_______________________________________________________________
 |
 |  http://ideology.lege.net/american_empire/
 |  http://www.eurolegal.org/pdf/ideologyamericanempire.pdf
 |  (The below version contains clearly marked corrections.)
 |
 |
 |  The Ideology of American Empire
 |
 |  by Claes G. Ryn
 |
 |
 |  __Claes G. Ryn__  is professor of politics at the Catholic
 |  University of America and chairman of the National
 |  Humanities Institute. He is editor of  _Humanitas_  and
 |  author of numerous books, including  _Unity Through
 |  Diversity: On Cultivating Humanity's Higher Ground_ 
 |  (Beijing University, 2000) and  _Will, Imagination and
 |  Reason: Babbitt, Croce and the Problem of Reality_  (2nd
 |  ed., Transaction, 1997). This article is adapted from a
 |  chapter in his  _America the Virtuous: The Crisis of
 |  Democracy and the Quest for Empire_  (forthcoming,
 |  Transaction 2003).
 |
 |
 |  The president of the United States has committed his country
 |  to goals that will require world hegemony, not to say
 |  supremacy. In numerous speeches and statements since
 |  September 2001, President Bush has vowed to wage an
 |  exhaustive, final war on terror and to advance the cause of
 |  a better world. ``Our responsibility to history is clear: to
 |  answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.''[1] In the
 |  president's opinion, the United States represents universal
 |  principles. He summarizes them in the word ``freedom.'' As
 |  mankind's beacon of political right, the United States must,
 |  he believes, remove obstacles to freedom around the world.
 |  Accomplishing this task is associated in the president's
 |  mind with using American military might. In June 2002
 |  [Editor: Corrected from error in the version edited by
 |  Elsevier Science Limited and published by Foreign Policy
 |  Research Institute, after correspondence with Claes G. Ryn.
 |  -- Leif Erlingsson], he informed the Congress that the
 |  ``Department of Defense has become the most powerful force
 |  for freedom the world has ever seen.''[2] Since 9/11, the
 |  U.S. government has relentlessly mobilized and deployed that
 |  force far and wide, with effects that remain to be seen.
 |
 |            What had happened? In his 2000 presidential
 |  campaign, President Bush had repeatedly called for a more
 |  ``humble'' U.S. foreign policy and expressed strong
 |  reservations about America's undertaking nation building and
 |  following a generally interventionist foreign policy. A
 |  cynic might suggest that, having won the presidency partly
 |  by appealing to Americans' weariness of international
 |  over-extension, President Bush had now seized an opportunity
 |  greatly to extend his power. A less cynical observer would
 |  note that the 9/11 attacks outraged the president. They
 |  aroused nationalistic feelings in him and shifted his focus
 |  to world affairs. Since then he has also gained a new sense
 |  of the military and other power at his command.
 |
 |
 |     1.  Remarks, National Cathedral, Sept. 14, 2001,
 |  http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09 .
 |  [ http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010914-2.html ]
 |
 |     2.  Statement to the U.S. Congress, June 18, 2002,
 |  http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06 .
 |  [ http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020618-5.html ]
 |
 |
 |  © 2003 Published by Elsevier Science Limited on behalf of
 |  Foreign Policy Research Institute.
 |
 |
 |
 |                                             Summer 2003 | 383
 |
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 |  RYN
 |
 |
 |          Yet it is not likely that George W. Bush would have
 |  changed his stated approach to foreign policy so drastically
 |  had he not been affected by a way of thinking about
 |  America's role in the world that has acquired strong
 |  influence in recent decades, not least in the American
 |  foreign policy establishment inside and outside of
 |  government. A large number of American political
 |  intellectuals, including many writers on American foreign
 |  policy, have been promoting what may be called an ideology
 |  of empire. Many of them are in universities; some are
 |  leading media commentators. Today some of the most
 |  articulate and strong-willed have the president's ear.
 |
 |          When the 9/11 terrorists struck, the time had long
 |  been ripe for systematically implementing an ideology of
 |  empire, but in his election campaign George W. Bush had
 |  seemed an obstacle to such a course. He advocated a more
 |  restrictive use of American power. If he had done so out of
 |  genuine conviction, 9/11 brought a profound change of heart.
 |  The already available ideology of empire helped remove any
 |  inhibitions the president might have had about an activist
 |  foreign policy and helped shape his reaction to the attack.
 |  It can be debated to what extent his advisors and
 |  speechwriters, who were to varying degrees attracted to the
 |  ideology, along with numerous media commentators of the same
 |  orientation, were able to channel the president's anger. In
 |  any case, President Bush moved to embrace the idea of armed
 |  world hegemony. The attack on America could have elicited a
 |  much different reaction, such as a surgical and limited
 |  response; it became instead the occasion and justification
 |  for something grandiose.
 |
 |          In spite of its great influence, the ideology of
 |  empire is unfamiliar to most Americans, except in segments
 |  that appear disparate but are in fact closely connected.
 |  Drawing these connections is essential to assessing the
 |  import and ramifications of the evolving Bush Doctrine.
 |
 |          Though heavily slanted in the direction of
 |  international affairs, the ideology of American empire
 |  constitutes an entire world view. It includes perspectives
 |  on human nature, society, and politics, and it sets forth
 |  distinctive conceptions of its central ideas, notably what
 |  it calls ``democracy,'' ``freedom,'' ``equality,'' and
 |  ``capitalism.'' It regards America as founded on universal
 |  principles and assigns to the United States the role of
 |  supervising the remaking of the world. Its adherents have
 |  the intense dogmatic commitment of true believers and are
 |  highly prone to moralistic rhetoric. They demand, among
 |  other things, ``moral clarity'' in dealing with regimes that
 |  stand in the way of America's universal purpose. They see
 |  themselves as champions of ``virtue.'' In some form, this
 |  ideology has been present for a long time.
 |
 |          There are similarities between the advocates of the
 |  ideology of American empire and the ideologues who inspired
 |  and led the French Revolution of 1789. The Jacobins, too,
 |  claimed to represent universal principles, which they summed
 |  up in the slogan  _``liberté, égalité, et fraternité.''_ 
 |  The dominant Jacobins also wanted greater economic freedom.
