(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
A few months before the September 11 attacks, the American historian Arthur Schlesinger jr. put forward a hypothesis that "despite the temptations the superpower position brings" as a result of the United States now being the sole superpower – the United States will not end up as an empire, because no nation is able to "assume the role of world judge or world police, ”and alone solve the challenges of the 21st century in terms of the environment, population growth and politics.
Like so many other intellectuals, Schlesinger relied on the "self-regulatory capacity of American democracy" and the rational attitudes of decision-makers.
Without desire
In the same vein, Charles William Maynes, an influential American foreign policy commentator, mentions that "America is a country with the capacity to become an empire, but without the desire to become one." Today we must realize that under George W. Bush, the imperialist dream is about to come true. This dream is reminiscent of what happened in the late 1800th century when the United States rose to prominence in the struggle for colonies by taking the first long steps toward a worldwide expansion in the Caribbean, Asia, and the Pacific. At that time, Jefferson's and Lincoln's land was seized by an imperialist fever. Journalists, businessmen, banks and politicians fought over who was most eager to subjugate the world.
"Economic leaders turned their attention to industrial dominance in the world," and politicians dreamed of "a great little war" (Theodor Roosevelt's famous expression) that could serve as a justification for international expansion.
- No one can stop us
"No other people are on a par with us in conquest, colonization and expansion […] nothing can stop us now," said Senator Henry Cabot Logde, the leading imperialist politician, in 1895. For Theodor Roosevelt – as when it suited him was an admirer of the English Empire's poet Rudyard Kipling – was the case straightforward: "I want," he said "that the United States becomes the dominant power in the Pacific." And he added: "The American people want to do the great work of a great power."
A journalist named Henry Watterson prophetically summed up this imperialist wave of the 1890s: "We are an imperial republic determined to exert a decisive influence over humanity, and to shape the future of the world to a greater degree than any other nation-state," including the Roman Empire, has ever done. ”
delusion
Traditional American history writing has long looked at this Sturm und Drang- imperialism as a delusion in the otherwise democratic history of the country. The United States was formed and developed through liberation from the British Empire and Europe's absolute kingdoms. Shouldn't the country also be vaccinated forever against imperialist contagion?
But a century later, as a new era of expansion for the American empire begins, Rome has become the dream the American elites are striving for. Starting with the position as the only superpower of 1991, strengthened after September 11, 2001 through unparalleled military mobilization and dazzled by its own strength, the United States now openly emerges as an empire state. For the first time since the end of the 1800th century, power demonstrations are now linked with unequivocal talk of world domination.
Rome crushed Carthage
"The fact is," writes Charles Kauthammer, lead writer of the Washington Post and one of the leading ideologues of the new right in the United States, "that since the Roman Empire no country has had such economic, technical, cultural and military dominance."
"America," he wrote as early as 1999, "embraces the world like a giant […] Since Rome left Carthage in ruins, no other power has reached the heights we have reached." For Robert Kaplan, George W. Bush's essayist and adviser on international affairs, "America's victory in World War II made the country a world power, just as the Second Punic War made Rome a world power."
The United States is superior
The Roman Empire has also become a mandatory reference point for commentators who belong further to the political center. Joseph S. Nye Jr., principal of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton, begins his latest book as follows: "Since the Roman Empire, no other nation has similarly overshadowed other nations."
Paul Kennedy, a famous historian known for his 1980s theses on US imperialist "over-expansion," goes even further: Neither the Pax Britannia, Napoleon's France, Philippe the Other's Spain, nor Charles the Great's empire – not even the Roman Empire – can compare to "today's American dominance."
"One has never experienced," he adds dryly, "such a great difference in power between the states of the world." In short, the environments that are more or less closely linked to the US government agree that "the US today enjoys greater superiority than any previous empire." Alongside its purely descriptive aspect, the reference to the Roman Empire testifies, as does the constant use of the word "empire," and that the United States is in the process of rebuilding a new imperialist ideology.
Magnificent Empire
"An Argument for an American Empire" – this is the easy-to-understand title of an article by Max Boot, lead author of the Wall Street Journal: "It is no coincidence that America [today has engaged in] military action in a number of countries where British Colonial forces have previously fought […] in areas where Western military intervention has been necessary to bring peace and order. ” According to Boot, "Afghanistan and other troubled areas [of the West] are begging to establish a foreign enlightened government following the pattern of English colonial rule."
Dinesh D'Souza, another right-wing ideologue, is a researcher at the Hoover Institution. He made a name for himself a few years ago by defending theories about the "natural" inferiority of African Americans. He also claims – in the article "Tribute to the American Empire" – that the United States "has become an empire; […] The most generous of all empires the world has ever experienced. ”
Order of the Empire
But these sulfur preachers from the new right are not alone. University teachers like Stephen Peter Rosen, director of the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University, hold the same tone. With scientific bias, he argues that "a political entity that possesses crushing superior military power, and that uses it to influence the actions of other states, is simply an empire."
