Some knowledgeable common sense on the subject:

A Funny Sort of Empire
Are Americans really so imperial?

By Victor David Hansen

It is popular now to talk of the American "empire." In Europe particularly
there are comparisons of Mr. Bush to Caesar — and worse — and invocations
all sorts of pretentious poli-sci jargon like "hegemon," "imperium," and
"subject states," along with neologisms like "hyperpower" and "overdogs." But
if we really are imperial, we rule over a very funny sort of empire.

We do not send out proconsuls to reside over client states, which in turn
impose taxes on coerced subjects to pay for the legions. Instead, American
bases are predicated on contractual obligations — costly to us and profitable
to their hosts. We do not see any profits in Korea, but instead accept the risk
of losing almost 40,000 of our youth to ensure that Kias can flood our shores
and that shaggy students can protest outside our embassy in Seoul.

Athenians, Romans, Ottomans, and the British wanted land and treasure and
grabbed all they could get when they could. The United States hasn't annexed
anyone's soil since the Spanish-American War — a checkered period in American
history that still makes us, not them, out as villains in our own history
books. Most Americans are far more interested in carving up the Nevada desert
for monster homes than in getting their hands on Karachi or the Amazon basin.
Puerto Ricans are free to vote themselves independence anytime they wish.

Imperial powers order and subjects obey. But in our case, we offer the Turks
strategic guarantees, political support — and money — for their allegiance.
France and Russia go along in the U.N. — but only after we ensure them the
traffic of oil and security for outstanding accounts. Pakistan gets debt relief
that ruined dot-coms could only dream of; Jordan reels in more aid than our own
bankrupt municipalities.

If acrimony and invective arise, it's usually one-way: the Europeans, the
Arabs, and the South Americans all say worse things about us than we do about
them, not privately and in hurt, but publicly and proudly. Boasting that you
hate Americans — or calling our supposed imperator "moron" or "Hitler" —
won't get you censured by our Senate or earn a tongue-lashing from our
president, but is more likely to get you ten minutes on CNN. We are considered
haughty by Berlin not because we send a Germanicus with four legions across the
Rhine, but because Mr. Bush snubs Mr. Schroeder by not phoning him as
frequently as the German press would like.

Empires usually have contenders that check their power and through rivalry
drive their ambitions. Athens worried about Sparta and Persia. Rome found its
limits when it butted up against Germany and Parthia. The Ottomans never could
bully too well the Venetians or the Spanish. Britain worried about France and
Spain at sea and the Germanic peoples by land. In contrast, the restraint on
American power is not China, Russia, or the European Union, but rather the
American electorate itself — whose reluctant worries are chronicled weekly by
polls that are eyed with fear by our politicians. We, not them, stop us from
becoming what we could.

The Athenian ekklesia, the Roman senate, and the British Parliament alike were
eager for empire and reflected the energy of their people. In contrast, America
went to war late and reluctantly in World Wars I and II, and never finished the
job in either Korea or Vietnam. We were likely to sigh in relief when we were
kicked out of the Philippines, and really have no desire to return. Should the
Greeks tell us to leave Crete — promises, promises — we would be more
likely to count the money saved than the influence lost. Take away all our
troops from Germany and polls would show relief, not anger, among Americans.
Isolationism, parochialism, and self-absorption are far stronger in the
American character than desire for overseas adventurism. Our critics may slur
us for "overreaching," but our elites in the military and government worry that
they have to coax a reluctant populace, not constrain a blood-drunk rabble.

The desire of a young Roman quaestor or the British Victorians was to go
abroad, shine in battle, and come home laden with spoils. They wanted to be
feared, not liked. American suburbanites, inner-city residents, and rural
townspeople all will fret because a French opportunist or a Saudi autocrat says
that we are acting inappropriately. Roman imperialists had names like Magnus
and Africanus; the British anointed their returning proconsuls as Rangers,
Masters, Governors, Grandees, Sirs, and Lords. In contrast, retired American
diplomats, CIA operatives, or generals are lucky if they can melt away in
anonymity to the Virginia suburbs without a subpoena, media exposé, or
lawsuit. Proconsuls were given entire provinces; our ex-president Carter from
his peace center advises us to disarm.

Most empires chafe at the cost of their rule and complain that the expense is
near-suicidal. Athens raised the Aegean tribute often, and found itself nearly
broke after only the fifth year of the Peloponnesian War. The story of the
Roman Empire is one of shrinking legions, a debased currency, and a chronically
bankrupt imperial treasury. Even before World War I, the Raj had drained
England. In contrast, America spends less of its GNP on defense than it did
during the last five decades. And most of our military outlays go to training,
salaries, and retirements — moneys that support, educate, and help people
rather than simply stockpile weapons and hone killers. The eerie thing is not
that we have 13 massive $5 billion carriers, but that we could easily produce
and maintain 20 more.