 |  They thought of themselves as fighting on the side of good
 |  against evil and called themselves
 |
 |
 |
 |  384 |  _Orbis_ 
 |
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 |                                                        Empire
 |
 |
 |  ``the virtuous.'' They wanted a world much different from
 |  the one they had inherited. The result was protracted war
 |  and turbulence in Europe and elsewhere. Those who embody the
 |  Jacobin spirit today in America have explicitly global
 |  ambitions. It is crucial to understand what they believe,
 |  for potentially they have the military might of the United
 |  States at their complete disposal.
 |
 |             The philosopher who most influenced the old
 |  Jacobins was Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), who asserted
 |  in  _The Social Contract_  (1762) that ``man was born free,
 |  but he is everywhere in chains.''[3] The Jacobins set out to
 |  liberate man. The notion that America's military might is
 |  the greatest force for freedom in human history recalls
 |  Rousseau's famous statement that those who are not on the
 |  side of political right may have to be ``forced to be
 |  free.''
 |
 |             The new Jacobins have taken full advantage of the
 |  nation's outrage over 9/11 to advance their already fully
 |  formed drive for empire. They have helped rekindle America's
 |  long-standing propensity for global involvement. Knowingly
 |  or unknowingly, President Bush has become the new Jacobins'
 |  leading spokesman, and he is receiving their very strong
 |  support. Reflexes developed by American politicians and
 |  commentators during the Cold War have boosted the
 |  imperialistic impulse. Many cold warriors, now lacking the
 |  old enemy of communism, see in the goal of a better world
 |  for mankind another justification for continued extensive
 |  use of American power. President Bush's moralistic
 |  interventionism gains additional support and credibility
 |  from a number of antecedents in modern American politics.
 |  Woodrow Wilson comes immediately to mind. But the current
 |  ideology of empire goes well beyond an earlier, more
 |  tentative and hesitant pursuit of world hegemony, and it has
 |  acquired great power at a new, formative juncture in
 |  history.
 |
 |             The most conspicuous and salient feature of the
 |  neo-Jacobin approach to international affairs is its
 |  universalistic and monopolistic claims. The University of
 |  Chicago's Allan Bloom (1930-92) argued in his best-selling 
 |  _The Closing of the American Mind_  that what he called
 |  ``the American project'' was not just for Americans. ``When
 |  we Americans speak seriously about politics, we mean that
 |  our principles of freedom and equality and the rights based
 |  on them are rational and everywhere applicable.'' World War
 |  II was for Bloom not simply a struggle to defeat a dangerous
 |  enemy. It was ``really an educational project undertaken to
 |  force those who did not accept these principles to do
 |  so.''[4] If America is the instrument of universal right,
 |  the cause of all humanity, it is only proper that it should
 |  be diligent and insistent in imposing its will.
 |
 |             The new Jacobins typically use ``democracy'' as
 |  an umbrella term for the kind of political regime that they
 |  would like to see installed all over the
 |
 |
 |     3.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Basic Political Writings
 |  (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987),  _Social Contract_ , Bk. I,
 |  Ch. I, p. 141.
 |
 |     4.  Allan Bloom,  _The Closing of the American Mind_ 
 |  (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 153.
 |
 |
 |
 |                                             Summer 2003 | 385
 |
 |  ____________________________________________________________
 |  RYN
 |
 |
 |  world. In their view, only democracy, as they define it,
 |  answers to a universal moral imperative and is legitimate.
 |  Bringing democracy to countries that do not yet have it
 |  ought to be the defining purpose of U.S. foreign policy. One
 |  may call this part of neo-Jacobin ideology ``democratism.''
 |  It has been espoused by many academics, Duke University
 |  political scientist James David Barber prominent among them.
 |  ``The United States should stand up and lead the world
 |  democracy movement,'' he wrote in 1990. ``We have made
 |  democracy work here; now we ought to make it work everywhere
 |  we can, with whatever tough and expensive action that
 |  takes.''[5]
 |
 |           Numerous American intellectual activists,
 |  journalists, and columnists, many of them taught by
 |  professors like Bloom and Barber, sound the same theme. It
 |  has become so common in the major media, newspapers, and
 |  intellectual magazines and has been so often echoed by
 |  politicians that, to some, it seems to express a
 |  self-evident truth.
 |
 |           Not all who speak about an American global mission
 |  to spread democracy are neo-Jacobins in the strict sense of
 |  the term. Some use neo-Jacobin rhetoric not out of
 |  ideological conviction, but because such language is in the
 |  air and appears somehow expected, or because war is thought
 |  to require it. Many combine Jacobin ideas with other
 |  elements of thought and imagination: rarely, if ever, is an
 |  individual all of a piece. Contradictory ideas often compete
 |  within one and the same person. The purpose here is not to
 |  classify particular persons but to elucidate an ideological
 |  pattern, showing how certain ideas form a coherent, if
 |  ethically and philosophically questionable, ideology.
 |
 |
 |  New Nationalism
 |
 |
 |           Two writers with considerable media visibility,
 |  William Kristol and David Brooks, who label themselves
 |  conservatives, have led complaints that the long-standing
 |  prejudice among American conservatives against a larger
 |  federal government is paranoid and foolish. Big government
 |  is needed, Kristol and Brooks contend, because the United
 |  States is based on ``universal principles.'' Its special
 |  moral status gives it a great mission in the world. In order
 |  to pursue its global task, the American government must be
 |  muscular and ``energetic,'' especially with regard to
 |  military power. Kristol and Brooks call for a
 |  ``national-greatness conservatism,'' which would include ``a
 |  neo-Reaganite foreign policy of national strength and moral
 |  assertiveness abroad.''[6]
 |
 |           Similarly, foreign policy expert Robert Kagan
 |  writes of his fellow Americans: ``As good children of the
 |  Enlightenment, Americans believe in human perfectibility.
