Should the United States be called an empire, in the classical sense of the word, whose dominance invites resentment, hostility and opposition?
There has been a spate of books released this summer by sundry scholars, commentators and journalists that address themselves to that seminal issue.
Consider “Imperial Hubris” by “Anonymous,” identified by the publishers as a “senior US intelligence official,” whose thesis departs from the conventional wisdom that Islamists are offended by the American social system — its democratic freedoms, civil liberties and, say, co-ed universities. Rather, says Anonymous, these Islamists’ hostility derives simply from their concern over the devastating impact that specific American policies have had on their world.
The book that truly takes the US to task for its imperial posture is “Multitude,” co-authored by the two political philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who argue that people around the world, not just the Islamic world, resent America for arrogating itself the right to regroup the destiny of populations outside its borders, and equally American presidents who, while doing so, consider themselves accountable to no one but American voters.
“Soft power,” writes Joseph Nye, dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, in his book “The Paradox of American Power,” is a better option for the US, soft power being a great nation’s ability to influence events and effect change around the world through persuasion rather than coercion, where the reach of its cultural values, political ideals and social institutions act as a magnet for others.
The devil with that, says the British imperialist historian Niel Ferguson (yes, these folks still tread the earth), who publishes in the US and teaches at New York University. Since the UN has demonstrated its inability to police the world, he writes, and the US has emerged with no credible great power in sight to rival it, then America should show the world a bit of American steel. “What is required,” he adds, is a US “capable of intervening to depose tyrants, end local wars, and eradicate terrorists.”
An extremist view? You ain’t seen nothing yet from the unabashed right, not till you’ve read Michael Ingnatief’s book “The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror,” the lesser evil here being the pursuit of the “righteous path” to self-preservation by a big power, namely, the necessity of “pre-emptive war,” “targeted assassinations, “coercive interrogations,” and “indefinite imprisonment” of suspects without trial.
And what, you ask, is the background of this unrepentant fascist professor? He is (and hold on to your surreal hats) the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard!
Alas, the book by the one Arab-American contributor to the debate, “Resurrecting Empire,” about America’s “perilous path in the Middle East,” succeeds only in, well, resurrecting that old notion, popular in the Arab discourse in the 1960s, having to do with the collaborative link between American imperialism, Arab reactionism and Israeli Zionism.
In the end, there’s only one book out this summer — insightful, penetrating, readable and upfront — that tells it the way it is, and that book would be “Pretext for War,” by the well-known investigative journalist James Bamford. Look, he says simply, the Bush administration’s Middle East policy decisions, driven by the ideological beliefs and imperial goals of the neoconservative elite inside and outside the government, have alienated much of the Arab and Islamic worlds.
So, finally, has the US become an empire, not unlike other empires in history?
It has become just that, writes Eliot Cohn in a piece, titled “The Burdens of Empire,” in the current issue of Foreign Affairs: “This idea gained immediacy when US soldiers trod in the footsteps of Alexander the Great in Afghanistan and US tanks rumbled through the ancient imperial heartland of Mesopotamia: Ruling and remaking distant, recalcitrant peoples looks very much like and imperial project.”
Yes, the American empire invites resentment, hostility and opposition by people in our part of the world. But were I an Arab living in the Arab world, instead of the US where I’ve spent much of my adult life, I would feel another sentiment: Envy. I would envy America’s book world, a world that enriches the life of the mind, the public debate and intellectual
The American empire? I take it as a package deal.
