TODAY, US Secretary of State Colin Powell is in the Mideast attempting to gain Arab support for the new Israeli-Palestinian peace plan (the "Roadmap"). Integral to the plan, the State Department believes, is achieving the end to sponsorship of Palestinian insurgent groups by Syria and its client state, Lebanon. Unfortunately for Powell, this strategy of engaging the nations of the Arab world without first directly addressing the central players, Israel and the Palestinian organisations, has been tried and failed before. Henry Kissinger attempted it after the Yom Kippur War to no avail, and Jimmy Carter had hoped his Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt would lead to a "domino effect" of such peaces between Israel and its Arab neighbours, concluding with the Palestinians. The central problem with these approaches is, while they recognise the role played by Arab states in the conflict, they fail to comprehend that the Israel-Palestinian conflict is the engine driving antipathy between the Arab world and Israel, rather than outside influence manipulating the Palestinians against Israel.
The failures of the Roadmap are numerous, but generally, they are the failure to recognise the inability of the Palestinian Authority to control militant Islamist groups, the intransigence of Israel's equally militant Likud Party, the Likudnik influences upon the United States government, and the United States' arrogant declaration of its sole proprietorship over the Roadmap's implementation. Powell believes the Palestinian groups will fall in line once Syria and Lebanon end their support. Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas are known to train in Syria's Beka'a Valley, and the Southern Lebanese Army (SLA) has been a constant thorn in Israel's side since the Lebanese civil war. The United States believes, furthermore, that its annihalation of the Iraqi government has proven a potent example to other Middle Eastern governments which dare stand in the way of American initiatives. Its influence over the government of Bashar Assad, ergo, would not be achieved through warfare (well, not just yet, at least) but via intimidation. Powell himself stated that the capitualation of Iraq's government to an American Raj represented a "new strategic situation" to which Syria had to respond. Assad knows the United States can claim potent casi bellorum against Syria- the stockpiling of chemical and biological weapons, the harbouring of Iraqi Ba'athists, the aiding of terrorist organisations- and that its troops are poised to strike from Iraq. Speculation is rampant that the United States is planning a military assault on Syria, but the objectives of the neoconservatives (at least, those with influence over the administration) are compliance with the United States first, forced "democratisation" second. As long as Assad displays an acceptable level of sycophantry toward the US, his "régime" is guaranteed some momentum.
However, Assad does not have an entirely obsequious agenda. Having supported Iraq's Ba'athist government in its defence against the United States' assult on the country, Assad has the support of a significant cross-section of his population as well the role of symbolic leadership of the Arab nationalist movement. Furthermore, he realises the Bush administration may not have the support from its electoral constituency to carry out an attack on Syria, at least so soon after the Iraq war. He has already managed to outflank the United States within the United Nations, calling for a ban on weapons of mass destruction across the Middle East. This would have cleverly exposed Israel's WMD programme while simultaneously painting Syria in the light of a sponsor of peaceful détente. However, as Ha'aretz reports, Powell spurned the invitation to eradicate WMDs. Responding to the Syrian entreaties, he responded ambiguously that [Mideast disarmament] "is a goal that we have to pursue over time, and not... at the moment of any particular declaration that might be put forward for political purposes, or to highlight the issue." Assad has also tempered potential discordant issues with the US by turning over some members of the former Iraqi government and cooperating with the United States in its pursuit of al-Qaeda.
When Powell appeared at a conference in Beirut, the US agenda was rebuffed by Lebanese Foreign Minister Jean Obeid, who stated security requires peace and that "no global peace is stable without justice and equity," evidently a call for a more internationalist approach to US and Israeli foreign affairs. Syria's Al-Thawra agreed, noting that "peace and security are achieved by respecting laws and international resolutions and tackling all the causes that led to the new reality." Powell considers the meetings with Syria and Lebanon to produce no noticeable or tangible result within the next few days, but expects some form of agreement to emerge within the coming week. Nevertheless, indications are that there is little to agree upon. The Syrian state media stated that "the peace and security the hot-headed in the U.S. administration talk about will not be achieved by missiles and planes," while Powell demanded "the Lebanese army [essentially controlled by Syria] to deploy to the border and end the armed Hezbollah militia presence."
It's unclear what Syria or Assad achieve from such US diatribes other than an indication that noncompliance might result in Damascus' eventual cluster-bombing. Powell, besieged by a foreign policy programme increasingly influenced by the Pentagon, has been forced to take a hard line in his negotiations (many hawks did not even wish Powell to make such a visit to the "terrorist state" of Syria). Powell cannot even pursue the "land for peace" policies pursued by Kissinger and Carter- offering the Golan Heights to Syria would be an outrage to the Likudniks in both Israel and the US. The essential failures of the roadmap- the lack of pressure on Israel and the inability to control Palestinian violence- remain. Syria's influence over the groups is notable but not considerable; indeed, if Mahmoud Abbas, the new Palestinian prime minister, does not have significant influence, Assad certainly does not. The recognition that these are popular movements catalysed from a restive Palestinian population and not paramilitary adjuncts of the Syrian or Lebanese armies is crucial. If the United States is serious about peace, it would engage Syria in far more constructive negotiations, with the Golan and recognition of the Israeli states as bargaining chips, while pursuing a more realistic agenda in Palestine. Furthermore, it should entertain the Syrian proposal on Mideast WMDs. The removal of Israeli nuclear weapons would not seriously compromise Israeli security (is the US really prepared to defend the use of such weapons by Israel?) and would be a triumph for the Arab world. Remembering the role pride plays in such negotiations is critical. Providing the background of a triumph for the Arabs to the Roadmap's implementation could help paper over the wounds of the Iraq invasion (to a certain extent) and make certain organisations more cooperative.
Still, the primary recognition should be that the heart of the problem lies not with the peripheral states, but within Israel and Palestine themselves. While the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is quite peripheral to the tension between Israel and Arab states in the Mideast, it is highly symbolic, and therefore crucial it is solved forthwith. Ending Saddam Hussein's government, which provided nominal support for the Palestinian groups, or pressuring Assad's, which granted slightly more, is not a feasible means to a permanent solution. That will only occur if the US goes down a road its current presidential administration is entirely unwilling to engage in- the inclusion of Islamist groups in the Palestinian government, and manipulating Israel with its tremendous leverage. In short, toppling Saddam and threatening Assad will not end the violence in Israel- indeed, images of Iraqis at Fallujah throwing rocks at American occupation troops is evidence the Intifada has only spread.
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Notes on the Global Condition-
-THE EUROPEAN UNION's Greek presidency is playing down tensions over Iraq within the organisation, noting that it must now work together in order to achieve effective Iraqi reconstruction. Under a multinational occupation force now proposed by the United States, Iraq may be divided into American, British, and Polish occupation zones, with other European troops involved. Opponents of the war would not be allowed to participate, the US has indicated. The US is clearly attempting to indicate its support for and to award those countries supporting its policies toward Iraq. Nevertheless, the idea of a Polish occupation zone (among other things) seems far-fetched. The legitimacy of any Iraqi occupation is questionable until the state is under the mandate or the direct administration of the United Nations. Not only would Iraqis be less hostile to occupation forces with Arab troops, under UN auspices, involved, but it would allow for officials with far more experience and success building genuinely representative states to head the country's reconstruction, and guard against a world order in which national influence is apportioned by the Pentagon rather than a worldwide body. Furthermore, the United States has made it eminently clear, via its promulgations vis-a-vis the Israeli-Palestinian "Roadmap" and contempt for any constraints upon its will, that it will not tolerate dissension among its Allies on critical issues. How will UK tolerance for a Shi'ite Islamist government correspond to American plans for a puppet secular "democracy"?
-CUBA's crackdown on dissidents in the past few weeks (including the summary execution of some) has caused considerable consternation amongst those who considered the Cuban government to be less the monstrous affair American propaganda has painted it as over the last forty years. Nevertheless, Counterpunchasks critical questions about the flagrant violations of human rights in Cuba. One's intellectual curiosity is rather limited, indeed, if one accepts the fact that Castro executed the individuals in question out of sheer wickedness. Saul Landau asserts, instead, that Castro fears he may be next on the list of dictatorships targeted by bellicose neoconservatives, and in paranoia has attempted to eradicate any potential subversion, which he sees ultimately as attempts by the US at his undermining. He has credible reason to fear- the United States has been actively attempting everything short of direct, armed invasion (the Bay of Pigs operation was attempted via proxy forces) since the Revolution to overthrow Castro and return the island to the paradise of quasi-slavery it enjoyed under Fulgencio Batista. Add to this the Bush administration's desire to court the votes of wealthy Cuban exiles in Miami, and it would seem entirely plausible to Castro he is the next course on the Pentagon's colonial menu.