 |  But Americans . . . also believe . . . that global security
 |
 |
 |     5.  James David Barber, ``. . . And Democracy Needs
 |  Help,''  _Washington Post_ , Jan. 25, 1990.
 |
 |     6.  William Kristol and David Brooks, ``What Ails
 |  Conservatism,''  _Wall Street Journal_ , Sept. 15, 1997.
 |
 |
 |
 |  386 |  _Orbis_ 
 |
 |  ____________________________________________________________
 |                                                        Empire
 |
 |
 |  and a liberal order depend on the United States--that
 |  `indispensable nation'--wielding its power.''[7]
 |
 |          International adventurism has often served to
 |  distract nations from pressing domestic difficulties, but in
 |  America today, expansionism is often fueled also by intense
 |  moral-ideological passion. Since the principles for which
 |  America stands are portrayed as ultimately supranational
 |  (for Bloom they are actually opposed to traditional national
 |  identity), ``nationalism'' may not be quite the right term
 |  for this new missionary zeal. The new Jacobins believe that
 |  as America spearheads the cause of universal principles, it
 |  should progressively shed its own historical distinctiveness
 |  except insofar as that distinctiveness is directly related
 |  to those principles. Though countries confronted by this
 |  power are likely to see it as little more than a
 |  manifestation of nationalistic ambition and arrogance, it is
 |  nationalistic only in a special sense. Like revolutionary
 |  France, neo-Jacobin America casts itself as a savior nation.
 |  Ideological and national zeal become indistinguishable.
 |  ``Our nationalism,'' write Kristol and Brooks about
 |  America's world mission, ``is that of an exceptional nation
 |  founded on a universal principle, on what Lincoln called `an
 |  abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.' ''[8]
 |
 |          This view of America's role can hardly be called
 |  patriotic in the old sense of that word. Neo-Jacobinism is
 |  not characterized by devotion to America's concrete
 |  historical identity with its origins in Greek, Roman,
 |  Christian, European, and English civilization. Neo-Jacobins
 |  are attached in the end to ahistorical, supranational
 |  principles that they believe should supplant the traditions
 |  of particular societies. The new Jacobins see themselves as
 |  on the side of right and fighting evil and are not prone to
 |  respecting or looking for common ground with countries that
 |  do not share their democratic preferences.
 |
 |          Traditionally, the patriot's pride of country has
 |  been understood to encompass moral self-restraint and a
 |  sense of his own country's flaws. By contrast,
 |  neo-Jacobinism is perhaps best described as a kind of
 |  ideological nationalism. Its proponents are not precisely
 |  uncritical of today's American democracy; Bloom complained
 |  that American democracy was too relativistic and
 |  insufficiently faithful to the principles of its own
 |  founding. But it should be noted that he regarded those
 |  principles as ``rational and everywhere applicable'' and
 |  thus as monopolistic. Greater dedication to ``American
 |  principles'' would by definition increase, not reduce, the
 |  wish to dictate terms to others.
 |
 |
 |  New Universalism
 |
 |
 |          Having been nurtured for many years in pockets of
 |  the academy, American neo-Jacobinism started to acquire
 |  journalistic and political critical
 |
 |
 |     7.  Robert Kagan, ``The U.S.-Europe Divide,'' 
 |  _Washington Post_ , May 26, 2002.
 |
 |     8.  Kristol and Brooks, ``What Ails,'' Sept. 15, 1997.
 |
 |
 |
 |                                             Summer 2003 | 387
 |
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 |  RYN
 |
 |
 |  mass in the 1980s. It was well-represented in the national
 |  security and foreign policy councils of the Reagan and Bush
 |  Sr. administrations. As Soviet com- munism was crumbling, it
 |  seemed to people of this orientation increasingly realistic
 |  to expect an era in which the United States would be able to
 |  dominate the world on behalf of universal principles.
 |  Missionary zeal and the desire to use American power began
 |  to flood the media, the government, and the public policy
 |  debate. Columnist and TV commentator Ben Wattenberg offered
 |  a particularly good example of this frame of mind when he
 |  wrote in 1988 that the prospects for exporting American
 |  values were highly propitious. ``Never has the culture of
 |  one nation been so far-flung and potent.'' Wattenberg
 |  pointed out that ``there is, at last, a global language,
 |  American.''[9]
 |
 |          After the Cold War, American culture could only
 |  spread, he continued, with global sales of American TV
 |  shows, movies, and music. ``Important newsstands around the
 |  world now sell three American daily newspapers. There is now
 |  a near-global television news station: Cable News Network.''
 |  Not mentioned by Wattenberg was that the content being
 |  transmitted to the world might be of dubious value and a
 |  poor reflection on America and democracy. What intrigued him
 |  was the potential to expand American influence by exporting
 |  America's culture.
 |
 |          Behind the argument that the United States and its
 |  values are models for all peoples lurked the will to power,
 |  which was sometimes barely able to keep up ideological
 |  appearances. Again by way of example, Wattenberg desired
 |  nothing less than world dominance: ``It's pretty clear what
 |  the global community needs: probably a top cop, but surely a
 |  powerful global organizer. Somebody's got to do it. We're
 |  the only ones who can.'' He called ``visionary'' the idea of
 |  ``spreading democratic and American values around the
 |  world.'' As if not to appear immodest, he wrote: ``Our goal
 |  in the global game is not to  _conquer_  the world, only to 
 |  _influence_  it so that it is hospitable to our
 |  values.''[10] Later he urged, ``Remember this about American
 |  Purpose: A unipolar world is fine, if America is the
 |  uni.''[11]
 |
 |          In the major media, one of the early and most
 |  persistent advocates of an assertive American foreign policy
 |  was the columnist and TV com- mentator Charles Krauthammer.
 |  In 1991, for example, he urged ``a robust interventionism.''
 |  ``We are living in a unipolar world,'' he wrote. ``We
 |  Americans should like it--and exploit it.'' ``Where our
 |  cause is just and interests are threatened, we should
 |  act--even if . . . we must act unilaterally.''[12] This
 |  point of view would eventually become a commonplace.
