America’s Empire, was “not merely that the United States is an empire but that it always
has been an empire.”
Thirty-five years ago, in the ideological heat generated by the War in Vietnam,
there were few defenders of the war who had spoken of it as an imperial venture.
The
charge of American empire was an indictment, an ascription of hidden intent used to
encourage a repudiation of the forbidden temptation. It arose on the left and was
condemned on the right. “Once,” as leftist critic Jonathan Schell wrote, “the left had
stood alone in calling the U.S. imperial and was reviled for defaming the nation. Now it
turned out to have been the herald of a new consensus. Yesterday’s leftwing abuse
became today’s mainstream praise.”
Or so it seemed. In fact, after a time, both advocates and critics of the Bush
Doctrine and the Iraq war developed second thoughts. The Bush administration never
accepted the “imperial” label and repeatedly insisted in its public pronouncements that
the United States was not and had never been an empire. “We have no empires to
establish or utopias to promote,” declared Bush. An academic proponent of the Bush
Doctrine, who subsequently joined the administration, denounced the “imperial” label as
reflecting a total misunderstanding of the purposes of Bush’s national security doctrine.
“Let us stop talking of an American empire, for there is and there will be no such thing.”
Victor Davis Hanson, another strong supporter of the Bush Doctrine, denounced the
5
Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire, New York: Penguin Press, 2004, p. 2. Cf.
also Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the new world order, New York:
Alfred A. Knopf: Distributed by Random House, 2003, pp. 85-6: “It is an objective fact that
Americans have been expanding their power and influence in ever-widening arcs since even before
they founded their own independent nation.”
6
George Liska, Imperial America: The International Politics of Primacy, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Press, 1967 was an exception to this rule.
7
Schell, Jonathan (2004) ‘Tomgram: Jonathan Schell on the empire that fell as it rose’, Available
HTTP: <
> (accessed 19 August 2004)
8
Philip Zelikow, ‘The Transformation of National Security: Five Redefinitions’, National Interest 71,
Spring 2003, 18-19.
3
Convention