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north coast TIMES EAGLE, M A Y /JU N E 2007
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contest, foreign invaders are fatally disadvantaged from the
outset; if they are not willingtto stay forever, they lose.
By the late 1970s adverse experience sufficient to
illuminate the utterly novel historical situation of the United
States in the late 20th century was in hand. Undoubtedly, it
had the biggest heap of weapons of any country. Without
question, they were the most varied, sophisticated and effective
in the world at their job of killing people and blowing things up.
The question was what the United States could accomplish with
this capacity. Certainly, if a conventional foe lacking nuclear
arms arrayed itself in battle against the United States, it could be
handily defeated. That was the mistake Saddam Hussein made
in 1990 when he sent his army out into the Kuwaiti desert, where
it was pulverized from the air. But few wars in fact conformed to
this conventional pattern any longer. Of far greater importance
was what happened to two kinds of war that had historically been
the most important — wars of imperial conquest and general
great-power wars, such as the First and Second World Wars.
During the 20th century the first kind had become hopeless
quagmires owing to the aroused will of local people everywhere
who, collectively, had put an end to the age of imperialism. The
second were made unfightable and unwinnable by the nuclear
revolution. It was these two limitations on the usefulness of
military force, one acting at the base of the international system,
the other at its apex, that delimited the superiority of the super­
power. (The paradox of impotent omnipotence was even more
pronounced for the other superpower, the Soviet Union, which
actually disappeared.)
Very possibly, the United States, with all its resources,
would have been the sort of globe-straddling empire that Joseph
McCarthy wanted it to be had it risen to pre-eminence in an
earlier age. It was the peculiar trajectory of the United States,
bom in opposition to empire, to wind up making its own bid
for empire only after the age of imperialism was over. Though
it’s hard to shed a tear, you might say that there was a certain
unfairness in America’s timing. All the ingredients of past
empires were there — the wealth, the weapons, the power,
hard and soft. Only the century was wrong. The United States
was not, could not and cannot be a new Rome, much less
greater than Rome, because it cannot do what Rome did. It
cannot, in a post-imperial age, conquer other countries and
lastingly absorb them into a great empire; it cannot, in the
nuclear age, not even today, fight and win wars against its chief
global rivals, who still, after all, possess nuclear arsenals. Even
tiny, piteous, brutalized, famine-ridden North Korea, more a cult
than a country, can deter the United States with its puny putative
arsenal. The United States, to be sure, is a great power by any
measure, surely the world's greatest, yet that power is hemmed
in by obstacles peculiar to our era. The mistake has been not so
much to think that the power of the United States is greater than
it is to fail to realize that power itself, whether wielded by the
United States or anyone else — if conceived in terms of military
force — has been in decline. By imagining otherwise, the United
States has become the fool of force — and the fool of history.
In this larger context the repeated constitutional crises of
the last half-century assume an altered aspect. The conventional
understanding is that an excess of power abroad brings abuses
at home. The classic citation is Rome, whose imperial forces, led
by Julius Caesar, returning from foreign conquest, crossed the
river Rubicon into the homeland and put an end to the republic.
(Thus both the proponents of American empire and its detractors
can cite Rome.) But that has not been the American story. Rome
and would-be Rome are not the same. Empire and the fantasy
of empire are not the same. It is rather the repeatedly failed bid
for imperial sway that has corrupted. It was not triumph but loss
— of China, of the atomic monopoly, among the developments
— that precipitated the McCarthy assault on liberty at home. It
was persistent failure in the Vietnam War already a decade old
and deeply unpopular that led an embattled, isolated, nearly
demented Richard Nixon to draw up his enemies list, illegally
spy on his domestic opposition, obstruct justice when his
misdeeds became known, ramble drunkenly in the Oval Office
about using nuclear weapons and ultimately mount an assault on
the entire constitutional system of checks and balances. And it is
today an unpopular President Bush, unable either to win the Iraq
War or to extricate himself from it, who has launched his absolut­
ist assault on the Constitution. Power corrupts, says the old saw.
done with them, for good or ill, and what should be done.