 |
 |          The idea of spreading democracy sometimes took on a
 |  religious ardor. In a Christmas column published in 1988,
 |  Michael Novak said about
 |
 |
 |     9.  Ben Wattenberg, ``Chance to Champion Freedom,'' 
 |  _Washington Times_ , Dec. 1, 1988.
 |
 |    10.  Ibid.; ``Showdown Time . . . Wake-up Slap,'' Aug. 8,
 |  1990; and ``To Sow Seeds of Freedom,'' Aug. 1, 1990
 |  (emphasis added).
 |
 |    11.  Ben Wattenberg, ``Peddling `Son of Manifest Destiny,'
 |  ''  _Washington Times_ , Mar. 21, 1990.
 |
 |    12.  Charles Krauthammer, ``Bless Our Pax Americana,'' 
 |  _Washington Post_ , Mar. 22, 1991.
 |
 |
 |
 |  388 |  _Orbis_ 
 |
 |  ____________________________________________________________
 |                                                        Empire
 |
 |
 |  the Judeo-Christian tradition that it ``instructs the human
 |  race to make constant progress. . . . It insists that
 |  societies must continually be reshaped, until each meets the
 |  measure the Creator has in mind for a just, truthful, free,
 |  and creative civilization.'' All over the world people were
 |  ``crying out against abuses of their God-given rights to
 |  self-determination.'' The spread of democracy was for Novak
 |  a great religious development that he compared to God's
 |  Incarnation. The ``citizens of the world . . . demand the
 |  birth of democracy in history, in physical institutions: as
 |  physical as the birth at Bethlehem.''[13] The enthusiasm of
 |  the Christmas season may have inclined Novak to
 |  overstatement, but he was clearly eager to have his readers
 |  associate democracy with divine intent.
 |
 |          This mode of thinking is in marked contrast to the
 |  old Christian tradition. Christianity has always stressed
 |  the imperfect, sinful nature of man and warned against
 |  placing too much faith in manmade political institutions and
 |  measures. Augustine (354-430) is only one of the earliest
 |  and least sanguine of many Christian thinkers over the
 |  centuries who would have rejected out of hand the idea that
 |  mankind is destined for great progress and political
 |  perfection, to say nothing about the possibility of
 |  salvation through politics. Although Christianity has
 |  stressed that rulers must serve the common good and behave
 |  in a humane manner, it has been reluctant to endorse any
 |  particular form of government as suited to all peoples and
 |  all historical circumstances. Here Christianity agreed with
 |  the Aristotelian view.
 |
 |
 |  The New Democratism
 |
 |
 |          Democratism has long had more than a foothold in
 |  American government. A look back in modern history is
 |  appropriate. President Woodrow Wilson, with his belief in
 |  America's special role and his missionary zeal, gave it a
 |  strong push. Harvard professor Irving Babbitt (1865-1933),
 |  perhaps America's most incisive and prescient student of
 |  modern Western and American culture, commented in the early
 |  years of the twentieth century on the imperialistic trend in
 |  U.S. foreign policy. Babbitt, the founder of what has been
 |  called the New Humanism or American Humanism, was formally a
 |  professor of French and comparative literature, but he was
 |  also a highly perceptive as well as prophetic observer of
 |  social and political developments. He noted that the United
 |  States was setting itself up as the great guardian and
 |  beneficiary of mankind. ``We are rapidly becoming a nation
 |  of humanitarian crusaders,'' Babbitt wrote in 1924. Leaders
 |  like Wilson viewed America as abjuring selfish motives and
 |  as being, therefore, above all other nations. Babbitt
 |  commented:
 |
 |      We are willing to admit that all other nations are
 |  self-seeking, but as for ourselves, we hold that we act only
 |  on the most disinterested motives. We have not as yet set
 |  up, like revolutionary France, as the Christ of Nations, but
 |  during the late war we liked to look on ourselves as at
 |  least the Sir Galahad of Nations. If the American thus
 |
 |
 |    13.  Michael Novak, ``Human Rights at Christmas,'' 
 |  _Washington Times_ , Dec. 23, 1988.
 |
 |
 |
 |                                             Summer 2003 | 389
 |
 |  ____________________________________________________________
 |  RYN
 |
 |
 |      regards himself as an idealist at the same time that the
 |  foreigner looks on him as a dollar-chaser, the explanation
 |  may be due partly to the fact that the American judges
 |  himself by the way he feels, whereas the foreigner judges
 |  him by what he does.[14]
 |
 |           By the time of President Wilson the idea had long
 |  been common in America that in old Europe conceited and
 |  callous elites oppressed the common man. There and elsewhere
 |  things needed to be set right. Thomas Jefferson had been a
 |  pioneer for this outlook. But from the time of George
 |  Washington's warning of the danger of entangling alliances,
 |  a desire for heavy American involvement abroad had for the
 |  most part been held in check. By the time of Theodore
 |  Roosevelt's presidency, it was clear that the wish for
 |  American prominence and activism in international affairs
 |  had thrown off earlier restraints. Woodrow Wilson reinforced
 |  the interventionist impulse, not, of course, to advance
 |  selfish American national motives but, as he said, to
 |  ``serve mankind.'' Because America has a special moral
 |  status, Wilson proclaimed, it is called to do good in the
 |  world. In 1914, even before the outbreak of the European
 |  war, Wilson stated in a Fourth of July address that
 |  America's role was to serve ``the rights of humanity.'' The
 |  flag of the United States, he declared, is ``the flag, not
 |  only of America, but of humanity.''[15]
 |
 |           Babbitt pointed out that those who would not go
 |  along with Wilson's ``humanitarian crusading'' were warned
 |  that they would ``break the heart of the world.'' Babbitt
 |  retorted: ``If the tough old world had ever had a heart in
 |  the Wilsonian sense, it would have been broken long ago.''
