A Potent Imperium

Modern Age, Fall, 2004 by Jeremy Black

American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy, by Andrew J. Bacevich, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. xiii 300 pp.

ANDREW BACEVICH'S American Empire is a first-rate book: important, interesting, and well-written. It stands outside mainstream writing on international relations as a result of its grasp of practicalities, and Bacevich's preference for rigorous analysis rather than the schematic model-making that, understandably, puts off so many readers. Bacevich sets out to consider the present situation in American foreign policy. He does so by re-examining the last century, searching out themes and continuities that move him away from turning points predicated on the beginning and "end" of the Cold War (I put the latter in quotation marks because in some parts of the world the Cold War has not ended, despite the demise of the Soviet Union).

In addition, Bacevich, Professor of International Relations at Boston University, looks at the relationship between America's global power and her domestic political culture. He concludes, "The question that urgently demands attention ... is not whether the United States has become an imperial power. The question is what sort of empire [the Americans] intend theirs to be. For policymakers to persist in pretending otherwise ... is to increase the likelihood that the answers they come up with will be wrong. That way lies not just the demise of the American empire but great danger for what used to be known as the American republic."

Bacevich's point of departure is the present, but he also goes back to look at how American policy has developed with the pursuit of moral ends increasingly linked to the pursuit of a potent imperium. Bacevich puts it clearly:

   [T]he politico-economic concept to which the United States adheres
   today has not changed in a century: the familiar quest for an "open
   world," the overriding imperative of commercial integration,
   confidence that technology endows the United States with a privileged
   position in that order, and the expectation that American military
   might will preserve order and enforce the rules. Those policies
   reflect a single-minded determination to extend and perpetuate
   American political, economic, and cultural hegemony--usually referred
   to as "leadership"--on a global scale.

Bacevich's route is an interesting one, including a re-examination of the works of two critical American historians, Charles Beard and William Appleman Williams, in order to throw light on the extent to which the defenders of liberal internationalism found it necessary to develop a mythic account of America's ascent to global power: specifically, what he terms the "myth of the reluctant superpower." Bacevich reviews Beard's critique of Roosevelt's interventionism and also underlines the value of Williams's questions about the desirable character and organization of the American imperium and what consequences it would have for the American people. While disagreeing with the prescriptions of both Beard and Williams, Bacevich finds much of value in their analysis. As an example of a judicious discussion of ideas and their applicability, his treatment of the two historians is masterly.

Moving forward, Bacevich shows how, as the American imperium became committed to globalization, those who resisted were seen as opponents of the United States. Inheriting British ideas from the nineteenth century, American writers and policymakers understood free trade and the unfettered movement of capital as political as well as economic goods, and thus as central goods for government to pursue. The state thus became a protection system for an economic world view which, in turn, helped fund the state.

But rather than seeing this in left-wing terms as the product of economic conspiracy and class interest, Bacevich focuses on the moral ideals that motivated policy, specifically on the pursuit of a benign and mutually beneficial world order that reflected an imperium rather than an empire of control, constraint, and coercion. The democratic objective at the heart of American capitalism is here seen as both cause and consequence of freedom. Bacevich underlines the degree to which this economic goal--seen at once as being in America's and the world's interest, and as conducive to liberty as well as prosperity--provides a continuous theme that bridged the close of the Cold War. It was pertinent both before 1990 and after it. Democratic capitalism had to be supported, and if necessary, fought for, everywhere.

Bacevich's discussion of the 1990s is particularly profitable. He argues that a greater reliance on military coercion as an instrument of policy and the tendency of serving military officers to displace civilians in implementing foreign policy were manifestations of the increasing militarization of American statecraft after the Cold War. This is not a course he welcomes:

  The note of apparent civil-military reconciliation on which the decade
  began proved ephemeral. Before the 1990s ended, evidence of civil-
  military dysfunction had become increasingly difficult to ignore.
  Meanwhile, events had exposed the limitations of the proconsular
  system--and of American's reliance on gunboats and Gurkhas to police
  the world.