American officials have been mounting a campaign of doublespeak concerning their new colonies of Iraq and Afghanistan (though, honestly, Afghanistan was more of a smash-and-run job). Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, on his tour of the crown jewels of the New World Order, said of Afghanistan that merely "pockets of resistance" existed and that "[US forces] are at a point where we clearly have moved from major combat activity to a period of stability and stabilisation and reconstruction activities." However, Rumsfeld also admitted that US forces would remain in Afghanistan for "years" to provide security for Hamid Karzai's government.
Yet it is hard to justify Rumsfeld's claims that the security situation in Afghanistan is the best it has been in 25 years. Indeed, Afghanistan at its most stable was the unfortunate reign of the Taliban. Miserable as it was, it may have represented a forward step forward from the dregs warloard-feuds. Karzai's government lacks utterly the resources to provide a stable Afghanistan; indeed, his Afghan National Army cannot secure any regions outside a small radius from Kabul. The much vaunted "Marshall Plan for Afghanistan" has failed to materialise in any capacity. Indeed, a brief row between the State and Defence Departments a few weeks ago degenerated into a debate as to whether enough money was being provided even to build Afghan roads. Afghan citizens commonly complain the United States is spending overwhelming amounts on education for women and little on any immediate necessary improvements. The US has found itself in the same awkward position as in Iraq- engagement of the warlords would require large-scale troop mobilisation and a possible guerilla war including numerous casualties- not to mention a post-neutralisation troop-heavy policing of the country's rough, mountainous terrain. Failure to engage will result in, well, the current situation, hardly amenable to anyone with a sober and informed perspective. Add to this precarious catch-22 the fact that the understaffed US military presence there is constantly preoccupied with fighting what Rumsfeld calls "pockets of resistance"- regrouping Taliban leaders and al-Qaeda operatives in the mountains. A classic "invasion of Afghanistan" scenario has thus emerged, of the type which kept the British and Soviets at bay. The resistance has fled to the hills, strengthening its forces, marshalling its resources. The war in Afghanistan drags on as media attention shifts elsewhere- in the long term, the US may not be seen as successful as initially observed. Afghanistan is also a potent illustration of how international organisations, too, require requisite stability to operate. The UN invokes precedents of its operatives working in effective concert with US officials in Kabul as well as Hamid Karzai's government- but in addition to assassination attempts (and some successes) on the Karzai government, UN offices in Kabul have been targeted by warlords and NGO aid workers captured by the reemerging Taliban in the country's southeast. Meanwhile, civilians die by the dozens in factional skirmishes and the Taliban is once again on the offencive. The Asia Timesreports an even more dire situation for the US in Afghanistan- an international coalition (a real one) composed of Arabs, Chechens, Uzbeks, not to mention Iranian intervention- all actively pledged to subvert American interests there.
The emerging failure of the American occupation of Iraq is being more openly exposed (as there were ultimately more sceptics of this latest war than of that in Afghanistan, and because of the latent media correspondants stationed there). Protests in Fallujah, a stronghold of Sunni Arab conservatism (and loyalty to Saddam Hussein) erupted in violence two days ago as US troops shot dead as many as fifteen protesters under suspect circumstances. The next day, the citizens of Fallujah protested again, and three more deaths resulted in the ensuing clash between the crowd and US troops. Most recently, seven American soldiers were injured by a grenade attack upon an American compound in Fallujah. This Israeli-Palestinian style cycle of retribution is the least of the United States' problems in its new arid lebensraum. American officials now must not only worry about the potent political force of Iraqi Shi'ites, but the antipathy of its Sunni population as well. In the north, it faces a growing hostility between Kurdish and Turkoman groups (the latter accuse the former of ethnic cleansing in its seizures of Mosul and Kirkuk in early April). Additionally, the two major Kurdish factions have seized leftover Iraqi armaments, in preparation either to fight American forces for an independent Kurdistan, a looming Turkish presence to the north, or, perhaps, each other.
Amongst these developments, President Bush is expected, in a carefully orchestrated photo-op aboard an American aircraft carrier, announce officially the end to hostilities in Iraq. The White House Press Secretary, Ari Fleischer, announced rather glibly that "the Iraqi people have freedom," and that "the threat to the United States has been removed," neither of which, of course, is true. The Iraqi people will never be truly free, as, even if accorded the "government of their choice," by the United States, the interests of Kurdish independence, Shi'ite theocracy, or Sunni neo-Ba'athism are likely to propel a civil war with rapid intervention by Turkey and Iran. Iraq was never a threat to the United States by any stretch of the imagination; indeed, following the Gulf War and postwar sanctions, it was unlikely Iraq could pose a plausible threat to Kuwait again. Nevertheless, Defence Secretary Rumsfeld announced yesterday:
Let me be clear: Iraq belongs to you [Iraqis]. We do not want to run it. Our coalition came to Iraq for a purpose - to remove a regime that oppressed your people and threatened ours. Our goal is to restore stability and security so that you can form an interim government and eventually a free Iraqi government - a government of your choosing, a government that is of Iraqi design and Iraqi choice. We will stay as long as necessary to help you do that, and not a day longer.
One would be forgiven for thinking that when President Bush announced that the "one clear purpose" of military operations against Iraq was solely "disarmament" that he was articulating the primary, secondary, or even bottom-rung justification for the conflict. Nevertheless, Rumsfeld's remarks taken in context have been far more ambiguous. This statement reneges on several previous commitments of US troops for specific long durations of time, and more recent statements to equal effect. It is interesting that UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw noted on a BBC radio programme Sunday morning that a fundamentalist regime may be tolerated, even welcomed, by Britain as a sign of Mideastern progress, recognising the example of Iran. A member of the "axis of evil" a credible model for the future government of a state targeted for immediate Americanisation? The extent to which Britain has been included in decisions on Iraqi reconstruction is the most potent illustration in itself of how such remarks must have been received in the twin neoconservative citadels of the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for a New American Century. Rumsfeld has already declared a Shi'ite theocracy inexcusable.
Finally, Ole Woehler Olsen, of the Danish Foreign Service, has been selected to administer southern Iraq's Basra province. He is said to understand the Arab world "to its fingertips." If this is so, perhaps his first recommendation should be that the Arab world does not enjoy subordination to hegemonistic Western powers seeking to maintain their status and exploit local resources via coerced assimilation to their values.
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Notes on the Global Condition-
When I wrote of strategies for the European containment of the US, I referenced the influence debts owed to Japan had on American policy toward the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Now Japan's Daily Yomiurimuses on how Japan, too, can use its economic power to right the United States. Though many of the ideas are radically militarist and/or economically libertarian, there are some less ideological, more considered designs for a rebuffing of American inlfuence over Japanese economic affairs and its foreign policy.
BBC reports concisely on the "new reality of American power." Most intriguing is former President Clinton's statement that "[America's] paradigm now seems to be: Something terrible happened to [it] on 11 September and that gives [it] the right to interpret all future events in a way that everyone else in the world must agree with. And if they don't, they can go straight to hell."
The Asia Times' Ahmad Faruqui provides an excellent analysis of the rise of neoconservatism and neoconservatism in his piece "Battle for the Soul of the American Republic." Particularly illuminating is the prospect that even Francis Fukuyama of "end of history" fame is arguing for imperial contraction and consolidation.
Recent events indicate the pre-war European schism may have a longer duration than many initially anticipated. Snide American diplomats and their ilk in the British Foreign Service predicted both Schroeder and Chirac would be on their needs upon the successful completion of the war, begging to re-enter the superficial amity of the Atlantic system. Russia, too, would fall in, it was speculated. The "big three" European leaders (Chirac, Schroeder, and Putin), however, mounted this week an improbable rejection of the current Atlantic order. The troika would demand its loans to Iraq paid back in full, and Russia, during a meeting between President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Tony Blair, went so far as to demand the entry of UN weapons inspectors for independent varification of alleged Iraqi weapons caches, in exhange for its lifting of sanctions on Iraq. The inception of a summit on unified European defence also caused considerable tensions between the Franco-German-Benelux "core Europe" and its peripheral fringes, which are traditionally opposed to attempts to "deepen" the European Union or move in a counterpolar direction, away from US policy dictations.
Traditionally, the European Union's strengthening has come from initiatives within the Franco-German axis, which, from the Elysée Treaty onward, has driven European integration. The idea of a central bank and unified currency had always been a German imperative; France sought expanded access to resources and markets. Together with Belgium and Luxembourg, they form the "Core Four" of the European Union represented at the defence summit. Once again, pragmatic reality dictates a European policy be tested in Europe's heart before its adoption by the remainder of the Union. A secret German document leaked to Sueddeutsche Zeitung contained plans for a Berlin-led effort to create a unified EU military by 2014, centrally commanded from Brussels and under a collective EU defence budget. In a way, this initial core commitment is greatly consistent with the EU's fundamental philosophies, that, especially, it is a consensual Union which entices prospective members (or, in this case, deepeners) with successful policies. More evident is the lack of coherent framework within the EU government in its pre-constitutional position to engage in such holistic debates. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the traditionally eurosceptical regions of the EU failed to represent themselves, especially after the row over Iraq. Nevertheless, the prospect of this "optional" summit on European defence drew fire from the Spanish Foreign Minister, Ana Palacio:
European security and defense policy cannot become an exclusive project. Any adventure [that sought to build a defence policy without the rest of the EU in agreement] would have no right to call itself European.