 |  He added that Wilson's rhetoric, which was at the same time
 |  abstract and sentimental, revealed ``a temper at the
 |  opposite pole from that of the genuine statesman.'' Wilson's
 |  humanitarian idealism made him ``inflexible and
 |  uncompromising.''[16]
 |
 |
 |  The Post-Cold War Imperative
 |
 |
 |           The notion that America had a mandate to help rid
 |  the world, not least Europe, of the bad old ways of
 |  traditional societies with their undemocratic political
 |  arrangements has remained a strong influence on American
 |  foreign policy. In World War II, FDR's sense of American
 |  mission may have been as strong as Wilson's.
 |
 |
 |    14.  Irving Babbitt,  _Democracy and Leadership_ 
 |  (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1979 [1924]), pp. 337, 295. It
 |  is a national misfortune that Americans have paid less
 |  attention to one of their truly great thinkers than to a
 |  number of lesser European lights who impress by their
 |  denser, more technical, less essayistic philosophical style.
 |
 |    15.  Woodrow Wilson, Thanksgiving Proclamation, Nov. 7,
 |  1917,  _The Papers of Woodrow Wilson_ , Arthur S. Link, et
 |  al. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966-93),
 |  pp. 44, 525; and Address at Independence Hall, Philadelphia,
 |   _Papers_ , pp. 30, 254. For an in-depth study of Woodrow
 |  Wilson and his notion of America as servant of mankind, see
 |  Richard M. Gamble, ``Savior Nation: Woodrow Wilson and the
 |  Gospel of Service,''  _Humanitas_ , Vol. XIV, No. 1 (2001).
 |
 |    16.  Babbitt,  _Democracy_ , p. 314.
 |
 |
 |
 |  390 |  _Orbis_ 
 |
 |  ____________________________________________________________
 |                                                        Empire
 |
 |
 |               For a long time during the Cold War, most
 |  policy makers and commentators saw that war as a defensive
 |  struggle to protect freedom or liberty against totalitarian
 |  tyranny. But some of the most dedicated cold warriors were
 |  also democratists. They had a vision for remaking the world
 |  that differed in substance from that of the Soviet Union and
 |  other communist regimes but that was equally universalistic.
 |  With the disintegration and collapse of the Soviet Union,
 |  these cold warriors did not argue for substantially reducing
 |  the American military or the United States' involvement in
 |  international affairs. On the contrary, they believed that
 |  America should continue to play a large and, in some
 |  respects, expanded role in the world; that, as the only
 |  remaining superpower, America had a historic opportunity to
 |  advance the cause of democracy and human rights. This
 |  language had long been gaining currency in the centers of
 |  public debate and political power, and soon government
 |  officials and politicians in both of the major parties spoke
 |  routinely of the need to promote democracy. Many did so in
 |  just the manner here associated with neo- Jacobinism. It
 |  seemed to them that the American ideology had not only
 |  survived the challenge from the other universalist ideology,
 |  but had prevailed in a contest that validated the American
 |  ideal as applicable in all societies.
 |
 |               The first President Bush thought of himself as
 |  a competent pragmatist, but, as is often the case with
 |  persons who lack philosophically grounded convictions of
 |  their own, he was susceptible to adopting the language and
 |  ideas of intellectually more focused and ideological
 |  individuals. The rhetoric in his administration about a New
 |  World Order often had a distinctly democratist ring, in
 |  considerable part probably because of the ideological
 |  leanings of speechwriters. In 1991 James Baker, President
 |  Bush's secretary of state, echoed a neo-Jacobin refrain when
 |  he declared that U.S. foreign policy should serve not
 |  specifically American interests but ``enlightenment ideals
 |  of universal applicability.'' Whether such formulations
 |  originated with Mr. Baker or his speechwriters, the
 |  Secretary clearly liked the sound of them. He advocated a
 |  ``Euro-Atlantic community that extends east from Vancouver
 |  to Vladivostok.'' This ``community,'' he said, ``can only be
 |  achieved on a democratic basis.'' The enormous size and
 |  political and cultural diversity of the region he described
 |  did not give him pause or make him question the United
 |  States' willingness or ability to take charge of such a
 |  daunting cause. No, the United States should promote
 |  ``common . . . universal values'' in those parts of the
 |  world, he said, and ``indeed, elsewhere on the globe.''[17]
 |  American power was there to be used. It seemed appropriate
 |  in cases such as these to talk of virtually unlimited
 |  political ambition.
 |
 |               The surge of globalist political-ideological
 |  aspirations was even more blatantly and pointedly expressed
 |  by the Bush Sr. administration in a draft Pentagon planning
 |  document that was leaked to the  _New York Times_ .
 |
 |
 |    17.  Secretary of State James A. Baker, speech to the
 |  Aspen Institute in Berlin, Germany, June 18, 1991.
 |
 |
 |
 |                                             Summer 2003 | 391
 |
 |  ____________________________________________________________
 |  RYN
 |
 |
 |  It had been produced under the supervision of then
 |  Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. The draft plan
 |  dealt with the United States' military needs in the
 |  post-Cold War era, setting forth the goal of a world in
 |  which the United States would be the sole and uncontested
 |  superpower. The draft plan assigned to the United States
 |  ``the pre-eminent responsibility'' for dealing with ``those
 |  wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of
 |  our allies or friends, or which could seriously unsettle
 |  international relations.'' The goal of American world
 |  dominance was presented as serving the spread of democracy
 |  and open economic systems. American military power was to be
 |  so overwhelming that it would not even occur to the United
 |  States' competitors to challenge its will.[18] This vision
 |  of the future might have seemed the expression of an
 |  inordinate, open-ended desire for power and control,
 |  uninhibited by the fact that the world is, after all, rather
 |  large. But significantly, many commentators considered the
 |  vision entirely plausible. The  _Wall Street Journal_ 
 |  praised the draft plan in a lead editorial favoring `` _Pax
 |  Americana_ .''[19]
 |
 |           Bill Clinton made clear in his 1992 presidential
 |  campaign that he would pursue a foreign policy similar to,
 |  if not more expansive than, the Bush administration's. In
 |  1993 his Secretary of State-designate Warren Christopher
 |  addressed a group of neoconservative Democrats, including
 |  Penn Kimball, Joshua Muravchik, Peter Rosenblatt, Albert
 |  Shanker, and Max Kampelman, to assure them that he would
 |  fully back the president's commitments to making promotion
 |  of democracy a central tenet of U.S. foreign policy.[20]
 |  Christopher's successor, Madeleine Albright, was even more
 |  comfortable with this stance. Democratist ideology was by
 |  now clearly dominant in top policy-making circles in
 |  Washington and elsewhere. It both generated and sanctioned
 |  an assertive, expansive use of American power.
