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AMERICA’S AGE OF EMPIRE
BY TODD GITLIN
On September 20, 2002, the Bush Administration
published a national security manifesto overturning the
established order. Not because it commits the United States
to global intervention: W e’ve been there before. Not because
it targets terrorism and rogue states: Nothing new there either.
No, what’s new in this document is that it makes a long-building
imperial tendency explicit and permanent. The policy paper,
entitled “The National Security Strategy of the United States
of America" — call it the Bush doctrine — is a romantic justifi
cation for easy recourse to war whenever and wherever an
American President chooses.
This document truly deserves the overused term
“revolutionary," but its release was eclipsed by the Iraqi debate.
Recall the moment. Bush, having just backed away from
unilateralism long enough to deliver a speech to the United
Nations, was now telling Congress to give him the power to go
to war with Iraq whenever and however he liked. Congress, with
selective reluctance, was skating sideways toward a qualified
endorsement. The administration had fended off doubts from
the likes of George Bush Sr.’s national security advisor Brent
Scowcroft, and retreated from its maximal designs (at least
on Tuesdays and Thursdays), giving doubters, and politicians
preoccupied with their reelection, reasons to overcome their
doubts and sign on.
The Bush White House chose this moment to put down
in black and white its grand strategy — to doctrinize, as it were,
its impulse to act alone with the instruments of war. Hitching a
ride on Al Qaeda's indisputable threat, the doctrine generalizes.
It is limitless in time and space. It not only commits the United
States to dominating the world from now into the distant future,
but also advocates what it calls the preemptive use of force:
“America will act against emerging threats before they are fully
formed."
The United States has many times sent armed forces
to take over foreign countries for weeks, years, even decades.
But the Bush doctrine is the first to elevate such wars of offense
to the status of official policy, and to call “preemptive" (referring
to imminent peril) what is actually preventive (referring to
longer-term, hypothetical, avoidable peril).This semantic shift
is crucial. When prevention of a remote possibility is called
preemption, anything goes. CIA caution can be overridden, Al
Qaeda connections fabricated, dangers exaggerated — and the
United States will have a doctrine to substitute for international
law.
The Bush manifesto displays bluster, romance, and
illogic in equal measure. Premise: America is fundamentally
righteous. ‘ In keeping with our heritage and principles, we do
not use our strength to press for unilateral advantage." This
will be news to much of the world, but never mind. An imperial
strategy is justified because there is in the world but “a single
sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy,
and free enterprise" — a model that, surprise, the United States
embodies. (As for success without freedom or democracy or
free enterprise, what about China? As for free enterprise and
democracy of a sort without success, what about Argentina?)
Conclusion: Whatever America does will be right — pursuing
terrorists, preemptive war, free trade, whatever. Nuance be
damned. For all the boilerplate about national differences, the
doctrine's key concern is clear: If all the world speaks American
values (though sometimes in funny local accents), why shouldn’t
everybody dance to our tune?
Look closer, and even the document's core phrases
lose their meaning. Just what is “a balance of power that favors
freedom’ — a term the authors use no fewer than four times?
Perhaps the answer is implicit in the doctrine’s insistence that
no rivals shall be permitted to exercise power the likes of
America's: "Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade
potential adversaries from pursuing a military buildup in hopes
of surpassing or equaling, the power of the United States."
Balance indeed.
The doctrine goes beyond the preemptive theme
sounded by President Bush in a West Point speech in June
2002. Read beneath its kitchen-sink rhetoric and you see, in
black and white, Bush codifying the unilateral treaty-busting
moves of his first months in office — his rejection of the Kyoto
climate-change protocol, his cancellation of the ABM accord,
his obstruction of the bioweapons treaty, and his flat withdrawal
from participation in the International Criminal Court, to name
only the most dramatic. Those go-it-alone exercises were not
casual or tactical retreats from global cooperation. They were
applications of a new policy that had not yet been spelled out.
The September 2002 manifesto does spell it out: The United
States rules.
The core of the National Security Strategy is unilater
alist, but it pays tribute to consultations with allies and "good
relations among the great powers." It is militarist, though it
nods in the direction of democracy and development. Make
no mistake: There’s no big surge in development forthcoming.
Nor, from an oil administration, any recognition that global
warming inflicts irrevocable damage and that sustainable energy
is a security issue — for us as well as the impoverished nations
whose well-being the doctrine purports to care about. In Bush
Country, there's no downside to free trade, which it calls “a
moral principle," no corporations ravaging forests or pushing
peasants off their land. The document does, however, pause
to put in a good word for lower tax rates.
It would be easy to dismiss Bush's manifesto on the
grounds it is a thumpingly clichd-ridden monstrosity, a heap
of Washington pixels expended because Congress in 1986
mandated periodic reports on national security strategy. The
document is meant not so much to be read as to be brandished.
This is internationalism imperial-style — as in Rome, when
Rome ruled. Its scope is breathtaking. There were large parts
of the world that Rome couldn't reach, but the Bush doctrine
recognizes no limits.
The government of the United States will ask not so
much as a by-your-leave.lt will know when threats are emerging,
partly formed, and it will not have to say how it knows, or be
convincing about what it knows. The doctrine affirms all of the
comforts and recognizes none of the dangers of empire. It
ignores the costs of unbounded deployment and war. It acknow
ledges no danger that reckless swashbuckling helps recruit
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terrorists. It forgets that all empires fall — they cost too much,
they incite too many enemies, they inspire contrary empires.
The new imperialists think they are different. All empires do.
Robert Jervis, a professor of international politics at
Columbia University and a leading foreign affairs realist in the
academy, calls the document's rhetoric “incredibly ambitious
and incredibly activist." As a declaration of American strategy
vis-à-vis the world, it is, Jervis believes, “the boldest public
statement since 1947,” when containment became policy and
the Truman Doctrine committed the United States to intervene
against communist insurgencies around the world Like the Bush
doctrine, containment was open-ended; unlike the new doctrine,
it was predicated on a network of alliances and multinational
organizations, of which NATO was the most formidable.