Despite widespread agreement on the need for a European defence framework, even by Britain, and the bolstering of a European Rapid Reaction Force to a size of 60,000, such initiatives were spurned by the pro-American governments of the UK and Italy as well. The defence guidelines drawn up between the UK and France at Le Touquet in January are seemingly scrapped. The perception is that the summit, including high profile members of the anti-war alliance, is meant to serve as a means to producing a counterpolar military force. This would not necessarily be a negative development, as discussed below, but those who interpret the summit in this way widely misinterpreted its intent. Indeed, American officials seemed to have little grasp of its intent (Colin Powell remarked that "four of the nations of the EU have come together and created some sort of a plan to develop some sort of a headquarters") to begin with. The heaviest criticism of the plan, that it was intended to create a force acting independently, rather than within NATO, should have been dampened by Franco-German efforts to curb Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt's enthusiasm for a totally independent force. They seem to have succeeded. Verhofstadt described the summit to the press as an attempt to strengthen NATO's "European pillar." Nevertheless Verhofstadt's longing for a non-allied counterpole seemed evident when he stated that:
If we want to count on the international scene, if we want to avoid division, which we experienced during the Iraq crisis, then it's absolutely necessary that we have European defence. Otherwise EU foreign policy is not credible.
However, Verhofstadt, Schroeder, Chirac, and Luxembourgeois Prime Minister Juncker issued a joint statement later during the summit stating that "the trans-Atlantic partnership remains an essential strategic priority for Europe." The essential disagreement, therefore, seemed to stem from the nature of that partnership. The statement seemed to highlight the "Core Four" perspective:
The time has come to take new steps in the construction of a Europe of security and defence based on strengthened European military capabilities, which will also give a new vitality to the Atlantic alliance.
Schroeder stated that what he "wanted to change" was that "In NATO, we do not have too much America, we have too little Europe." Charges that the proposed European Security and Defence Union (ESDU) was a redundant duplication of NATO were refuted by Chirac. "We have not decided to create a European SHAPE [Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe]. This is not about duplicating SHAPE, but eliminating duplication by national headquarters," he said. International organisations have been less sceptical of the summit. EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana described the summit initiative as "positive." The EU It was received warmly but somewhat apprehensively at NATO itself. The recommendations of the summit, many agree, correspond to European defence initiatives enthusiastically supported by the abstaining states prior to the Iraqi divide.
More overtly, the Putin-Blair meeting highlighted Russian strategy in attempting to counterbalance US power, as it had during the Cold War. Putin is motivated somewhat by domestic political concerns, which make it necessary for him to appear in a nationalist position. Echoing the popular consensus, Moskovskiy Komsomolets reported, rather sardonically, that "Blair will try to convince Putin of the obviousness of the new law of physics by which the world must be ruled by one force, from one centre - and to explain where this centre is located." Moscow publically rebuffed Blairite attempts to "woo" it into the Anglo-American fold. Putin openly mocked the ostensible justification for the Iraq war- the weapons of mass destruction, which have heretofore been undiscovered. He declared that Russia would not even allow sanctions to be lifted without the return of UN weapons inspectors, and that Russia would only consent to loan restructuring rather than any repudiation of Iraq's debt. From his position of strength, Putin declared:
If the decision-making process in such a framework is democratic then that is something we could agree with, but if decisions are being made by just one member of the international community and all the others are required to support them that is something we could not find acceptable.
This statement is virtually a clarion call for an multipolar international community. Putin had expressed earlier views that the imposition of the American system on the entirety of the world was untenable. "We have no intention of dealing in the export of capitalist democratic revolution," he said at the 14 April St. Petersburg summit of anti-war leaders. "If we proceed to do that, the world will embark on a very dangerous, slippery path of an unending chain of military conflicts."
The dramatic combination of the Putin-Blair meeting and the European defence summit indicated the divisions within Europe, and, indeed, the Atlantic alliance, remained, and that the powers continued to actively seek a counterpole to impede American hegemony. Tony Blair was acutely aware of this phenomenon when he warned of the implications of a new "cold war" between Europe and the United States. Blair posed a question to Europe- whether it would develop in concert with American interests, or if it would "rapidly become rival centres of power." Warning of the latter phenomenon, Blair ruminated:
If we do not deal with the world on the basis of partnership between Europe and America, we will in a sense put back into the world divisions we wanted to get rid of when the cold war finished. I think that would be a disaster.
Blair, like the "Core Four" of the ESDU summit, invokes the term "partnership." And yet, what king of partnership is so lopsided as to grant the ability for one partner to command another? Europe is frozen out of the decision making process in the Atlantic Alliance. Britain and other pro-war European powers gained next to nothing from their support of American activities- they merely followed in expected, obsequious lockstep. During the Cold War, the United States saw the need to enlist the assistance of Europe by treating its states as partners in containing the Soviet Union. It puts on no such pretenses today. To the neoconservative faction, the finale of the Soviet threat has allotted an unprecedented preponderance of military power to the United States, to which there are relatively few deterrents. Indeed, the nature of American imperial history itself suggests that, without limits to its power, the US will seek to overspread the earth with its value system. In North Korea, American rejections of a North Korean offer to scrap its nuclear arms programme in return for oil shipments, food aid, security guarantees, energy assistance, and economic incentives confirmed that the United States no longer negotiates, it commands.
Eisenhower once said that the world must become "a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect...one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength." Hence the importance of a counterpole becomes apparent. The United States will not pay attention to Europe so long as it presents no apparent economic or imperial challenge to American hegemony (indeed, US policy is geared toward preventing this from happening). Tony Blair's warnings of a "new cold war" seem overblown, so long as Europe is careful to build its counterpole under the auspices of the Atlantic Alliance and not beyond it. In this, Schroeder and Chirac made a wise choice in not heeding Verhofstadt's fantasy of an independent EU military.
Europe, however, should be careful not to overplay the military nature of its counterpole. George Kennan was always right when he said the real challenge posed by the Soviet Union was political and economic, not military. This alone made the USSR a force to reckon with in Washington. Maintaining relatively flexible, small forces within NATO is key to preventing the balance of power from becoming a contest of might. Arms races are beneficial to no one, and the goal, ultimately, is not move Europe away from friendly relations with the US, but to make it more relevant within that framework. The most important component should always be Europe's diplomatic and financial powers. These goals can ultimately be achieved by the Franco-German core alone, if necessary, as these states are the primary creditors of both the US and Iraq as well as preeminently influential in Africa and the Middle East. The counterpolar powers can continue to implore Russia to act in concert with them as well. Europe should not seek total independence, but a manifestation of the realities of codependence in the policies of both sides of the pond. By softly and gently constraining US aggression, Europe will not abandon the Atlantic Alliance, but move it in a direction ultimately more representative of the interests of all, and not one, of its member states.
For all the talk of the United States' openly entering a phase of empire with its invasion and conquest of Iraq, the recent imperialist gestalt is no radical shift in the American political spirit. Originally citizens of the early British Empire, Americans inherited its expansionist spirit, its sense of divine inspiration, and its mercantilist philosophies. It was seen as pure and open ground for the expression of such an imperialist impulse, observed as early as 1725, when George Berkeley, disenchanted with the state of British society, undertook a "civilising" project in Bermuda, and upon his return enthusiastically penned the verse "America":
...In happy Climes, where from the genial Sun
And virgin Earth such Scenes ensue,
The Force of Art by Nature seems outdone,
And fancied Beauties by the true:
There shall be sung another golden Age,
The rise of Empire and of Arts,
The Good and Great inspiring epic Rage,
The wisest Heads and noblest Hearts.
Not such as Europe breeds in her decay;
Such as she bred when fresh and young,
When heav'nly Flame did animate her Clay,
By future Poets shall be sung.
Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way;
The four first Acts already past,
A fifth shall close the Drama with the Day;
Time's noblest Offspring is the last.
