Is the U.S. an Empire?

Iraq alone would not decide whether America had become or was to become an empire. Other issues might also have an impact: To what degree would the United States attempt to enforce a regime of nuclear nonproliferation when its allies were lukewarm about the tough confrontations such policing might entail? To what degree would the United States prove reluctant to demand exemptions -- in their way a sort of imperial prerogative -- as other lesser powers sought to construct an international legal order, such as the international court of justice, or energy emission regimes? To what degree would the United States risk war to protect the independence and security of its major Pacific clients, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, the latter above all claiming a status that accorded with American values but not with the long-standing accommodation with China?

And even these issues alone could not separate empire from leadership or ascendancy and preponderance or hegemony. To choose empire would confirm internal transformations, some of which Americans liked without facing up to their implications, others of which would not be openly accepted. To accept empire would be to confirm the trends toward inequality and toward further emphases on the public status of elites, whether of money, of advanced education, or of celebrity status. It would be to confirm the capacity of the executive -- what Arthur Schlesinger had called the imperial presidency -- to further evade control by other branches of government. It would give greater strength to the instruments of plebiscitarian consultation -- public opinion polls and focus groups and television audiences -- at the cost of congressional deliberation. None of this was inevitable, however. David Hume had once speculated that absolute monarchy might be "the easiest death, the true euthanasia, of the British constitution," but still preferable to a democracy riven by factionalism. His concern proved excessive, and to envision empire as the inexorable euthanasia of the American Republic might well be alarmist as well.

Still, just as Hume might envisage absolutism as a lesser evil, so imperial tendencies were not totally repugnant and indeed might prove attractive. Empires eroded individual liberties and marginalized dissent, but encouraged cosmopolitanism. To slide toward empire would still allow an ever more diverse American society to persevere in its growing acceptance of multiculturalism and its toleration of immigrants and minorities. To sidle toward imperial institutions might facilitate an activist intervention abroad on behalf of the rule of law and against human rights abuses. Separation of powers, after all, had often made America stingy and self-regarding. The commitment to spread democracy outside the United States, as advocated by the ambitious presidents of the past century -- Woodrow Wilson, the two Roosevelts, Truman, Reagan, and the second Bush -- might thrive under an imperial regime. Adversaries who resorted to terrorism, whether in the Middle East or in Manhattan, would render the evolution toward empire even more acceptable. The idea that their country was, or might become, an empire still repelled, and, what is even more fundamental, struck Americans as intuitively at odds with their institutions and community. Nonetheless, the trajectory had its attractions, and therein lay the openness of the moment.

Related Links

• Cliopatria Symposiums on Imperialism: British v. American and Beyond Imperialism