Empires create a culture of pride and pomp, and foster a rhetoric of
superiority. Pericles, Virgil, and Kipling all talked and wrote of the grandeur
of imperial domain. How odd then that what America's literary pantheon —
Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, and Alice Walker — said about 9/11
would either nauseate or bewilder most Americans.

Pericles could showcase his Parthenon from the tribute of empire; Rome wanted
the prestige of Pax Romana and Mare Nostrum; the Sultan thought Europe should
submit to Allah; and the Queen could boast that the sun never set on British
shores. Our imperial aims? We are happy enough if the Japanese can get their
oil from Libya safely and their Toyotas to Los Angeles without fear; or if
China can be coaxed into sending us more cheap Reeboks and in turn fewer
pirated CDs.

Our bases dot the globe to keep the sea-lanes open, thugs and murderers under
wraps, and terrorists away from European, Japanese, and American globalists who
profit mightily by blanketing the world with everything from antibiotics and
contact lenses to BMWs and Jennifer Lopez — in other words, to keep the world
safe and prosperous enough for Michael Moore to rant on spec, for Noam Chomsky
to garner a lot of money and tenure from a defense-contracting MIT, for Barbra
Streisand to make millions, for Edward Said's endowed chair to withstand Wall
Street downturns, for Jesse Jackson to take off safely on his jet-powered,
tax-free junkets.

Why then does the world hate a country that uses it power to keep the peace
rather than rule? Resentment, jealousy, and envy of the proud and powerful are
often cited as the very human and age-old motives that prompt states
irrationally to slur and libel — just as people do against their betters. No
doubt Thucydides would agree. But there are other more subtle factors involved
that explain the peculiar present angst against America — and why the French
or Germans say worse things about free Americans who saved them than they did
about Soviets who wanted to kill them.

Observers like to see an empire suffer and pay a price for its influence. That
way they think imperial sway is at least earned. Athenians died all over the
Mediterranean, from Egypt to Sicily; their annual burial ceremony was the
occasion for the best of Hellenic panegyric. The list of British disasters from
the Crimea and Afghanistan to Zululand and Khartoum was the stuff of Victorian
poetry. But since Vietnam Americans have done pretty much what they wanted to
in the Gulf, Panama, Haiti, Grenada, Serbia, and Afghanistan, with less than an
aggregate of a few hundred lost to enemy fire — a combat imbalance never seen
in the annals of warfare. So not only can Americans defeat their adversaries,
but they don't even die doing it. Shouldn't — our critics insist — we at
least have some body bags?

Intervention is supposed to be synonymous with exploitation; thus the Athenians
killed, enslaved, exacted, and robbed on Samos and Melos. No one thought Rome
was going into Numidia or Gaul — one million killed, another million enslaved
— to implant local democracy. Nor did the British decide that at last
17th-century India needed indigenous elections. But Americans have overthrown
Noriega, Milosevic, and Mullah Omar and to rid Iraq of Saddam Hussein, to put
in their places elected leaders, not legates or local client kings. Instead of
the much-rumored "pipeline" that we supposedly coveted in Afghanistan, we are
paying tens of millions to build a road and bridges so that Afghan truckers and
traders won't break their axles.

In that regard, America is also a revolutionary, rather than a stuffy imperial
society. Its crass culture abroad — rap music, Big Macs, Star Wars, Pepsi,
and Beverly Hillbillies reruns — does not reflect the tastes and values of
either an Oxbridge elite or a landed Roman aristocracy. That explains why Le
Monde or a Spanish deputy minister may libel us, even as millions of
semi-literate Mexicans, unfree Arabs, and oppressed southeast Asians are dying
to get here. It is one thing to mobilize against grasping, wealthy white people
who want your copper, bananas, or rubber — quite another when your own youth
want what black, brown, yellow, and white middle-class Americans alike have to
offer. We so-called imperialists don't wear pith helmets, but rather baggy
jeans and backwards baseball caps. Thus far the rest of the globe — whether
Islamic fundamentalists, European socialists, or Chinese Communists — has not
yet formulated an ideology antithetical to the kinetic American strain of
Western culture.

Much, then, of what we read about the evil of American imperialism is written
by post-heroic and bored elites, intellectuals, and coffeehouse hacks, whose
freedom and security are a given, but whose rarified tastes are apparently
unshared and endangered. In contrast, the poorer want freedom and material
things first — and cynicism, skepticism, irony, and nihilism second. So we
should not listen to what a few say, but rather look at what many do.

Critiques of the United States based on class, race, nationality, or taste have
all failed to explicate, much less stop, the American cultural juggernaut.
Forecasts of bankrupting defense expenditures and imperial overstretch are the
stuff of the faculty lounge. Neither Freud nor Marx is of much help. And real
knowledge of past empires that might allow judicious analogies is beyond the
grasp of popular pundits.

Add that all up, and our exasperated critics are left with the same old empty
jargon of legions and gunboats.


Chris Mark