expect all the benefits of state employment—steady pay, good housing, free medical benefits, education, relief from racial discrimination, world travel, and gratitude from the rest of society for their “service.” They are well aware that the alternatives on offer today in civilian life include difficult job searches, little or no job security, regular pilfering of retirement funds by company executives and their accountants, “privatized” medical care, bad public elementary education, and insanely expensive higher education. They are ripe not for the rhetoric of a politician who followed the Andover-Yale-Harvard Business School route to riches and power but for a Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, or Juan Peron—a revolutionary, military populist with little interest in republican niceties so long as some form of emperorship lies at the end of his rocky path.
Regardless of who succeeds George W. Bush, the incumbent president will have to deal with an emboldened Pentagon, an engorged military-industrial complex, our empire of bases, and a fifty-year-old tradition of not revealing to the public what our military establishment costs or the kinds of devastation it can inflict. History teaches us that the capacity for things to get worse is limitless. Roman history suggests that the short, happy life of the American republic may be coming to its end—and that turning it into an openly military empire will not, to say the least, be the best solution to that problem.
One common response to this view is that ours is actually a “good empire” like the one from which we gained our independence in 1776. Whatever its faults and flaws, contemporary America, like England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is said to be a source of enlightenment for the rest of the world, a natural carrier of the seeds of “democracy” into benighted and oppressed regions, and the only possible military guarantor of “stability” on the planet. We are, therefore, the “cousins” and inheritors of the best traditions of the British Empire, which was, according to this highly ideological construct, a force for unalloyed good despite occasional unfortunate and unavoidable lapses.
The expatriate Scot and Harvard historian Niall Ferguson typically argues that the British Empire was motivated by “a sincere belief that spreading commerce, Christianity, and civilization was as much in the interests of Britain’s colonial subjects as in the interests of the imperial metropole itself.”41 He insists that “no organization [other than the British Empire] has done more to impose Western norms of law, order and governance around the world” and that “America is heir to the empire in both senses: offspring of the colonial era, successor today. Perhaps the most burning contemporary question of American politics is: Should the United States seek to shed or to shoulder the imperial load it has inherited?”42 The
According to journalist Erik Tarloff, writing in the British newspaper
The rewriting of history to prettify the British Empire has long been commonplace in England but it became politically significant in the United States only after 9/11, when the thought—novel to most Americans—that their own country was actually an “empire” began to come out of the closet. Beginning in late 2001, approval of American imperialism became a prominent theme in the establishment and neoconservative press. “It was time for America unabashedly and unilaterally, to assert its supremacy and to maintain global order,” writes Joshua Micah Marshall, editor of an influential Washington Internet newsletter. “After September 11th, a left-wing accusation became a right-wing aspiration: conservatives increasingly began to espouse a world view that was unapologetically imperialist.”46
Bernard Porter, a professor at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and a recognized specialist on Britain’s imperial past, likes to argue that his country acquired its empire unintentionally. Apologists for American imperialism also contend that the United States acquired its continental girth as well as its Caribbean and Pacific colonies in a fit of innocent absentmindedness.47 Despite his tendency to minimize the importance of the British Empire, Porter is an acute observer of trends in the candor with which this history has been approached. In the twentieth century, he observes, “Imperialism—in the old, conventional sense—suddenly became unfashionable.... [New books] took an entirely different line on it from before: hugely downplaying the glorious military aspects of it; almost giving the impression that most colonies had asked to join the Empire; stressing Britain’s supposed ‘civilizing’ mission; and presenting the whole thing as simply a happy federation of countries at different stages of ‘development.’ ... A new word was coined for it, which was thought to express this sort of thing better: ‘Commonwealth.’ A popular metaphor was that of the ‘family.’ “48
In Porter’s view, the ordinary Victorian Englishman was never much interested in the empire, which was always a plaything of the military classes and those who wanted (or had) to get out of the British Isles. But in America, the idea that the British Empire was really nice—totally unlike its French, German, Russian, and Japanese contemporaries—had long been well received by novel readers and latter-day fans of the long-running TV series
During the post-9/11 period of American enthusiasm for imperialism, one of its most influential proselytizers was Michael Ignatieff, a Harvard professor and self-appointed spokesman for “humanitarian imperialism,” also known as “Empire Lite.” As the demand for his cheerleading faded in light of the Iraq war, Ignatieff decided to return to his native Canada and became a politician. Back in Toronto, he acknowledged to a journalist that his many essays and op-eds had all been written as if he were an American, and he apologized for having used “we” and “us” some forty-three times throughout his essay entitled “Lesser Evils,” which is a defense of official torture.49
In the
In numerous one-liners, Ignatieff sings the praises of American imperialism: “Multilateral solutions to the world’s problems are all very well, but they have no teeth unless America bares its fangs.... Regime change is an imperial task par excellence, since it assumes that the empire’s interest has a right to trump the sovereignty of a state.... The question, then, is not whether America is too powerful but whether it is powerful enough. Does it have what it takes to be grandmaster of what Colin Powell has called the chessboard of the world’s most inflammable region? ... The case for empire is that it has become, in a place like Iraq, the last hope for democracy and stability alike.”50
Ignatieff’s warlike prose comes from an essay entitled “The Burden,” an unmistakable reference to Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem “The White Man’s Burden,” written while he was living in Vermont and addressed to Americans as they prepared to subjugate the Philippines:
