On a mission: the uses of American power

Christian Century, April 5, 2005 by Lloyd Steffen

Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana.

By Gary Dorrien. Routledge, 336 pp., $30.00.

Saving Christianity from Empire.

By Jack Nelson-Pallmeyerr Continuum, 192 pp., $24.00.

Anxious About Empire: Theological Essays on the New Global Realities.

Edited by Wes Avram. Brazos Press, 224 pp., $18.99.

American Providence: A Nation with a Mission.

By Stephen H. Webb. Continuum, 208 pp. $24.95.

THE UNITED STATES goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy," Secretary of State John Quincy Adams wrote in 1821. "She is a well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. If the United States took up all foreign affairs, it would become entangled in all the wars of interest and intrigue, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own soul."

Some 80 years later President McKinley, stymied about what to do in the Philippines, went into a late-night, down-on-the-knees prayer session in the White House and emerged with a different vision. It had come to him that he could take "all the islands and--"by God's grace" he said--educate, uplift, civilize and Christianize the Filipinos. Having received divine endorsement for an imperial military incursion, McKinley put his worries about empire to rest. "I went to bed," he said, "and went to sleep, and slept soundly."

Adams's warning has gone unheeded, and McKinley's appeal to a long-standing national belief that America enjoys a special or "exceptionalist" destiny in the history of nations continues to lurk around the edges of many current foreign policy initiatives. The idea that America has received a divinely approved mission to spread freedom, democracy and capitalist prosperity to the world through its economic and military might persists, even as foreign affairs are increasingly preoccupied with the very activities Adams feared--searching out monsters (terrorists), entangling the nation in wars of interest and intrigue, and becoming an imperial "dictatress." Yet public officials deny any fall into imperialism. Despite preemptive military action, the post "victory" occupation of Iraq and global involvements elsewhere, America's present policy makers and public officials insist that the term "empire" simply does not apply.

Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer differs. An empire, he contends, is a nation ambitions to exercise control over the political and economic systems of other nations--and the international order itself--to the end of preserving, promoting and advancing its own interests. If Nelson-Pallmeyer is right, then the policy makers' denials are hollow. The U.S. has become an imperial nation.

Nelson-Pallmeyer's Saving Christianity from Empire and three other recent books subject the idea of American empire to moral and theological reflection. Just as the nation is divided politically over the question of empire, these books expose a moral and theological divide.

In Imperial Designs Gary Dorrien, a prolific author whose writings include two volumes in an acclaimed series on American liberal Christianity and a decade-old book on neoeonservative ideology, thoroughly rehearses the movement of the ideas and people operating the U.S. foreign policy machinery. In an astonishingly comprehensive discussion of the neoconservatives' rise to power, Dorrien identifies the major players who devised the grand strategy of unipolarism, which calls for America to assert itself as the preeminent global power in the post-Cold War world.

The neoconservatives, Dorrien explains, are a group of originally liberal intellectuals who became disaffected with McGovernism. They have advocated capitalist economics, a minimal welfare state, and a militantly interventionist, anticommunist, expansionist and nationalistic Americanism. The neocons left the Left in the '70s, gravitated to the Reaganite Republican Party in the '80s, faded in the '90s when the Republicans were out of power and then reemerged with the election of George W. Bush. Dorrien demonstrates how neocons came to influence foreign policy and asserts that 9/11 provided an unexpected opportunity for them to assert a new and aggressive unilateral Americanism as the cornerstone of foreign policy.

Although Dorrien attends to important figures who are sympathetic to neoconservative ideology, including President Bush both before and after 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, his focus is on the neocons, or unipolarists, whose ideas and intellectual biographies he presents against the backdrop of their work inside and outside of government: Paul Wolfowitz, Colin Powell, Charles Krauthammer, Joshua Muravchik, Max Boot, Ben Wattenberg, William Kristol and Robert Kagan.

For all that the neoconservatives have said publicly about their vision of American power, a coherent narrative of the development of their policy has been needed, and Dorrien provides that account impressively. He reveals that the purported reasons for the Iraq invasion (defending America (?ore weapons of mass destruction and spreading democracy and freedom) were a mere gloss intended for public consumption. The neocon position has for over a decade focused on advancing American strategic interests in the oil-rich Middle East and finding ways to establish bases for military operations to protect those interests. Readers will be sobered by Dorrien's account of Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz arguing that Saddam Hussein would have to be overthrown whether or not a connection to 9/11 was found.