The poem is remarkable for its insight into themes which have characterised the imperial élan of the United States. The ironic strain of the glorification of its natural state as making it "pure," while celebrating the Westward expansion and resultant destruction of the natural world endemic of empire-building is to the present day a feature of American society, in which large vehicles of high fuel consumptions are consistently advertised with backdrops of spectacular natural scenery. Berkeley's pastoral reference, especially to that of the "Golden Age," the classical myth of a time before agriculture of trade, when the world was seemingly a paradise of bounty, is present. The mythology of pastoralism has shifted, however, with the advances of society. Today, the family farm and the values of the agrarian "heartland" are extolled; agriculture being seen as an archaic circumstance. Nevertheless, this period of unspoiled simplicity is characterised as containing "the Good and Great," as well as "the wisest Heads and noblest Hearts," metonymic expressions of the agents of imperialism; the "pure spirits" of rusticity so lauded by Horace which today are echoed by the intonations of Midwestern and Southern politicians who "talk straight," in the parlance of the American interior. Furthermore, the condemnation of Europe as decadent is a theme clearly evident in contemporary America, as the condemnations of the Continent's two greatest powers continue to be espoused by jingoists. The deeper meanings of "Old Europe" and "New Europe" are hence unearthed by the dichotomy between the Continent's decay and the "fresh and young," representative of the American entrepreneurial spirit.
Berkeley's last stanza, his most famous, of course the inexorable drive of Empire to the West, the greatest imperial theme of all in American history. The belief was that the Aryan race, to which innumerable ethnicities have laid claim, originated in Central Asia and migrated to Europe, from which, in Berkeley's age, they would reach America. Berkeley, among many others, imagined it was this race's destiny to encircle the globe, repopulating it with its stock. Ordinary Americans, with the foundation of the Republic, had more benign, if equally destructive, premonitions. Residual elements of early European imperialism clung to the pioneers who saw it as their birthright to push ever westward to the Pacific- the virtue of manly brawn was trumpeted above all, followed by a missionary zeal. When the British had issued the Proclamation of 1763, declaring a settlement boundary in order to appease native populations on the opposite side of the Appalachians, the Americans were apoplectic. Even more egregious, to them, was the passage of the Québec Act in Parliament, annexing much of what is now the Midwest to Québec and declaring Catholicism the official religion of the region. Anger at this concession to "the Popist French," the traditional enemies of New England and New York, and the prohibition on seeking new territory upon which to profit and Christianise were primary contributing factors in the rebellion against Britain. The end of the War of 1812 had brought an upsurge of nationalist sentiment which was further catalysed with the virtual eradication of land ownership priveleges in order to gain voting rights- the principles of Jacksonianism. Having decamped from Europe, in which many had been disdained minority elements of society, and subsequently gained a share of power through universal white male suffrage, they inferred the absolute superiority of their system, especially as evidenced by the "victories" of 1783 and 1814.
Advent of Manifest Destiny
The mélange of commercial and religious interests which drove American expansionism was compounded in the 1840s with the sense that Americanism was the destiny of the Western Hemisphere. As Native Americans were removed through either systematic genocide committed by military forces, biological warfare in the form of smallpox-covered blankets, or forcible transplantation to the tentative "Indian Territory" of Oklahoma, the cycle of success seemed to confirm God's blessing of the American nation. It was a cyclical prophecy, that American success confirmed the perfection of Americanism, but it continues to this day, in which the subjugation of Iraq is celebrated as if achieved by a divine miracle rather than superior technological and numerical force. John O'Sullivan proclaimed, in 1845:
Our manifest destiny is to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.
This was a testiment to the philosophy of Manifest Destiny, now in full swing, which embodied all the contributing factors of traditional aggressive American expansionism into one simple formula of jingoist fundamentalism. That the ideals of the American revolution would oversweep the Hemisphere was ordained by Providence itself. The country had taken its first step toward eliminating rivals by proclaiming the Monroe Doctrine, forbidding European imperial presence on the soils of the American half of the planet. The Monroe Doctrine had always been difficult to take seriously, however, as it was evident the United States did not have the power, until 1943 at least, to stave of an intervention in Central or South America by a major European empire. The doctrine was thus high on rhetoric and low on tangible enforcement capability. In 1845, with Texas having successfully revolted from Mexico and European forces capitualating to revolutions in South America, Manifest Destiny seemed assured. The tenuous nature of the new American republics, however, became clear when Britain seemed to have its sights on the potentially rich region of California. The President, James Polk, sent an envoy to Mexico to offer $25 million for all territory from California east. The Mexicans refused the offer. Polk then ordered a column of troops to the Rio Grande, then territory claimed jointly by the US and Mexico, anticipating a Mexican attack. When none came, citing unpaid debt claims and the snubbing of his envoy, Polk asked Congress for a declaration of war. Congress hesitated, but enthusiastically voted for war as soon as spurious reports came that the troops despatched had been attacked on American soil. Among the sceptics was a young congressman, Abraham Lincoln, incidentally, who believed the premises of the war false. Nevertheless, Mexican forces were routed by the US military, California was secured after an engineered rebellion among the territory's anglo-saxon population, and vast reaches of the continent were engulfed by the United States.
Limitations of Power
In Oregon, circumstances were different. A longstanding border dispute between the US and Britain would have erupted into war if not for the prudent observation that the US was best off not engaging powerful Britain, especially at the same time as it was fighting Mexico. A diplomatic settlement was reached. Henceforth, the United States would seek expansion only where it perceived imminent and obvious limits to its capacity for military victory. In 1821, John Quincy Adams, in what has onward been referred to as a polemic against expansion in the name of exporting the values of the American revolution, stated:
Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.
She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force...She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit...
[America's] glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her Declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice.
However, one may sense the overtones of frustration in Adams' famous words. In them are a combination of several impulses running contrary to the expansionist spirit in American history, but, more importantly, the sense that involvement in imperial ventures in order to remake the world in America's image is not a matter of philosophy, but its inability to engage in affairs "beyond the power of extrication." The founding rathers routinely denounced intervention in outside conflicts; George Washington advising to not engage in "foreign entanglements." Prior to 1991, concerns about a lack of sufficient power overwhelmed attempts to involve the United States in any outside conflict in which it was equally matched. The American ideal of bringing the "light" of "freedom" to the entirety of the world was thus dampened by the pragmatic reason of the founders, whose philosophies extended from those of the Enlightenment.
Still, Adams' rhetoric intones several noteworthy principles as inherent to Americans as expansionism. The first is isolationism. The initial colonists came to the American continent seeking a seemingly paradoxical mixture of conquest and refuge. There has, therefore, always been a rather introspective aspect of the United States which has lent itself to some notable aspects of its imperial ventures, those being its inability to maintain a long presence in its newfound possessions and its lack of zeal for the acquisition of new cultural knowledge. Aspects of the British Empire which contributed to its success vis-a-vis American ventures were its educated incorporation of local customs and its determination to leave an imperial administration in place as long as necessary to produce (in theory) a self-governing state. Americans consistently shun the desire to understand the world outside their self-contained cultural apparatus, and its belovedness to them, being the only place they truly understand, belies their ability to venture abroad in order to seek the long-term project of nation-building in the imperial acquisitions. The second principle espoused by Adams was fear of militarism. The well-educated class of Americans at this time were schooled in Enlightenment principles derived from classical writings, and Adams was keenly aware of how imperial expansion had shaped Rome's transformation from republic to dictatorship and, finally, empire. He also felt jockeying for territory with the extant European powers, no matter the motive, would inevitably inspire the same greed-driven machinations as those formulated in contemporary European capitals, and hence the character of the Republic would be permutated. In short, Adams feared the values of the United States could not be sustained while simultaneously crusading for those same values abroad. Today we see this reflected in the erosion of civil liberties while the American military engages the fulfillment of neoconservative ideological dogma. The fear of the effects of military power on the republic retarded the growth of the nation's military for nearly a century- from Jefferson's refusal to build a strong navy to the lack of a standing army throughout most of the 19th century. The third and final principle expressed by Adams was the "City on a Hill" philosophy, first formulated by John Winthrop, the early Massachusetts Puritan, who decreed that his newfounded town, Boston, should become a "city on a hill, an example for all the world." This sentiment was one of "leading by example," whereby the United States concentrated all efforts on improving itself internally in the hope it would inspire others to emulate its achievements. These fundamentally anti-imperialist strains in American culture would manifest themselves continually whenever imperial exploits grew sour.