 |
 |           When running for president, George W. Bush appeared
 |  to have substantial qualms about this broad use of American
 |  might. He questioned the desire to impose solutions to
 |  problems in all regional and local trouble spots around the
 |  world, seeming to recognize that such efforts betrayed
 |  arrogance and an undue will to power that other countries
 |  might resent. His adoption of a wholly different, far more
 |  assertive tone after the 9/11 attacks was surely induced in
 |  large part by war-like conditions. Although the change was
 |  probably motivated more by pragmatic than by ideological
 |  considera- tions, President Bush's rhetoric began to take on
 |  a neo-Jacobin coloring, as when he spoke of the ``axis of
 |  evil,'' a phrase coined by neoconservative speechwriter
 |  David Frum.
 |
 |           In subsequent speeches, the president has often
 |  come to resemble Woodrow Wilson in assigning to the United
 |  States, the exceptional country,
 |
 |
 |    18.  Patrick E. Tyler, ``U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for
 |  Insuring No Rivals Develop,''  _New York Times_ , Mar. 8,
 |  1992.
 |
 |    19.   _Wall Street Journal_ , lead editorial, Mar. 16,
 |  1992.
 |
 |    20.   _Washington Post_ , Jan. 9, 1993. The designation
 |  ``neoconservative'' for the mentioned individuals is taken
 |  from this article.
 |
 |
 |
 |  392 |  _Orbis_ 
 |
 |  ____________________________________________________________
 |                                                        Empire
 |
 |
 |  an exceptional mission in the world. He has asserted that an
 |  attack upon the United States was an attack upon freedom:
 |  ``A lot of young people say, well, why America? Why would
 |  anybody want to come after us? Why would anybody want to
 |  fight a war with this nation? And the answer is because we
 |  love freedom. That's why. And they hate freedom.''[21]
 |  Identifying America with the universal cause of freedom,
 |  Bush has even adopted Wilsonian imagery. Echoing Wilson in
 |  1917, he said that the American flag stands ``not only for
 |  our power, but for freedom.''[22] Although the president
 |  used the term ``freedom'' rather than ``democracy,'' which
 |  is the one favored by the new Jacobins, he seemed to agree
 |  with the notion that any enemy or critic of the United
 |  States is an opponent of universal principle. ``They have
 |  attacked America,'' he said three days after 9/11, ``because
 |  we are freedom's home and defender.''[23]
 |
 |           Proponents of American empire had moved with great
 |  speed to head off any reluctance on the part of a devastated
 |  and disoriented American public to deal quickly and
 |  comprehensively with terrorism around the globe. Already on
 |  the morning after the attacks, when it was still not clear
 |  who was responsible, the  _Washington Post_  carried an
 |  article by Robert Kagan calling for sweeping
 |  countermeasures. The U.S. Congress should, Kagan insisted,
 |  declare war immediately on the terrorists and any nation
 |  that might have assisted them. The situation required that
 |  America act with ``moral clarity and courage as our
 |  grandfathers did [responding to the attack on Pearl Harbor].
 |  Not by asking what we have done to bring on the wrath of
 |  inhuman murderers. Not by figuring out ways to reason with,
 |  or try to appease those who have spilled our blood.''[24] On
 |  the same day William Bennett, Jack Kemp and Jeane
 |  Kirkpatrick issued a statement calling for war against the
 |  ``entire'' Islamic terrorist network.[25]
 |
 |           If the president thought that American actions
 |  might have contributed to the hostility to the United States
 |  in the world, he did not, and in the circumstances perhaps
 |  could not, say so publicly. What he did say and has said
 |  repeatedly is that the United States must be diligent,
 |  active, and forceful-- preemptive even--in dealing with
 |  present or potential threats of terrorism. Paradoxically,
 |  given his earlier calls for American humility, he has
 |  presided over a massive push for greater American
 |  involvement in the world and for a
 |
 |
 |    21.  Remarks of President to United Brotherhood of
 |  Carpenters and Joiners of America 2002 Legislative
 |  Conference, June 19, 2002,
 |  http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06 
 |  [ http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020619-8.html ];
 |  Peter Slevin, ``The Word at the White House: Bush Formulates
 |  His Brand of Foreign Policy,''  _Washington Post_ , June 23,
 |  2002.
 |
 |    22.  Remarks of President to West Point Commencement, June
 |  1, 2002, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06 
 |  [ http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020601-3.html ].
 |  The same kind of imagery had been used by General George C.
 |  Marshall at the Commencement exercises in 1942, and the
 |  president began his speech by quoting Marshall, who had
 |  expressed the hope that ``our flag will be recognized
 |  throughout the world as a symbol of freedom on the one hand,
 |  and of overwhelming power on the other.''
 |
 |    23.  Remarks, National Cathedral, Sept. 14, 2001.
 |
 |    24.  Robert Kagan, ``We Must Fight this War,'' 
 |  _Washington Post_ , Sept. 12, 2001.
 |
 |    25.  Statement of three of the co-directors of Empower
 |  America, Sept. 12, 2001.
