Imperialism: the highest stage of American capitalism?

National Interest, The, Spring, 2003 by Gideon Rose

Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 320 pp., $29.95.

WHEN THE dust from the Soviet Union's collapse was still settling, the future of the international system seemed up for grabs. Now that bipolarity has given way to unipolarity, parsing the behavior of the hegemon is clearly the order of the day--and this is the task Andrew Bacevich sets for himself in American Empire. His study is really two books in one. The first, a description of post-Cold War American foreign policy that stresses continuity over change, is impressive and persuasive. The second, an attempt to explain this record with reference to an expansionary logic supposedly inherent in America's domestic political economy, is not.

Bacevich begins by noting how conventional wisdom views the end of the Cold War as a dramatic turning point in the history of American foreign policy. It rendered the country's old grand strategy of containment obsolete, this story runs, forcing policymakers to come up with a replacement appropriate to a new and turbulent era--something they failed to do during the 1990s. Hogwash, he says; in recent years 'the United States has in fact adhered to a well-defined grand strategy", which is "to preserve and ... expand an American imperium." Far from being an improvisation, moreover, this strategy "derives directly from U.S. principles and practices elaborated and implemented during and even before the Cold War."

Bacevich is not the first to make this case, but he does it at length and convincingly. Partisan posturing leads political players on all sides to exaggerate the differences between one administration and the next, he argues, and journalists and historians tend to follow suit, treating each presidency as a distinct and separate phenomenon. But this obscures the broad similarities in approach that lie beneath the surface. Bush pere, Clinton and Bush fils have all drawn on a common playbook, one that stresses globalization and interdependence as the key features of the contemporary world, free trade and open markets as the chief goals of U.S. policy, and American military hegemony as the guarantor of international stability. The "Big Idea" tying all of this together is

openness: the removal of barriers to the movement of goods, capital, people, and ideas, thereby fostering an integrated international order conducive to American interests, governed by American norms, [and] regulated by American power.

In support of this thesis Bacevich pulls together a broad range of public statements by officials in all three administrations, showing that there is indeed a consistent rhetorical and ideological core to U.S. foreign policy thinking. And he links this to a basic set of policies, demonstrating that what unites Executive Branch decision-makers from both parties is more significant than what divides them. Only people who do not know the game, therefore, are surprised when their favorite presidential candidate sheds his inflammatory campaign rhetoric about China or Russia or nation-building or whatever and embraces the previous guy's positions once ensconced in office.

Befitting his status as a retired U.S. Army colonel, Bacevich is particularly insightful on military issues, and is an excellent guide to the difficulties the defense establishment has had in coming to terms with the new international environment. Trained and equipped to fight large conventional wars, the American armed forces have instead found themselves pressed into service in a variety of "imperial policing" missions around the globe. As the services fight off attempts at radical military transformation and grumble openly about civilian interference, Washington relies increasingly on modem versions of the "gunboats and Gurkhas" used by imperial powers a century ago. And at the cutting edge of this new/old system are the regional commanders-in-chief, operating as "proconsuls" responsible for the routine management of the Pax Americana.

FOR HELP IN explaining all of this--most of which he finds distasteful--Bacevich turns to two dissenting historians from decades past, Charles A. Beard and William Appleman Williams. Both have been deservedly pilloried over the years, he says, for botching the great foreign policy issues of their own times, the fights against Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, respectively. But they are still worth reading, for while they may have been wrong about our enemies, they were right about us. They understood that the true and permanent source of American foreign policy lies within, and cautioned against its all-consuming lust. Looking over their shoulders, Bacevich claims, we can see three great truths about recent events:

First, that U.S. foreign policy remained above all an expression of domestically generated imperatives; second, that economic expansionism abroad, best achieved by opening the world to trade and foreign investment, was a precondition of America's own well-being and therefore the centerpiece of U.S. strategy; and third, that [officials believed] the cause of peace was best served by the United States' occupying a position of unquestioned global preeminence.