The Sectional Struggle Propels Imperialism
As the interior struggle over the character of the American republic grew more incisive in the years prior to the Civil War, Southern slaveholding interests propelled imperialist ambitions. Southern motivation for expansion was fueled by congressional representation. Barred by compromises from creating new slave-states in the territories seized in the Mexican War, they would need to look elsewhere in order to forge the new states needed to balance northern influence in the Senate. As commercial interests began to explore the possibilities of obtaining a Central American nation as a canal route to gold-rich California and the islands on its approaches, some Southerners seized the initiative, especially William Walker, an independent adventurer who seized power in Nicaragua, proposed site of a canal, and promptly legalised slavery. President Pierce refused to recognise this action, and Walker was deposed by a Central American alliance. The prospect of an inter-oceanic canal piqued British interests as well, and the potential canalhead at Greytown was seized by British troops, an apparent violation of the Monroe Doctrine. Nevertheless, without the means to fight a fullscale war with Britain, the US was forced to sign a treaty in which either side swore not to seize exclusive control of an isthmian canal. America's new Pacific coastline was now propelling its commercial interests in Asia, and in 1853 Commodore Matthew Perry was despatched to force Japan open to trade through gunboat diplomacy. The Pierce administration, acting for Southern interests, made several covert attempts to seize Cuba as slave territory, as well. Pierce theorised that the US could exploit European divisions during the Crimean War, and therefore posing a direct challenge to a European imperial interest would go relatively unnoticed. The exposure of his schemes in the anti-slavery north, however, put a temporary end to the coveting of Cuba.
Imperialist Interpretation of the Civil War
Seemingly an interior struggle, the Civil War which erupted in the United States in the 1860s became as much about the preservation of American unity, or societal absolutism. Lincoln was, professionally, quite pragmatic about the slavery issue, which he saw personally as a moral abomination. The secession of the majority of slave states, however, was seemingly intolerable. Lincoln moved to facilitate a war in which the North's industrial might would squash the agrarian slave system of the South and reimpose Northern hegemony. The fact was that the Civil War was an imperialist venture. The South was an economic colony of the North, its wageless labour earning huge dividends for the manufacturers in free states who capitalised on it. While aristocratic pretentions did dominate the South, the lethal addiction to a slave-based cotton economy could have been eased by economic diversification or at least the easing of tariff rates. Because of the implementation of protectionist policies for Northern industries, however, and the ideological conviction at the time that the government should not become involved in structuring any degree of economic planning, the South remained lashed to Northern manufacturing and this wreaked economic mayhem on the region- preventing the formation of competitive Northern industry as well as providing an impetus for secession. With the Civil War came the imposition, eventually, of Military Reconstruction, a crude system by which Southern states were ruled by the edicts of Northern generals. Eventually a slightly improved, yet still exploitative sharecropping regime emerged in the South, appeasing both Northern industrialists and moral absolutist abolitionists. Ostensibly, the slaves had been "freed," but they remained lashed to Northern capitalist imperialism until demographic shifts in the South made the sharecropping economy irrelevant and social programmes could bolster the economic fortunes of the region's blacks and poor whites. Prior to the boom of the "Sunbelt," efforts to improve the regional economy through government investment, notably with the Tennessee Valley Authority projects during the New Deal, were fought vigourously by business interests.
By No Other Name
Late 19th century European imperialism made a big mark on the United States. Among the Western powers and Japan was the suspicion each would overtake the other without the application of aggressive expansion to pre-empt seizure of territories and resources by rivals. At the same time, a wave of economic globalisation, propelled by major advances in communications and transport technology, was sweeping the industrial states, broadening the outside view of the United States. Suddenly, foreign markets and the competition for access to them was more important than ever before, especially considering the period of languid introspection which characterised the post-Civil War decades. Additionally, the "closing of the frontier," caused Americans to fear the degredation of their "national character," which some felt was shaped by the Western pioneer spirit. This required an outlet, which was, naturally, outside the realm of the current 48 states. These factors, combined with a sweeping pre-Progressivist religious revival, the growing acceptibility of the theory of Social Darwinism, and the rise of corporate-controlled media (with manipulated perspectives meant to skew inclinations toward the profit interests of the owners) fueled a period of unprecedented overseas imperial expansion.
This new period of imperialism would assert itself both militarily and economically. As the period opened, American war planners, as well as those in the ascendent imperial powers of Germany and Japan, eagerly consumed Alfred T. Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power upon History, and the pre-First World War naval race ensued. Furthermore, the US pursued a "Big Sister" policy in Latin America, seeking to pry open markets which could thus be dominated by American industries (the policy continues to this day, with the advent of the Free Trade Area of the Americas). The national mood was such that the US risked wars with Germany, Italy, Chile, and Canada over extremely insigificant disputes, all within the span of a few years. The United States was able to extract dividends from the European arms race, however, by implicating Britain in violation of the Monroe Doctrine while the British Empire fretted over German naval expansion. The British, the limits of their own power having been reached, capitualated, and formed the basis for the current Anglo-American relationship, at first determined by the British need for an ally against Germany.
The first truly aggressive action of the overt period of late-19th century imperialism was the seizure of Hawai'i. This came about initially as a result of independent migration, as had many of the United States' imperial conquests. As in Texas and California, anglo-saxons poured into Hawai'i in order to proslityse its natives and harvest its sugar. In 1890 white planters grew displeased with both tarrif barriers to American markets and the increasing hostility of Queen Liliuokaliani to anglo-saxon designs on the Hawai'ian government. The whites staged a revolt and were promptly assisted by American marines under the illegal direction of the US ambassador. However, President Cleveland, elected on a platform of "national honesty," spurned desires to annex the islands. In this, Cleveland's policy harkened back to the position of John Quincy Adams and his promotion of an embettered America as "guiding light" and fear of a military influence on society. Nevertheless, the popular mood incanted imperialism as a great leap forward.
Stealing from Spain
The most important development of the new imperial era, however, was the Spanish-American War, remarkable in its similarities to the United States' most recently-fought conflict in Iraq. A revolt in Cuba, incited due to economic difficulties arising from recently-raised American tariffs, broke out in 1895. Cleveland, with his anti-imperialist tendencies, would not intervene to prevent the loss of American investments or to free the Cuban insurrectionists from Spain. Nevertheless, the public demanded action. They were manipulated by the machinations of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, influential media barons who were the Rupert Murdochs of their day. Hearst's New York Journal particularly resembled Fox News in its drummed up, wildly exaggerated claims in justification of jingoist adventurism. Hearst steered his papers in the direction of his investments, attempting (unsuccessfully) to instigate a war against Mexico in the late 19th century in order to incorporate Mexican territory into the US and cash in on his holdings with the coming of a new settlement drive. His attempts to justify American action against Cuba included the despatching of reporters to Cuba to report on committed Spanish atrocities. When the reporters told Hearst the conditions were nowhere near atrocious enough to warrant armed intervention, he famously replied "you furnish the pictures, and I'll furnish the war." Such campaigns of disinformation by the money-interest media added a new aspect to the American imperial character- controlled ignorance.
The United States sent the battleship Maine to Havana harbour in order to evacuate Americans, if necessary, as violence mounted in Cuba. The Maine exploded due to (as finally ascertained in the 1970s) a mechanical malfunction. At the time, however, this was seen as a provocative action undertaken by Spanish operatives. Spain was molded by the lurid, jingoistic "yellow press" of Hearst and Pulitzer into the "Spanish Brute," a repressive imperial power whose prerogatives were the oppression of Cubans and slaughter of Americans. Though, ironically, fearing a war with Spain would cause economic unrest, President McKinley acceded to popular demands. Congress simultaneously adopted a war declaration and the Teller Amendment, by which the United States promised to grant "freedom" to the Cuban populace.
The war was greeted in the press as "Uncle Sam's Latest, Greatest, Shortest War" and by future Secretary of State John Hay as "our splendid little war." The opening of the war came as a surprise to anyone who truly considered American motives were associated solely with freeing Cubans or even avenging the Maine incident. Admiral John Dewey of the US Asiatic fleet was wired, sans authorisation, by Assistant Naval Secretary Theodore Roosevelt to immediately attack Manila Bay. Dewey did so decisively, obliterating the Spanish fleet, staving off German attempts at intervention and securing the Philippines as an American possession. American troops stormed Manila's defences with the assistance of Filippino insurgents under the leadership of Emilio Aguinaldo. The United States, having taken charge of a Far Eastern possession, postulated that Hawai'i would need to be permanently lashed to the US in order to serve as a way station in resupplying the new eastern Empire, and it was promptly annexed. Berkeley's lines rang true- the Americans were expanding their Empire into the Pacific, and thus fulfilling his ambition for a return of the anglo-saxon "Aryans" to Central Asia. American power-projection into the Pacific, which now included Samoa as well, was motivated more by the commercial interests of the influential San Francisco financial community than any particular philosophy, however (see Gary Brechin's Imperial San Francisco).
The American invasion of Cuba was confused but nevertheless successful, due to overwhelming American numerical superiority. In an act lacking any military necessity, the antiquated, inferior Spanish fleet, cornered by American warships, was totally destroyed, and five hundred Spaniards died as a result. American captains actually had to restrain their men from cheering at the massacre. Cuba surrendered, and the Americans descended on Puerto Rico and Guam as quick land grabs before the war could officially end. Thousands of American troops perished as the result of insensitivity to the climate, compared to a relative few from combat wounds.
