Foreign policy experts are lately using the word “empire” when criticizing the global aspirations of US President George W. Bush. They worry that the United States has ceased being a democratic republic and is now embarked on a dangerous expansion of its political, military and economic interests overseas.

Americans are generally discomforted with the idea that the US presence overseas is an empire. It is at odds with the idealized view that America is a peace-loving republic uninterested in exploiting other nations.

Yet American empire succinctly defines the reality of America’s global dominance. Whether under the pretext of fighting communism or international terror, the United States has expanded its own economic and political power — usually at great cost to global stability and its own prosperity.

But is the United States truly embarked on a new path toward a New American Empire? Or is it simply staying a course of global expansion established by Bush’s presidential forbearers?

A mere 227 years ago, several visionary British-educated political intellectuals established the United States of America as a republic: a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

George Washington, the most sanguine among these so-called founding fathers, hoped to strike a balance between the big-money interests of the federalists (the Anglo-nostalgic predecessors of the Republican Party) and the small-farm, small-government interests of civil-libertarians (the genesis of the Democrats) led by Thomas Jefferson, a man who would eventually succeed Washington as the country’s third president.

But the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) destabilized this political balance. Jackson, a real estate speculator, merchant and slave trader, proved to be the most aggressive enemy of Native Americans in early US history: His drive for land and power became his predominant concern, and resulted in the relocation (or annihilation) of most Native Americans living east of the Mississippi River.

When President Abraham Lincoln assumed the White House (1861-1865), he organized the country into a Union — a move that precipitated a bloody four-year civil war. The product of this terrible conflict was a huge, industrialized monolithic power, the very antithesis of what Jefferson envisioned.

Over the next half-century, Lincoln’s successors, led by William McKinley (1897-1901) and Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909), transformed the United States from the republic conceived by the founding fathers into an aggressive empire.

The Monroe Doctrine — a southern-looking foreign policy created by President James Monroe (1817-1825) — had established the Caribbean and Latin American as an American sphere of influence. By the turn of the 20th century, the Monroe Doctrine would serve as a springboard for American foreign policy in Asia, rendering the Pacific Ocean into a vast pond solely for the use of the United States.

World War I was an essentially European conflict into which Woodrow Wilson chose to engage the US. When it ended in 1919, American emerged as a dominant economic power on the world stage.

But not even the United States could escape the great depression that hit developed countries in the late 1920s. Days after assuming office, President Franklin Roosevelt (1933-1945), created the New Deal, an economic recovery plan that, while attempting to redistribute some of America’s wealth, also significantly reshaped and expanded the federal government.

Following World War II, President Harry S. Truman (1945-1953) celebrated the absolute international dominance of the United States by creating a national security state whose underlying premise was that the Soviet Union was so great a menace that Americans must give up many of their freedoms to guard themselves permanently against this enemy — a policy redeployed 50 years later by President George W. Bush (2000- ) in response to the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Truman also transformed the temporary, wartime American intelligence agency known as the Office of Strategic Services into the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA’s mission was to counter and thwart the Soviet Union, whose strength was exaggerated by those for whom the Cold War was an economic and ideological boon.

During Truman’s tenure a huge wartime army was, for the first time in US history, left in place. As a result, America’s defense budget soared and became untouchable. This garrison state would last well into the 21st Century.

The Truman administration would also witness the first major East-West military encounter of the Cold War, the Korean conflict. Soon after, the United States would become mired in another unwinnable war in Asia: Vietnam.

Vietnam was a noxious trauma for America. Prior to Vietnam, the United States was able to feed its omnivorous appetite for wealth and economic power through a series of relatively successful conquests: from Andrew Jackson’s Indian Wars to the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War.

For the US, however, the war in Vietnam eventually became a military and political quagmire.

It was also during the Vietnam conflict that Gore Vidal, one of America’s most insightful and harshest foreign policy critics, first coined the term “American Empire.”

Gore Vidal’s latest book, Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta, accuses George W. Bush of using the 2003 invasion of Iraq to expand the American Empire in a manner that is unprecedented in its aggressiveness: “No matter how corrupt our system became over the past century,” Vidal writes, “we still held onto the constitution and the Bill of Rights. I never once believed I would see a day when a great people (like Americans) would be unopposed to an arbitrary and secret war.”

Vidal believes that “while we can certainly blame the oil and gas hustlers” for culpability in Gulf War II, there is a broader explanation for US involvement in the region. “Benjamin Franklin foresaw this day most clearly in 1787, when he was a delegate to the Constitution Convention in Philadelphia,” says Vidal, who spoke recently at the University of California at Los Angeles. “Though he favored adoption of the constitution, Franklin warned: ‘It might provide good government in the short term, and it may be a blessing to the people for a short while. Until the people become corrupted; and then it will only end in despotism.’”

Vidal is equally cautionary about American latest incursion into Iraq: “The old (American) republic is a shadow of itself, with a government that sees as its true enemy ‘We the People.’ We must persuade this most peculiar (presidential) administration that they are acting on their own and against the wishes of American people.”

Arab News Opinion 21 May 2003