“imperial” moniker as a gross misrepresentation of reality. “‘Imperialism’ and
‘hegemony’,” writes Hanson, “explain nothing about recent American intervention
abroad--not when dictators such as Noriega, Milosevic, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein
were taken out by the U.S. military. There are no shahs and Your Excellencies in their
places, but rather consensual governments whose only sin was that they came on the
heels of American arms rather than U.N. collective snoozing.”
Critics of the administration also had second thoughts. They began to doubt that
that Bush’s policies, objectionable though they were, really represented something new
under the sun. Though the dominant leitmotif of critics was that Bush had abandoned the
honorable traditions of American internationalism to chase after the elusive and
disreputable goal of an American imperialism, many others returned to the theme that the
United States had long entertained imperial ambitions. Bush, in this reconsideration,
became the representative of a nation acting in character rather than out of character. If
that were the case, however, the question arose: when did the transformation from
republic to empire take place? Some writers detected the change as occurring with the
end of the Cold War and the elimination of a geopolitical counterweight to the United
States. Others followed the lead of J. William Fulbright, who wrote in the midst of the
War in Vietnam that America has succumbed in Southeast Asia to the lure of empire and
insisted that such a course represented a grave departure from American traditions. If a
vast complex of overseas bases and standing military establishments was the decisive
development, perhaps the most logical date was 1945, when the United States first
emerged as superior to all other states in the various dimensions of power.
9
Hanson, Victor Davis (2004) “Cracked Icons: Why the Left has lost credibility,” Available HTTP:
<
> (accessed 17 December 2004).
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Convention