Aftermath of Conquest
The dilemma for the United States, in pursuit of its imperial ambitions, has always been administration. One of the primary anti-imperial impulses of the American character, as illustrated by John Quincy Adams' sentiments above, is that of isolation and introspection as a nation. The outward projection of the American character is held to be inevitable and, hence, a burden to be undertaken by the "liberated" peoples. Americans prefer clearcut conflicts to their uncertain and volatile aftermaths, prefer to return to the "core" US when the "job" is complete. With the finale of the Spanish-American War, Americans were for the first time confronted with an Empire of nonwhite colonies. Internal subversion had brought Hawai'i into the American fold; yet it remained majority nonwhite. Occupied Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines were clearly dominated by non-anglo-saxons. Previously, American expansion had relied on genocide or transplantation to remove the Native Americans and restock their holdings with whites. However, this proved implausible in the new colonies, as they contained far larger populations inhabiting structured societies. Whereas prior colonisation would entail the eradication of a relatively uncared-for Native American tribe, such tactics would be indefensible in the recent acquisitions. Furthermore, the world was beginning to justify imperialism on the basis of beneficence- the bringing of "civilisation" to the aboriginals, rather than their replacement with "civilised" men.
The most decisive problem for the United States was the new colonial possession of the Philippines. McKinley felt his hands tied. Returning the islands to Spanish rule was not an option, nor was abandoning them, which, he feared, would lead to anarchy or seizure by another imperial power. As missionaries were waited eagerly for the opportunity to "Christianise" the Philippines, and financial interests initially sceptical to the war saw their opportunity to cash in, McKinley concluded American reign in Manila was the necessary policy. He embodied the traditional fusion of evangelism and commercialism inherent in the American imperial character when he expressed that "God directs us- perhaps it will pay."
The debate over imperialism commenced almost immediately after the islands had been seized. Rudyard Kipling, the unabashed champion of British imperial projects, quickly penned, in 1899, a verse to the United States, entitled "The White Man's Burden," which quickly became the defining poem on the imperial spirit. Kipling exhorted Americans to "civilise" the Philippines, as the European powers were doing elsewhere in the world. Kipling, however, appealed directly against natural American impulses. When he exhorted Americans to
Send forth the best ye breed-
Go send your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild
he ignored the historical inability of Americans to go forth as disciples of Americanism. Proconsulate positions were not sought in the United States as they were in Rome or Britain. Opponents of direct American administration of the Philippines were equally vocal. The Anti-Imperialist League, embodying the fear of militarist influence on the United States, promptly organised itself. William James, the philosophical father of the school of pragmatism, burst out that the US had "puke[d] up its ancient soul in five minutes without a wink of squeamishness." Indeed, the nature of the Filipino situation had propelled into the forefront an open debate on imperialism. Anti-imperialists saw the United States befallen to despotism at home and forced into confrontationism in the Far East.
The question of whether to grant the newly-conquered peoples of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba the rights guaranteed by the US Constitution was a contentions one. The US had already denied them their right to independence, as the anti-imperialists ardently affirmed. Would the possessions be incorporated into the American nation, as past territories had been, or governed in a new and different way. Divisions over the potential future independence of these lands, as well as a racist fear of millions of nonwhite American citizens fused to bring about the decisions of the Insular Cases, in which the Supreme Court ruled the conquests' fate was individually determinable by Congress.
With this newfound power, Congress decided to withdraw from Cuba, yet forced the Cubans to write the Platt Amendment into their constitution, ostensibly as a safeguard against European attempts at its conquest. The Platt Amendment allowed the US basing rights on the island, as well as forbidding Cuba to impair its independence by bilateral treaties or foreign debts. Most ominously, the Amendment allowed US troops to "intervene" in Cuba any time it deemed necessary.
In the Philippines, events were less auspicious. Frustration with the American occupation led Emilio Aguinaldo, the US' former ally, to turn his imsurrection against their forces. A protracted guerilla war ensued on the islands, and American frustration with the Filipinos' unconventional tactics led to the application of torture and the incarcertation in concentration camps of insurgents. Echoing the introspective American attitude, US soldiers spoke of the guerillas:
Civilise 'em with a Krag [rifle]
And return us to our beloved homes
The savagely-repressed rebellion against the US cost 600,000 lives. Aguinaldo was eventually captured and the war declared complete, though the fighting continued sporadically. In the intervening period McKinley appointed William Taft the administrator of the territory. Taft embraced the locals with a patronising Kiplingesque spirit, calling them his "little brown brothers" and declaring a policy of "benevolent assimilation." Though the economic, infrastructural, educational, and sanitation conditions in the Philippines improved dramatically, the population remained hostile to what was a foreign occupation, especially to assimilation policies designed to cram Americanism down their throats. Kipling seemed eerily prophetic, especially the stanza of his poem reading:
Take up the White Man’s burden-
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard
The election of 1900 is mythologised as the contest over imperialism. McKinley squared off against populist agrarian William Jennings Bryan, who espoused common and familiar principles on the future state of the republic should it continue to pursue an imperial stature. At a campaign stop in Kansas City he proclaimed:
Behold a republic standing erect while empires all around are bowed beneath the weight of their own armaments--a republic whose flag is loved while other flags are only feared.
Bryan thus openly espoused both the "City on a Hill" and "fear of militarism" arguments of traditional American anti-imperialism. Furthermore, the Democratic National Platform of 1900 embodied the fear of a despotic regime seizing power in an imperial state:
We assert that no nation can long endure half republic and half empire, and we warn the American people that imperialism abroad will lead quickly and inevitably to despotism at home.
McKinley's election victory, however, was no mandate for imperialist policies (elections, even landslides, are rarely mandates for any specific policy). American voters, clinging to their introspective tendencies, focused more on economic issues, for which Bryan lost in 1896 as well. Furthermore, most of Bryan's traditional constituency in the agrarian west was either apathetic or ignorant to imperialism. Many wondered what effect it could possibly have on the price of wheat.
The period of 1896-1901 propelled the US into an unprecedented extension of its imperial ambitions. Most remarkable, however, were the causes and effects of the Spanish Civil War and their relation to the latent occurrences in Iraq. The spurious nature of the Maine attack was for the America of 1898 much as 11 September was for the America of 2001- an open invitation to warfare. In both cases, the United States used the occurrences as justifications for attacks on nations which had nothing to do with them (though, admittedly, the true cause of the Maine incident was incognito in 1898). Both wars were fomented by a jingo-media, and both resulted in de facto occupations of foreign territory with no evident plan for its future. In Iraq, the Shi'ite population is nearing open rebellion- will it be a repeat of the bloody Philippines revolt? The histories of the three major territories grabbed by the US in the Spanish-American War going forward from 1900 do not bode well for optimists who believe Iraq has been delivered into the light of Truth, Freedom, and Democracy, especially considering the many greater variables the occupation of Iraq entails.
Big Stick and Progressive Imperialism
Theodore Roosevelt, propelled to the presidency in 1901 with the assassination of McKinley, was among the United States' most unabashed imperialists. He saw the supremacy of the state as paramount in maintaining what he saw as the supreme vitue- virility. His untrammeled sense of adventurism embodied this belief and dragged along with it the US. Shortly before his takeover of the presidency, however, the United States became involved in the imperial subjugation of China. John Hay, Secretary of State during the McKinley administration, wedged Chinese markets open through a series of circular "Open Door" notes, in the hope that such markets would not be closed to the US through competitive European imperial operations. In 1900, the Chinese Boxer Rebellion against imperial interests prompted a response among the imperial powers. A multinational coalition crushed the uprising, and American troops lent a contribution in order to gain concessions for the Open Door policy.
Roosevelt's mantra was to "speak softly and carry a big stick," by which was implied that American diplomatic demands had to be backed by force. This doctrine was first employed in Panama, where a conspiracy among canal speculators fomented a revolt against Colombian rule. American forces intervened in favour of the Panamanians and set up a puppet state in order to build a canal more cheaply than what would have been otherwise required to appease the Colombian senate. Roosevelt felt he had a "mandate from civilisation" -a term very much like Manifest Destiny- to build the canal, at any cost.
Rooseveltian policy toward Latin America was coherently expressed in what is called the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. This stated that, if a Latin American republic was in a financially dire situation, the US would intervene in order to prevent a takeover from creditor nations (i.e., European empires). Ergo, Latin America would be, in the imperial race, the exclusive property of the United States. The doctrine was essentially a preemptive one, and further opened Central and South America to US exploitation.