 |
 |
 |
 |                                             Summer 2003 | 393
 |
 |  ____________________________________________________________
 |  RYN
 |
 |
 |  vastly more intrusive role for government in the daily lives
 |  of U.S. citizens. In fairness to a politician who is not
 |  also an intellectual and a historian, war has its own logic,
 |  and it may be premature to draw definitive conclusions about
 |  the president's statements and actions in the wake of 9/11,
 |  which was an act of war. [ Leif Erlingsson:  That was a
 |  false statement.  Wars are per definition fought between
 |  nations.  9/11 was a crime, an act of terrorism, but not of
 |  war. ] But the fact is that President Bush's assertive
 |  approach and universalistic rhetoric has been seized on by
 |  American democratists who have been preparing the ground for
 |  a war and for a wider pursuit of empire. Charles Krauthammer
 |  praised the president for applying ``the fundamental
 |  principle of American foreign policy--the promotion of
 |  democracy.''[26] Political activist and writer Midge Decter
 |  pointed out that after 9/11 America could do something to
 |  clean up the world. She urged her countrymen ``to hang onto
 |  what is most important to remember: that our country, the
 |  strongest on earth, has been pressed by circumstance--I
 |  would say, has been granted the opportunity--to rid the
 |  world of some goodly measure of its cruelty and
 |  pestilence.''[27]
 |
 |          In mid-September 2002, President Bush sent to the
 |  U.S. Congress the president's annual statement on strategy,
 |  the  _National Security Strategy_ , which gave clear
 |  evidence that he was abandoning his earlier calls for a more
 |  ``humble'' U.S. foreign policy. Though the report was framed
 |  as a strategy for combating terrorism, the stated objectives
 |  supererogated any need to respond to acute external or
 |  internal threats. The report defined what amounted to a new
 |  and highly ambitious role for America in the world. Released
 |  the day after the president asked the Congress to authorize
 |  the use of preemptive military force against Iraq, it
 |  provided justifications for American intervention against
 |  potential security threats, while also formulating a new and
 |  much broader international agenda. The report in effect set
 |  forth a doctrine of American armed hegemony. The president
 |  justified this ascendancy as serving both America's security
 |  needs and its efforts to promote freedom, democracy, and
 |  free trade. The  _Washington Post_  said that the 
 |  _Strategy_  gave the United States ``a nearly messianic
 |  role.'' It meant not only acceptance but also extension of
 |  the old Wolfowitz draft plan. Indeed, Wolfowitz is now
 |  Deputy Secretary of Defense and a highly vocal and assertive
 |  proponent of American activism around the world. According
 |  to the report, America's strength and influence in the world
 |  is ``unprecedented'' and ``unequaled.'' The United States,
 |  ``sustained by faith in the principles of liberty and the
 |  value of a free society,'' also has ``unparalleled
 |  responsibilities, obligations, and opportunities'' beyond
 |  its borders. The report calls for possessing such
 |  overwhelming military power as to discourage any other power
 |  from challenging American hegemony or developing weapons of
 |  mass destruction. It overturns the old doctrines of
 |  deterrence and containment. Committing the United States to
 |  a much expanded understanding of security, it argues that
 |  the United States must reserve the right to act preemptively
 |  and
 |
 |
 |    26.  Charles Krauthammer, ``Peace Through Democracy,'' 
 |  _Washington Post_ , June 28, 2002.
 |
 |    27.  Midge Decter, ``Unnecessary Wars,''  _Imprimis_ ,
 |  Sept. 2002, p. 5.
 |
 |
 |
 |  394 |  _Orbis_ 
 |
 |  ____________________________________________________________
 |                                                        Empire
 |
 |
 |  unilaterally against potentially threatening states or
 |  organizations. But the president approved an even wider
 |  goal. The  _Strategy_  commits the United States to making
 |  the world ``not just safer but better.'' In explaining the
 |  report, a senior administration official said that besides
 |  leading the world in the war against terrorists and
 |  ``aggressive regimes seeking weapons of mass destruction,''
 |  the United States should preserve the peace, ``extend the
 |  benefits of liberty and prosperity through the spread of
 |  American values,'' and promote ``good governance.'' In
 |  familiar-sounding words, the report describes America's
 |  strategy as a ``distinctly American internationalism that
 |  reflects the union of our values and our national
 |  interests.''[28]
 |
 |
 |  A New Kind of War
 |
 |
 |          The foreign policy of George W. Bush's immediate two
 |  predecessors, Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton, had a strong
 |  Wilsonian tilt. But neither president followed any
 |  sustained, consistent strategy. By contrast, the Bush
 |  Doctrine as set forth in the  _National Security Strategy_ 
 |  and other places commits the United States to a bold,
 |  comprehensive, and elaborate foreign policy. The publicly
 |  and formally stated U.S. goal, in sum, is to establish
 |  global supremacy. The United States would set itself up as
 |  the arbiter of good and evil in the world and, if necessary,
 |  enforce its judgments unilaterally.
 |
 |          Reservations expressed in Europe and elsewhere about
 |  American unilateralism and global aspirations have been
 |  scorned and dismissed by proponents of empire as a failure
 |  to recognize the need to combat evil in the world. Kenneth
 |  Adelman, a former deputy ambassador to the UN and a highly
 |  placed advisor on defense to the U.S. government, couched
 |  his advocacy of imperial designs in terms of fighting
 |  terrorism. ``I don't think Europeans should cooperate with
 |  the United States as a favor to the United States. They
 |  should be very grateful to the United States and cooperate
 |  because we have a common enemy--terrorism. In my mind, it's
 |  a decisive moment in the conflict between civilization and
 |  barbarism.''[29]
 |
 |          Since America is at war it is, in a way, not
 |  surprising that some of its leaders should be portraying
 |  America as being on the side of good and those not eager to
 |  follow America's lead as aiding and abetting evil. Stark
 |  rhetoric has been used before to get Americans to support or
 |  sustain war, but the war aims spoken of today are derived
 |  from a consciously universalistic and imperialistic
 |  ideology. Therein lies an important difference, and a great
 |  danger.
 |
 |          The belief in American moral superiority knows no
 |  party lines. In an article critical of the George W. Bush
 |  administration's way of preparing for
 |
 |
 |    28.   _National Security Strategy of the United States of
 |  America_ , Sept. 17, 2002,
 |  http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html ,  and Karen DeYoung
 |  and Mike Allen, ``Bush Shifts Strategy From Deterrence to
 |  Dominance,''  _Washington Post_ , Sept. 21, 2002.
 |
 |    29.  ``Six Degrees of Preemption,''  _Washington Post_ ,
 |  Outlook section, Sept. 29, 2002.
