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World News See other World News Articles Title: A Short History of American Empire “What’s the point of having this superb military … if we can’t use it?” —Madeleine Albright Toward the end of his history of the domestic conflict over U.S. overseas expansion at the close of the nineteenth century, Stephen Kinzer notes that the winners permanently changed our political lexicon. “Imperialists” became openhearted, visionary “globalists” and “internationalists.” Anti-imperialists became crabby, reactionary “isolationists.” As applied to the United States, the words “empire” and “imperialism” virtually disappeared. This muddling of the language has made it easier for Americans to misunderstand just what it is that we are doing out there in the world. Thus, in late 2013, at a time when Barack Obama’s foreign policy was widely criticized in the United States as too “soft,” a Gallup poll of around 65,000 people in sixty-five countries showed that the United States was considered the greatest threat to world peace (Pakistan was a distant second). The story we tell ourselves, of course, is that we are the guardians of the peace, besieged by forces of evil that hate us because of our unique national virtues of freedom, tolerance, and democracy. The possibility that we are being attacked here—in San Bernardino, Orlando, or Boston—because we are bombing there—in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Yemen—lies beyond the current intellectual capacity of our public discourse. Yet, what word better than “empire” describes America’s role among nations? We have at least 800 acknowledged military installations around the world, the most extensive imperium in history. In 2016, U.S. Special Operations forces—commandos, Navy Seals, Green Berets—were deployed in 138 countries. In many foreign capitals, the most important figure is the U.S. ambassador. We are the globe’s biggest military spenders by far, and sell as many weapons of war as the rest of the world’s arms traffickers combined. True, we haven’t won a war against a substantial military foe since 1945. But we haven’t had to. Once established, empires do not have to definitively win the wars on their periphery. Rather, the central task is to demonstrate their willingness and capacity to inflict murderous punishment on those who rebel. Since 2001, we have attacked fourteen different countries. Imperialism’s default foreign policy is limited, but endless, war. Here at home, the authoritarian politics needed to accommodate empire are firmly in place among both the leaders and the led. Congress has long surrendered to the executive branch its constitutional duty to decide whether or not to go to war. At a time when the U.S. electorate holds virtually all other institutions in contempt, the military is revered. A study from Harvard and the University of Melbourne reports that the share of Americans who think that rule by the armed forces would be a “good” or “very good” thing rose from one in sixteen in 1995 to one in six in 2014. With the election of Donald Trump, the misuse of language to obscure the reality of imperialism has reached new heights. But the practice extends beyond the mindless babble of our infantile president. After he sent missiles to bomb Syria, the front page of the New York Times referred to Trump—global capitalist, defender of dictators, and blustering champion of U.S. military expansion—as an “isolationist.” Our foreign policy debates—hard power vs. soft power, realism vs. values, military vs. diplomacy, unilateralism vs. multilateralism—do not reflect opposing philosophical ideas on how Americans should relate to the world. They are disputes over the best way to reinforce our self-appointed role of policeman, jury, and judge of the global order. The Democratic cop may have a less belligerent personality than the Republican cop, but both will shoot to kill when their authority is threatened. Stephen Kinzer, former foreign correspondent for the New York Times, has long been one of the few voices reminding Americans of our imperial identity. Over the years he has written a series of accessible and fast-paced histories of the United States’ less-than-benign interventions in other countries’ domestic politics—including the violent overthrow of elected governments in Chile, Iran, and Guatemala. In his latest, The True Flag, he takes us back to where he thinks it all began—the years 1898 to 1901, when the U.S. political class pushed us off on the quest for global domination. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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