Bush now trades in alliances for ad hoc “coalitions.”
He makes a pass at disguising unilateralism as “a distinctly
American internationalism that reflects the union of our values
and our national interests." Interestingly, the doctrine retroact
ively downgrades the old threat, characterizing Soviet commun
ism as “a generally status quo, risk-averse adversary." (If only
Ronald Reagan had grasped that before he committed the
country to the massive deficits of the 1980s.) Bush and his allies
want their challenge to surpass all previous challenges, their
terrain to extend beyond all previous terrains. The whole world
is their turf.
Now, some things are true even if George W. Bush
says them. It is true and important that Al Qaeda and its
brethren are uncontainable and undeterrable. American power
does sometimes serve a larger good — as it would in the Middle
East, were Bush wise enough to exert it on behalf of a two-state
Israel/Palestine solution. But Al Qaeda is not the Bush doctrine’s
principal target, nor does it have more than a few words to spare
about the Middle East. Terrorism is the occasion for what is
really a doctrinal update. The National Security Strategy
proclaims the virtue of a power extension — call it regime
extension — that its authors have sought for years.
During his campaign for the Presidency, George W.
Bush never so much as hinted at the grandiosity of the vision
he has now loosed upon the world. But don't think that it erupted
out of the blue after the massacres of September 11. The
emphasis on preemption is new, but on the whole, the National
Security Strategy is the most recent version of a go-for-broke
imperial outlook that has emerged over the last decade. The first
version was drafted in 1992 by then Secretary of Defense Dick
Cheney’s then-subordinate Paul Wolfowitz; the leaked document
was repudiated by then-President Bush. A successor manifesto
was drawn up in 2000 over the names of Wolfowitz and others
who soon thereafter landed high positions in the administration
of George Bush II. Both documents emphasized pumping up
American military power to such a high pitch that rivals would
opt not to compete. Both emphasized far-flung bases and unilat
eralism. The new doctrine thus represents the triumph of the
Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz group, who have sought to estab
lish an American Millennium ever since the collapse of the
Soviet Union.
Cannon Beach, Oregon
If Bush had doubts about regime extension before
September 11, he surely does no longer. The moralism of a
President with a mission has now fused with the parochialism
of a man whose well of world knowledge is filled with oil. He will
take the battle to the enemy, even if the enemy is far-flung,
even if allies are frightened and skeptical, even if political and
economic costs of war are immense. (Since the economic costs
will fall mainly on America’s poor and middle class and will have
the effect of forestalling any progressive spending initiatives at
home, they do not concern him unduly.) Americans know fear
now, so fear is what he will mobilize. Americans want multilater
alism, so he patches together ad hoc coalitions, even goes to
the United Nations — once he has already decided on war.
The doctrine is so sweeping that it discredits what might
have been, from another hand, more modest imperatives.There
is surely (as the United Nations Charter insists) a case to be
made for national self-defense as a last resort. There are
organizations like Al Qaeda whose purposes can properly be
called genocidal, and it is not clear how, in the years to come,
they and their purposes are to be coped with.Critics of American
bravado are obliged to address the question in earnest. It is
mightily worth underscoring that, as the document says, "inter
national obligations are to be taken seriously. They are not to
be undertaken symbolically to rally support for an ideal without
furthering its attainment."
But the document undermines its most defensible points
because it exudes the spirit of take-it-or-leave-it. It carries out
Bush’s impulse to rip-roar through obstacles after a bit of small-
group communion.lt has all the logic of the Republican Supreme
Court majority in Bush v. Gore, the logic that put W in the White
House, the logic that now leads to the charmed circle of Bush,
Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Rice to make enormous
decisions behind closed doors without much consultation
(except an occasional nod to Colin Powell). It has the bluster
of an administration that presses the intelligence agencies to
sign onto its view of how things must be, against their better
judgment. This is the manifesto of a bully with a ferocious will
who fumbles in search of reasons to explain why he does what
he feels like doing.
If you thought the promulgation of such a manifesto
would be big news, you would be mistaken. On release, the
National Security Strategy was jabbed at by a few opposition
politicians, picked apart in a handful of newspaper columns, and
promptly sank from sight.On television, it hardly even happened.
That Democrats paid attention to the Bush doctrine at all is to
the credit of Al Gore, who in a September 23, 2002 speech in
San Francisco said that it conveys “one of the most fateful
decisions in our history: a decision to abandon what we thought
was America’s mission in the world." He concluded that the new
doctrine destroys “the goal of a world in which states consider
themselves subject to law" in favor of "the notion that there is
no law but the discretion of the President of the United States."
No major network deigned to take more than passing note of his
speech.
As a nation, we re still in a trance. The leadership of the
most powerful nation-state on earth proceeds to set out its grand
strategy, its unified theory of everything, and its prime channels
of information don’t see fit to let the populace in on the news
that their government is hell-bent on empire and has said so in
black and white.
Nonetheless, Bush's strategy is now in force. It confirms
suspicions and stokes paranoia. In propounding that there are
no more than two models for how a society lives in the world,
and that those who despise the one must enlist behind the other,
it indulges in the same drastic oversimplification that motivates
the terrorists. Americans will have to contend with the conse
quences for generations. That is why the Bush doctrine is
dangerous It’s a gift to anti-Americans everywhere.
Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism and sociology at
Columbia University. He is author of four books (among them a
history of the Students for a Democratic Society of which he was
once a member, as well as Letters to an Activist published last
year), and a columnist for Mother Jones magazine, from which
this article has been reprinted.