Under President Taft the lockstep march of empire to commercial interests received a name: dollar diplomacy, the principle that US troops should follow its investments and its investments made to corollate to foreign policy. Dollar diplomacy was repudiated by the progressive President Wilson, who espoused an idealistic foreign policy stance. However, he was forced to re-invoke the Roosevelt Corollary when American property was at stake in Central America and the Caribbean. Between 1900 and 1925, US troops intervened thrice in Cuba, thrice in Nicaragua, once each in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Panama, and Honduras. Additionally, the US placed the governments of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua under its control by announcing "financial supervision" and seizing control of their treasuries. Espousing a politics of fundamentalist Americanism for Latin America, Wilson declared "I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men," and took measures to support a rebellion against the revolutionary leader of Mexico, General Huerta. When his government was toppled, Pancho Villa emerged as a rival to the new government of Venustiano Carranza and menaced American territory. An expedition was sent into Mexican territory and essentially fought both sides. The implication was that Mexico would be kept under the American thumb.
When the First World War broke out, American commercial interests were immediately at stake. The US had become a major trading partner of Britain and France, and a German victory was seen as unaffordable, not to mention an affront to the balance of power which accorded America greater influence. The war, however, was sold, through various overt propaganda mechanisms like the Committee on Public Information, as a fight for democracy, a war against tyrrany, etc. Wilson needed to appeal to such a crusade to remake the world in order to invigourate the American imperial spirit- passions for war could be stirred up in the name of a such a grand, if ultimately apocryphal, cause. Wilson therefore devised the Fourteen Points, whereby he espoused the need, above all, for "self-determination" in Europe, the creation of democracies in the American image. Wilson's championing of collective security and international law was ultimately futile, however, as the American Congress, invoking imperial trappings, argued against the submission of the United States, with its uniquely "holy" message, to suspect international organisations. It was no accident that Henry Cabot Lodge, the primary opponent of the League of Nations, was an impassioned imperialist. By the 1920s, it was clear that the League had "redistributed" colonial territory into the hands of the victorious allies, that it would be ineffectual without the United States, which considered its imperial destiny above the shackles of law, that the Weimar Republic in Germany was considered a sham imposed by American demands, and that the "republics" carved out of Central and Eastern Europe were gradually becoming totalitarian states. In his 1921 inauguration speech, Warren Harding proclaimed a "return to normalcy," ending the interventionist/internationalist period with a reassuring resurgence of isolationism. Through the 1920s, American policy stressed an idealistic commitment against war, epitomised in the Kellogg-Briand Pact purportedly outlawing the institution. US policy also stressed a maintenance of its rising supremacy through the series of naval power treaties signed to fix naval ratios. A bit of the crusading spirit was evident in the expeditionary force sent to Russia to fight for the anti-communist Whites during its civil war, but antipathy with militarism following the First World War dampened the American commitment to this cause.
The Cold War: Jockeying for Power
Americans only support imperial ambitions when they lead to the spread of Americanism. Therefore, fascist and imperial Japanese aggression in the 1930s was seen as inimical to American interests. Anti-isolationists reviewing this period in American history often remark that there was an innate danger posed by the rise of new imperial rivals with ideologies contrasting that of the Anglo-French-American axis. Owing to the experience of the First World War, however, Americans were unwilling to engage in open warfare with these powers. To the isolationists, however, the US was dragged into the war by imperial overreach. Vast distances and long naval supply lined crippled American defences in the Philippines and Hawai'i. The British Empire suffered the same issues in its Asian colonies. Nevertheless, the Second World War for the United States had several imperial objectives: protecting its extant imperial holdings, especially the Philippines and Hawai'i, preventing the rise of competitive imperial powers, and maintaining is primary export markets (once again, the French and British Empires).
The end of the war put the United States in its greatest position of power, and yet it was challenged by an opposing superpower, the Soviet Union. While Soviet propaganda ranted about the nature of American imperialism, the USSR itself was undeniably an imperialist state, seeking the exportation of its revolution and believing in the inevitable victory of its cause much in the same way the United States had. The Cold War was essentially an imperial jockeying for power, much like the "Great Game" played in Central Asia for the mastery of Afghanistan between Britain and Russia throughout the 19th century. The two powers alternately sponsored various groups to fight revolutions and counterrevolutions against each other. The specifics are ultimately too various to be recounted here, but in almost every case proxy wars were fought between the American imperial vision of a world filled with liberal democracies quiescant to American economic systems, and the Soviet vision of a world united under its leadership and employing Soviet economic systems.
The United States began to realise its vision could not be achieved through coercion or intimidation alone. It required partnership, respect, and cooperation among its allies in pursuit of its dreamworld, one Americanised by consent. This led to the creation of such international organisations as the UN, NATO, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organisation. However, the United States perceived a conjoined alliance against Soviet expansion as an affirmation of the inevitably supremacy of Americanism. The people, it was thought, would elect Manifest Destiny, unless somehow prevented by communist subversion. European agitation against continuing American troop presence and occasionally intemperate flare-ups provoked by the more adventurous presidential administrations went relatively unnoticed in terms of policy changes and even such dramatic events as DeGaulle's departure from NATO in 1966 were not seen as augering increased transatlantic tensions if the common cause of the Cold War were to end. Simply put, the US was blinded by its triumphalism in those regions which it did "control," as it perceived a dualist world with only relative variation.
The temptation during the Cold War was always to use American military strength to engage the Soviet Union and "roll it back," therefore "liberating" its citizenry and making the world safe for supreme Americanism. This, however, would have required military spending levels few were willing to bear. In 1961, when fantasies of a military victory over the Soviet Union still persisted, President Eisenhower delivered his famous farewell speech, in which he appealed to classic anti-imperialist themes in American history:
Understandably proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.
Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.
Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.
Eisenhower thus denounced militarism, as the anti-imperialists of the fin de sielce period and John Quincy Adams had, as being poison for the endurance of the values of the republic. Eisenhower phrased this, however, in more pragmatic terms; he saw the tremendous budgetary burden of a heavily-armed military as incompatible with American quality of life. It would require extreme rates of taxation, something his conservative administration was unwilling to allow, but also would contribute little in return to the economy. Ergo Eisenhower also recognised the power of the "City on a Hill" appeal.
However, Eisenhower refused to abide by the spirit of isolationism. Though his administration resembled Harding's in its pledge of "politics of tranquility," it was not one to enshrine isolationism, as Eisenhower was keenly aware of the lessons of the 1930s. He saw, however, the need for cooperation rather than imposition. It was therefore why he saw the importance of a "proud confederation of mutual trust and respect" in which "the weakest come with the same confidence as do we." Of warfare to achieve American interests, Eisenhower only predicted "certain agony." Observant of the natural limits of American power and therefore a champion of internationalist cooperation, Eisenhower was willing to condemn Britain and France for their actions in the Suez as unilateral power-mongering, and ended the improbable war in Korea with a victory only for its initial UN mandate. Eisenhower was not without his faults in this regard, however. The 1957 Eisenhower Doctrine proclaimed the right to unilateral intervention to protect American interests in the Mideast, and was employed in Lebanon the following year.
Enforcing the End of History
With the end of the Cold War came what was perceived to be unchallenged American might. The few holdouts against the American official or unofficial empires were to be isolated or contained. When they had finally been defeated, neoconservative triumphalists gloated, it would constitute the "end of history," in which all ideologies- fascism, communism, socialism, would bow down to the supremacy of the American system. The empire will have conquered the earth.
The reality was far different. The end of the cold war has exposed innumerable divisions in the once unshakeable American alliance network. The imperial order has been defied by an increasingly powerful and unifying Continental Europe, especially its core states, France and Germany. China has emerged as a major competitor as it morphed from a Maoist to a simple totalitarian capitalist state. As has been especially evident, bands of individuals disenchanted with the emerging New World Order have formed international terrorist organisations. In more benign situations, disillusionment with the American-imposed neoliberal economic order has caused a resurgency in Leftist politics in Latin America and elsewhere. These groups prove especially frustrating to the American establishment, built as it is with "overwhelming power," but only truly overwhelming conventional military power, capable of engagement with nation-states and not highly manoeuvrable anti-imperial rebels.
The neoconservative faction, frustrated with the disappearance of the mirage of total imperial dominance, have now advocated armed intervention to remake the world in the image of America- nothing really new, as the above demonstrates, but a radical departure onto a traditional imperialist agenda from what was becoming a world emerging with diverse views but still willingness for partnership with the United States.
There are those who feel the instability and inequality of the world cry out for a Pax Americana of security and Americanisation. Yet they grossly ignore the factors which led to the current global order, namely, resistance to the imperial order itself. Furthermore, the traditional limitations on American imperial policy refute the arguments of Max Boot that the world needs "the enlightened administration of jodhpurs and pith helmets," provided by Americans. This is argued cogently by pro- (though, only of the Britannic persuasion) imperialist Niall Ferguson, in his New York Times Magazine article.