"Our goal," he continues, "is not to defeat a rival, for such does not exist, but to maintain our position as an empire, and to maintain the order of the empire." An order which, according to another Harvard professor, "was formed [solely] to advance the interests of the American Empire." Within this order "the Empire signs the parts of the legal world order that suit the empire (for example, the World Trade Organization), while disregarding or sabotaging the parts it does not like (Kyoto Protocol, International Criminal Court, ABM Agreement) . ”
Radical rupture
The idea of an empire is a radical break with the idea of America that Toqueville created, and that the Americans themselves used to recognize themselves in: A democratic exception among modern nations. But this breach does not seem to be problematic. Those who still have scruples – and there are fewer and fewer – hang the adjectives "friendly" and "soft" to the words "empire" and "hegemony." Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment, for example, writes: “The truth is that America's friendly hegemony is good for a large part of the world's population. It is without a doubt a better scheme than all realistic alternatives. ”
Theodor Roosevelt used about the same words a hundred years ago. He rejected any comparison between the predator-like European colonial powers at the time: “The simple truth is that our expansionist policies, which we find throughout American history […] are in no way similar to imperialism […] To this day I have not met a single imperialist in this country. "
Hesitant imperialist
More directly, Sebastian Mallaby declares himself a "hesitant imperialist." Mallaby is a lead writer for the Washington Post, a newspaper that became famous through the Watergate scandal and its – admittedly somewhat late – opposition to the Vietnam War, but which after 11/XNUMX has become a mouthpiece for the empire. In the serious journal Foreign Affairs from April this year, he claims that today's lack of world order requires the United States to pursue an imperial policy.
In the third world, which according to Mallaby is characterized by state bankruptcies, uncontrolled population growth, local violence and social disintegration, only a neo-imperialist policy makes sense. Naturally, he is reluctant to invest US dollars to rebuild failed states or for his country to engage in humanitarian action. But he does not hesitate for a moment to recommend that the United States use its military power in all corners of the world to crush "the enemies of civilization" and "the forces of evil." And his vocabulary – the constant references to the struggle between "civilization" and "barbarism" – reveals a completely traditional imperialist way of thinking.
Security through gun power
We do not know exactly how much Bush remembers from the teaching given at prestigious institutions such as Yale and Harvard, but after 11/XNUMX, he has actually become the Caesar of the new American empire. Caesar who, in Cicero's words, "won complete victories in very important battles against the most warlike peoples […] and succeeds in intimidating and overcoming them, pushing them back and accustoming them to obey the authority of the Roman people." Do Bush and the new American right want to secure the empire's security and wealth through war, by subduing disobedient people in the third world, by ruling the "bully states" and perhaps keeping the "failed" old colonial powers under surveillance?
The United States is trying to achieve security through force of arms rather than through cooperation. Therefore, the country acts alone or with changing partners, unilaterally and based on narrow national interests. Instead of attacking the economic and social causes of the permanent reproduction of violence in the countries of the South, the United States is in the process of further destabilizing them through military intervention. That the United States seeks control and not territorial conquests does not change anything: Both "friendly" and "hesitant" imperialists are imperialists as good as anyone.
Control of the vassal states
If the Third World countries have to submit to the United States and enter a new era of colonial rule or halfway autonomy, Europe must take up a subordinate role in the colonial system. In the American vision, which is a result of the country's only superpower status from 1991, Europe is far from having any independent strategic power, but a dependent area that has neither the will nor the capacity to defend its paradise, and which depends on the will of the United States. to wage war.
Europe will thus become part of a new imperialist and vertical division of labor where "the Americans are waging war, while the French, British and Germans defend the borders and the Dutch, Swiss and Scandinavians act as humanitarian aid."
Europe does not exist
At present, "the Americans have so little confidence in their allies, […] with the exception of the British, that they exclude them from all activities except the most subordinate police missions." Zbigniew Brzezinski, the inventor of "jihad" against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan, stated a similar idea several years ago. According to him, and a number of other American strategists, the United States' goal "should be to keep its vassal states in a state of dependence, to ensure that dependent states remain obedient and protected, and to ensure that the barbarian states do not unite."
As usual, Charles Krauthammer says things even more directly: "America has won the Cold War, put Poland and the Czech Republic in its pocket, and then pulverized Serbia and Afghanistan. As a passer-by, the United States has proved that Europe does not exist. " This contempt is a major reason for the transatlantic tension since 11/XNUMX.
Once the United States has chosen to become an empire, this choice condemns the United States to use the time the country has left of its hegemony – long or short – to build walls around the West. Like all other empires, the United States will be solely concerned with "a single thought: How to avoid disappearing, how to avoid dying, how to prolong its existence," to borrow an expression from the South African author John Michael Coetzee.
Reproduced with permission of Le Monde Diplomatique. Translated by Ole-Jacob Christensen.
