The Bush Team's Skewed View of American History

Tristram Hunt, author of the forthcoming, Building Jerusalem, in the Guardian (March 22, 2004):

Paul Kennedy, the great historian of empires, likes to remind his audience that George Bush read history at Yale - but not that many history books. However, since September 11 and the installation of a Churchill bust in the Oval Office, President Bush seems to have put his college days behind him. History is now in vogue at the White House. Indeed, the entire Bush foreign policy has been premised on a narrative of America's past at the heart of which is the principle of liberty.

Since the inception of the "war on terror", the Pentagon has been careful to eschew the call of empire. What motivates neoconservatives, we are told, is not the aggrandisement of American power but ensuring the beacon of liberty shines brightly across the globe. In his 2003 state of the union address, President Bush reassured his global audience that America sought to "exercise power without conquest".

Although the neoconservative polemicist Charles Krauthammer has declared America to be "the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome", and Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, sounds every day more like an Edwardian viceroy, the White House is adamant that the war on terror is distinct from the colonial ambitions of previous great powers. Instead, what the Bush administration is concerned with is fulfilling the ideals of the American revolution.

However, although bookshops in the US are awash with new biographies of George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, what the White House has learned from all this scholarship seems little different from the historical interpretation of the Mel Gibson film The Patriot. For Gibson, the revolution was a clear-cut struggle for liberty against the British oppressors.

The neoconservatives have taken this dubious history as read and then universalised the principle. The liberty won by the founding fathers in the 18th century is for the Pentagon hawks a value of global validity. As President Bush put it: "If the values are good enough for our people, they ought to be good enough for others." And as the disillusioned Republican thinker Paul Craig Roberts has pointed out, it is this claim of universality that seems to endow American principles with their monopoly on virtue. It behoves America, as a republic of virtue, to export these ideals around the world.

The president certainly feels the hand of history and casts himself as a latter-day Churchill. Recently, at a Churchill exhibition at the Library of Congress, Bush aligned himself with his hero, announcing: "We are the heirs of the tradition of liberty, defenders of the freedom, the conscience and dignity of every person".

This sense of moral clarity is what is meant to distinguish neoconservatism from plain old conservatism. While the likes of Kissinger and Nixon were happy to collude with terrorism and bolster tyrannies, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence, and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, will brook no such betrayal of America's heritage. It is this call of historic virtue that accounts for President Bush's recently launched "forward strategy for freedom in the Middle East". Instead of supporting friendly if corrupt Arab regimes, democracy and liberty would provide the litmus test for US diplomacy in the region. "For too long, American policy looked away while men and women were oppressed," announced the leader of the free world. "That era is over."

Leaving aside US support for some pretty distasteful regimes in the oil-rich Caspian basin, or Rice's intervention in the Venezuelan elections, or the decision to postpone the polls in Iraq, there remain fundamental historical problems with the neoconservative vision.

For at the political core the American revolution was a highly restricted notion of freedom: the right of property holders to dispose of their wealth as they saw fit. Many revolutionaries simply wanted to be treated as Englishmen - which might account for Benjamin Franklin lobbying for a job in the Westminster government as late as 1771. No taxation without representation is a very different cry from the universal right to liberty.

Moreover, the property that many founding fathers wanted to protect was their slave holdings. One of the more unpublicised episodes of the war of independence is the history of black loyalism, of the tens of thousands of slaves who made their way to the British side to form the Ethiopian Regiment, the Black Brigade and the Black Pioneers. For the chattels of America, it was the British government not the righteous revolutionaries that promised liberty.

Politicians with moral clarity are indubitably attractive, and after the tergiversations of the Clinton era, there is some refreshing candour about the Bush agenda. But if the president had read just a little more history he might appreciate the complexity of the past - and show some humility in the present.