Still, Americans feel it is their special creed to bring the greatness of Americanism to the world, tolerating few deviations. They are driven by the same missionary zeal and commercialist philosophies, though today those assert that economic imperialism is just and benign "globalisation." It is not just the perceived gift of the principles of the Revolution to the world, but a measure of more archaic influences as well, relics of virtually prehistoric European ideas, and certainly what Nietzsche would call "the morality of power," though often with more conciliatory justifications. After periods of prolonged frustration Americans are usually ready to slink back into isolationism, and improving their own society as an example to others. When they emerge from these tranquil yet fatally withdrawn periods, it is often in the name of not only the security of that idyllic serenity, but the belief that by bringing its core values to the rest of the world, they, too, will desire nothing but peaceful conformity with the ways of America. For such sweeping philosophical conceptions of empire alone will Americans shed their blood.
The Blood Orgasm of Peace Reflections on the Condition of American Society
Cities and towns across the United States exulted. America had conquered Iraq, the perpetual thorn in the side of their triumphalist empire, one in a handful of states labelled, by the boy-emperor, the "axis of evil." With the Forces of Evil nearly vanquished, the Forces of Wholesome Goodness could thus stream forth, spilling organs spasming with latent nervous impulses onto streets flooded with bodily effluvia. The rigid stare of the contemporary Ozymandias was dragged eye to eye with the Tigris, running deep red. Days later the citizens of the United States proposed a day by which they would support their agents of imperial bile-lust by silently sporting red garments. Of the tricoloured American standard, one shade now ruled supreme. Old Glory's stripes pierced the restless Mideast sands and the scarlet stains gurgled past the shells of cluster-bombed mosques.
Wide-eyed with the visceral emotion of this transcendent moment the high priests pontificated from the pulpit of Fox News, aching for the demonstration of the latest ordinance on Mohammedan flesh. A nation so replete with historical ignorance and creative drought was bound, eventually, to abandon the intellectual and rhetorical difficulties of high diplomacy for the simple duality of war, bringing collective cause to a people whose groupthink would otherwise be engaged in the dangerous realisation that the underpinnings of their economy had become precariously loose. Only a war would fixate this hyper-assimilated mass of television-slaves on something other than their declining compensation for supplicating themselves before the high altar of laissez-faire power-mongering. Only a war would foster a new outlet for the preachers bearing both Holy Crosses and Golden Arches to go forth and quench the thirst of rapacious capitalism for the fuel of its incomparable excesses. Having deposed the CIA-installed turncoat Hussein, America's missionaries of mellifluous moral malapropisms reclined in the gilded seats of his most opulent residence, the new throne-masters. Add a mustachioed grimace and, like the pigs of Animal Farm, their laughter echoed their erstwhile enemy's, once again chilling the humid Mesopotamian air.
The bubbly was poured in the conference-rooms in Washington before the minarets of Baghdad were even consumed in the acrid pall of oil-fires, the most menacing defence of a state purportedly invaded for its threat to all human well-being. There, a band of Lionhearted Crusaders, whose brutal promulgations of "The Cross or the Sword" mirrored the archaic creed of their Saracen adversaries, extolled the news of conquests in the Near East. It was not long before they wondered whether their righteous acquisition could be used as a spring-board of rolling Godly thunder. Soon Assad of Damascus' head could be rammed through with a pike and paraded down the overwhelming thoroughfares of the War Capital, passing monuments to the massacres on which the blood-empire was built, passing columns raised by half-naked three-fifths men without three-fifths votes whose only sin was their skin colour. The fortresses of the Levant would once again bow to the true, venegeful God, the God of mercy and compassion to all wealthy white males. Soon the Parthians who for long and long-forgotten months brought as much shame to the American Empire as it had to the city by the Tiber would have the selfless gift of good old-fashioned Shah freedom rammed up their anuses before they could leapfrog into newly-Christianised Warlordistan.
The Left came up with a clever word for the spillage of brain-matter in puddles of stomach acid. They called it "liberation," and eagerly tuned into the propaganda feeds to await whether the skull-piles gathered by their Forces of Freedom would exceed those of their atrocious neo-Pol Pot, whether their aghast expressions during the looting of precious Iraqi antiquities would be vindicated by seen-and-be seen exposition of the very same artefacts the next spring at the British Museum or the Met. When the stylised iconography of Ba'athist stability came crashing down they lauded the coming of Liberty, Equality, and Freedom to the boiling cauldron of millenia-old ethnic scalp-famine to the excrement of the Versailles Treaty cartography project, in which the victorious allies of the war against the barbaric Hun celebrated their victory over the rapists of Belgium by carving the Ottoman Empire into pie-chart representations of their percentage of men dead in the war to "make the world safe for democracy" and their resulting share in the region's glistening black gold. The valiant Armada of Light has rescued Iraq from its odious dark cloud of totalitarian oppression, and delivered it into the odious dark cloud of open rebellion, internecine warfare, intra-ethnic factionism, regional power-struggle, anarchic chaos, and, eventually, the return of totalitarian oppression to put the lid back on Pandora's Box. None of this matters to the Left, however. CNN and the New York Times will be covering the next sequence in the Wars of Perfection and Happiness by the time any of this happens. Afghanistan? Where's that?
Leading the way were a pack of disillusioned Trotskyites, warrior social-democrats who cheerfully amputated the limbs of the freedom- baseball- apple pie- and America-loving peoples of Iraq in order to redistribute its nationalised-oil hoard to the fossil-barons of Texas, where the human rights record is nearly as bright and shiny as in slave-happy Mauritania. Nightly they their tirades about the need to look down at the inferior, backward, 12th-century culture of the Middle East through a gun turret and blast the Compassionately Conservative message of "democratise (our way) or die!" in the form of depleted-uranium shells inspired flag-clutching members of the Francophobe warrior caste to prance around their trailer parks with glee. They remarked with pride that the neon-illuminated board beneath the hundred-foot high Denny's sign along the interstate declared that they supported their troops in their fight for the freedom to brutalise, incinerate, maul, and plunder a sanctions-cripped Third-World nothing of a state with a force exceeding the might of the seventeen other largest militaries combined. If they didn't, apparently, the Saddamite gestapo would descend on the American heartland and brownskinned mongrels would impregnate the prettiest blonde on every cul-du-sac. Shifting justifications didn't matter, it was all fluff to explain the True Cause to the inexorably suspect intelligensia anyway. Real Americans knew that Saddam was a bad, bad, man, as had obviously been revealed to their Christ-like Commander in Chief by a divinely Burning Sagebush one night while wandering for forty minutes in the arid expanses of Crawford.
Just to remind anyone who dared deviate from the reverent, obsequious awe every American was required to display toward Reich, Volk, and Führer, the Imperial Ministry of Homeland Security was established to ensure that any potentially subversive Mohammedan was made an example of. An incessant flow of insults were broadcast over the propaganda webs. Flags appeared on every automobile, the sizes of which were proportionate to one's fear of being mislabeled an enemy of the state. Successive PATRIOT Acts gave a pinch of in-your-face irony to the total erosion of civil liberties. Those who failed to "love freedom" were pilloried. The forcible trying of civilians in military courts was the cherry-on-top of the coup d'etat of a presidential administration orchestrated into existence by a self-appointed Politburo of Supreme Court Justices. Congress abdictated all effective power, noting that a time of crisis for freedom required the absolute erasure of democratic representation. The entire country was overjoyed when reassured by the rhetoric of the boy-emperor, whose performances could easily be outshone by a seven-year-old school dropout. They had to be, lest the undercover squadron of counterrevolutionary operatives employed by the Office of Total Information Awareness snared them. Thousands of shoes were removed, lest more planes collide with skyscrapers. Mall security forces from Butte Flats, Idaho to Pithoe, Georgia clamped down, expelling such perilous elements as men wearing peace t-shirts and fearing a co-ordinated Islamic fundamentalist attack on puny Midwestern shopping centres. Americans were commanded to buy duct tape and plastic sheeting so they might suffocate in the event of a terrorist attack. Sometimes the only means to freedom is suicide. Failure to comply, of course, represented support for Saddam Noriega Milosevic Satan Hitler bin Laden.
Woe be unto he who was on the list of those in the State Department accused, in prime McCarthyist style by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, of undermining the president and carrying out such heinous crimes as diplomacy! Going forward, America's diplomacy shall be the cruise missile, its embassies supercarriers, its international organisations coalitions of those diamond-war torn, Third World starvation-zones which could not afford the loss of foreign aid. If the UN doesn't authorise the Glorious Blitzkrieg of Forced Americanisation it is irrelevant! If Europeans fail to roll over and accede to American might they're all noxious appeasers! Should France stand in the way, they're all Saddam-loving terrorists! Only through the application of genocidal force will the United States pursue its Manifest Destiny and erupt in ejaculatory elysium; a blood orgasm of peace.