 |
 |
 |
 |                                             Summer 2003 | 395
 |
 |  ____________________________________________________________
 |  RYN
 |
 |
 |  war against Iraq, Richard C. Holbrooke, ambassador to the UN
 |  under President Clinton, expressed a view ubiquitous in the
 |  American foreign policy establishment: ``Over the past 60
 |  years, the United States has consistently combined its
 |  military superiority with moral and political
 |  leadership.''[30] The word ``consistently'' is telling. The
 |  notion that, unlike other nations, America is above moral
 |  suspicion, provides the best possible justification for the
 |  desire to exercise American power.
 |
 |           It seems to the proponents of the ideology of
 |  American empire that, surely, America the virtuous is
 |  entitled to dominate the world. Some of them have worked
 |  long and hard to make this point of view dominant in
 |  American foreign policy. President Bush was merely echoing
 |  what others had been saying when he stated: ``There is a
 |  value system that cannot be compromised, and that is the
 |  values we praise. And if the values are good enough for our
 |  people, they ought to be good enough for others.''[31]
 |
 |           Many members of the so-called Christian right share
 |  the view that America has a special mission, but give this
 |  notion a triumphalist religious cast beyond the moralism
 |  typical of neo-Jacobin ideology. They believe that the
 |  United States, as led by a man of God, has a virtually
 |  messianic role to play, especially in the Middle East, where
 |  God's chosen people, Israel, must be supported by the United
 |  States against their enemies. Breaking sharply with the
 |  mainstream of traditional Christianity, which has made a
 |  distinction between the things of God and the things of
 |  Caesar, this form of religion identifies a particular
 |  political power, America, with God's will. George W. Bush's
 |  rhetoric has sometimes suggested that he is drawn to such
 |  thinking. ``Evangelical'' Christianity of this kind may rest
 |  on rather simplistic theological, biblical, and historical
 |  assumptions and arguably have virtually no influence over
 |  America's dominant national culture, but it provides
 |  considerable political support for neo-Jacobinism, which
 |  does have such influence. In its practical effects on United
 |  States foreign policy, this religious triumphalism puts a
 |  religious gloss on neo-Jacobinism. It does not Christianize
 |  U.S. foreign policy, but makes it less humble and more
 |  belligerent.
 |
 |           Both in domestic and international affairs the new
 |  Jacobins are strongly prejudiced against the traditions of
 |  old, historically evolved nations and groups. These only
 |  retard the emergence of a new order based on what they
 |  consider universal principles. In their view, the
 |  distinctive traits of different societies and cultures
 |  should yield to the homogeneity of virtuous democracy.
 |
 |           The new Jacobins are trying to clear away obstacles
 |  to the triumph of their ideology and of their own will to
 |  power. They exhibit a revolutionary mindset that will
 |  inexorably lead to disaster. Alongside what President Bush
 |
 |
 |    30.  Richard C. Hoolbrooke, ``It Did Not Have to Be This
 |  Way,''  _Washington Post_ , Feb. 23, 2003.
 |
 |    31.  Remarks by President George W. Bush, in taped
 |  interview with Bob Woodward, Washington Post, Nov. 19, 2002;
 |  excerpted from Woodward,  _Bush at War_  (New York: Simon
 |  and Schuster, 2002).
 |
 |
 |
 |  396 |  _Orbis_ 
 |
 |  ____________________________________________________________
 |                                                        Empire
 |
 |
 |  called ``history's unmarked graves of discarded lies''[32]
 |  lie the graves of the self-righteous, the people whose
 |  moralism concealed, even from themselves, their importunate
 |  will to power. As Ronald Reagan preached, the idealistic
 |  utopians and the well meaning are responsible for some of
 |  the world's worst evils. Self-righteousness blinds one to
 |  one's own sins.
 |
 |          Even if the opinions examined in this article are
 |  assessed in the most generous and charitable spirit, their
 |  element of political-ideological imperialism is hard to
 |  miss. A philosophically and historically inclined observer
 |  is reminded of the terrible and large-scale suffering that
 |  has been inflicted on mankind by power-seeking sanctioned or
 |  inspired by one or another kind of Jacobin moral and
 |  intellectual conceit. Communism, one of the most radical and
 |  pernicious manifestations of the Jacobin spirit, has
 |  disintegrated, at least as a major political force. But
 |  another panacea for the world is taking its place. The
 |  neo-Jacobin vision for how to redeem humanity may be less
 |  obviously utopian than that of communism. It may strike some
 |  as admirably idealistic, as did communism. But the spirit of
 |  the two movements is similar, and utopian thinking is
 |  utopian thinking, fairly innocuous perhaps if restricted to
 |  isolated dreamers and theoreticians but dangerous to the
 |  extent that it inspires action in the real world. The
 |  concern voiced here is that neo-Jacobinism has come to
 |  permeate American public debate and is finally within reach
 |  of controlling the military might of the United States.
 |
 |          Prudence, realism, compromise, and self-restraint
 |  are indispensable qualities in politics. They have been
 |  reflected in traditional American institutions, in great
 |  decisions made by American statesmen, and sometimes in
 |  American public opinion. They have constituted the first
 |  line of defense against all manner of foreign and domestic
 |  threats, including surges of passion and eruptions of
 |  extremism. Given the atrocities of 9/11 and the need for a
 |  firm American response, the prominence of crusaders in the
 |  Bush administration is perhaps not surprising. But it is
 |  also a sign that needed old American virtues are weakening
 |  or disappearing. The continued ascendancy of neo-Jacobinism
 |  would have disastrous consequences. By acting under its
 |  influence America's leaders may be setting in motion fateful
 |  developments that they and their successors will not be able
 |  to control.
 |
 |
 |    32.  Address to Congress, Sept. 20, 2001.
 |
 |
 |
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 |
 |  ____________________________________________________________
 |
 |  (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this
 |  material is distributed without profit to those who have
 |  expressed a prior interest in receiving the included
 |  information for research and educational purposes.)
 |______________________________________________________________