Perhaps it will still be possible to shoehorn the United States
into a stretched definition of “empire,” but it would look nothing
like Britain or Rome. Or perhaps, as I believe, a United States
rededicated to its constitutional traditions and embarked
on a cooperative course with other nations would find that
it possesses untapped reserves of political power, though it
will take time for American prestige to recover from Bush’s
squandering of it.
Until very recently those authentic questions went
substantially unexplored outside scholarly journals, and the
country instead busied itself repairing the imperial illusions
so rudely dashed by the Vietnam War. Suppressing the lessons
of the Chinese Revolution had been easy, since the United
States had not fought in China. Getting over the lessons of
Vietnam took longer. Many segments of American society,
none more than the military, had learned them deeply and
vowed “never again.” (The poignancy of the generals’ recent
outspoken statement against the conduct of the war in Iraq lies
precisely in the officers’ chagrin that they indeed did let it happen
again.) The lessons were formulated in military terms in the
so-called Powell doctrine, requiring that before military action
proceeded there must be a clear military — not political —
objective, that there must be a commitment to the use of
overwhelming force and that there must be an “exit strategy."
Nevertheless, in other quarters the lessons were named a
Vietnam syndrome," an illness, and other explanations were
brought forward. The lessons of Vietnam were not so much
forgotten as vigorously suppressed, in the name of restoring
the reputation of America’s military power. Ronald Reagan said
of the Vietnam military, “They came home without a victory not
because they were defeated but because they were denied a
chance to win." After the first Gulf War, President Bush crowed,
“By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!”
The country was getting ready for the second Iraq War, which
violated every tenet of the Powell doctrine.
But is power the right word to use in the face of so much failure?
The sometimes suggested alternate — that weakness corrupts
— seems equally appropriate. In a manner of speaking perhaps
both saws are true, for in terms of military might the United
States is unrivaled, yet in terms of capacity to get things done
with that might, it so often proves weak — even, at times,
impotent, as McCarthy said. The pattern is not the old Roman
one in which military conquest breeds arrogance and arrogance
stokes ambition, which leads to usurpation at home. Rather, in
the case of the United States, misunderstanding of its historical
moment leads to misbegotten wars; misbegotten wars lead to
military disaster; military disaster leads to domestic strife and
scapegoating; domestic strife and scapegoating lead to usurp­
ation, which triggers a constitutional crisis. Crises born of
strength and success are different from crises born of failure.
Fullbright warned of the corruption of imperial ambition and the
arrogance of power. But we need also to speak of the corruption
of imperial failure, the arrogance of anxiety.
What the true greatness — or true power — of the
United States is or can be for the world in our time is an
absorbing question in pressing need of an answer. Our very
conceptions of greatness and power — military, economic,
political, moral — would need searching reconsideration. Those
true powers — especially the economic — also have an “imperial
aspect, but that is another debate. An advantage of that debate
is that it would be about things that are real. Jettisoning the
mirage of military domination of the globe that has addled so
many American brains for more than half a century and also
shunning the panic-stricken fears of impotence that have
accompanied the inevitable frustration of these delusions,
the debate would take realistic stock of the nation’s very
considerable yet limited resources and ask what is being
A parallel evolution was occurring in the constitutional
domain. The lesson most of the country learned from Watergate
and the forced resignation of Richard Nixon was that the imperial
presidency had grown too strong.(In general our imperial-minded
Presidents have had much more success rolling back freedom at
home than extending it abroad.) Dick Cheney, who had served
as Chief of Staff for President Gerald Ford, drew an opposite
lesson — that the powers others called imperial were in fact the
proper ones for the presidency and had been eviscerated by the
opposition to Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. As he has put
it, "Watergate and a lot of things around Watergate and Vietnam,
both during the 1970s, served, I think, to erode the authority...
the President needs to be effective, especially in the national
security area." Taking the Nixon presidency as a model rather
than a cautionary tale, he sees new usurpation as restoration.
In doing so, he brings the old theme back in a new guise —
that American weakness in the world is caused by domestic
opponents at home. In his view domestic subversion — this time
of executive authority, not misguided imperial ambition — is the
country's problem.
Can this pattern be broken? Voices are already being
heard advising that the opposition to the Iraq War and the failed
vision it embodies should now embrace a generalized new readi­
ness to use force. But that way lies only a new chapter in the
sorry history of the pitiful, helpless giant. The needed lesson is
exactly the opposite — to learn or relearn, or perhaps we must
say re-relearn, the lessons regarding the limitations on the use
of force that have been taught and then rejected so many times
in recent decades. Only then will we be able to stop repeating
ourselves and, giving up dreams of imperial grandeur, start
saying and doing something new.
Jonathon Schell wrote this article for The Nation,
from which it has been excerpted. He is one of America’s
great journalists. His reporting from Vietnam has been called
the “classic reporting on the Vietnam War." His book, The
Village of Ben Sue, is perhaps his most memorable, in which
a quote from a U.S. Army major became an indelible icon of
the war and a fixture of contemporary language: “We had to
destroy the village to save it." He is also author of Abolition,
The Fate o f the Earth, The Time o f Illusion, and most recently
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence & the Will of
the People.
COPS & CAESARS?
The case made for an American empire by its adherents
is framed in terms of power: they claim that if the United States
does not use its tremendous military superiority much of the
world would either dissolve or enflame in chaos. Their aspiration
is that the manifest destiny of the United States is to ultimately
envelop the planet as its imperial guardian against chaos and
disorganization — and to also suppress any other nation or
combination of them competing against the United States for
worldly power.
This is the New World Order: world military supremacy
by the United States — space-based weapons, new nukes and
combat weapons at least a generation ahead of anyone else in
military technology. The USA is the only reigning superpower —
the world’s first truly ‘hyperpower’. Not only does the U S. intrude
its power of “protection" (a Mafia activity) into critical areas of
, the world, it engulfs their cultures and exports its own ideology
to supplant them.
The paradox of Pax Americana is that the more the
U.S. projects its power, the more it will be forced to protect it.
The Bush administration wants the USA to be as strong as
possible and every other nation as weak as possible.
We are a nation obsessed with military power. We
forget the bankruptcy and failure of conducting our business
in the world with martial arrogance. Our own political liberties
degenerate when we give power to generals and clerics. It is
difficult to not laugh at the solemn imposters who request our
wealth and children for the abyss of military supremacy. But
we also cringe at their exhortations for war worship.
We think we are going to make the world over in our
image with our armies — the problem is we will no longer be
who we think we are; our use of military force to import demo­
cracy will have made us over into tyrants and our tyranny will
be imprinted onto foreign nations the way invaders always do.
The United States is not making the world safe for
democracy but is instead recklessly inciting new and old hatreds
— and every attempt to impose its will on any other people will
be met with iron implacability.
And here is the real conflict: the test of the future as
a world civilization loosely ruled by a confederation of United
Nations or a U.S. mandated world (which might very well set
precedence for China assuming ascendancy down the road).
If indeed the U.S. uses its superpowerdom to recreate the world
as an American clone as consummation of its Manifest Destiny,
which America are we thinking about — the America of the
Revolution; the America of the Emancipation; the America
of the Cold War; or the America that demands the imperial
prerogatives of being the world’s sole superpower?
Empires like Rome or Great Britain have no place in
the 21st century world. Hitler and Stalin’s successors learned
that in the last century. One nation and one people are unable
to dominate a polyglot world for very long (if at all) — and
history has indicated world dominance has shortened in time
over the millennia: Rome was boss of its world nearly 500
years: England little more than a century; the USSR reigned
for 75 years; Hitler’s Nazis lasted only a dozen years.
The same narrow interests that doomed American
participation in the League of Nations following World War 1
continue to thwart U.S. participation in the United Nations
despite its achievements of helping prevent nuclear war during
the Cold War. The Bushites in particular wish to incapacitate
the UN as a multilateral form of international authority.
The real problem the U.S. has with the UN is that
despite its hyperpower status it does not reign but is instead
reduced to being only one power among many, even in the
Security Council, and though it has tremendous influence, is
only able to lobby for its advantage rather than exert force
The United States gloats in its reigning hyperpower
status and acts in the old Roman way, inflicting its immense
capacity for war upon the world, which is its main offering to
the New World Order’. But it is a defective colossus and the
imperial fabric is tearing apart, primarily due to its own internal
cupidity that has put the nation at the brink of ruin.
-MICHAEL McCUSKER
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