Are Americans really so imperial?

by Victor Davis Hanson

National Review Online

It is popular now to talk of the American “empire.” In Europe particularly there are comparisons of Mr. Bush to Caesar — and worse — and invocations all sorts of pretentious poli-sci jargon like “hegemon,” “imperium,” and “subject states,” along with neologisms like “hyperpower” and “overdogs.” But if we really are imperial, we rule over a very funny sort of empire.

We do not send out proconsuls to reside over client states, which in turn impose taxes on coerced subjects to pay for the legions. Instead, American bases are predicated on contractual obligations — costly to us and profitable to their hosts. We do not see any profits in Korea, but instead accept the risk of losing almost 40,000 of our youth to ensure that Kias can flood our shores and that shaggy students can protest outside our embassy in Seoul.

Athenians, Romans, Ottomans, and the British wanted land and treasure and grabbed all they could get when they could. The United States hasn’t annexed anyone’s soil since the Spanish-American War — a checkered period in American history that still makes us, not them, out as villains in our own history books. Most Americans are far more interested in carving up the Nevada desert for monster homes than in getting their hands on Karachi or the Amazon basin. Puerto Ricans are free to vote themselves independence anytime they wish.

Imperial powers order and subjects obey. But in our case, we offer the Turks strategic guarantees, political support — and money — for their allegiance. France and Russia go along in the U.N. — but only after we ensure them the traffic of oil and security for outstanding accounts. Pakistan gets debt relief that ruined dot-coms could only dream of; Jordan reels in more aid than our own bankrupt municipalities.

If acrimony and invective arise, it’s usually one-way: the Europeans, the Arabs, and the South Americans all say worse things about us than we do about them, not privately and in hurt, but publicly and proudly. Boasting that you hate Americans — or calling our supposed imperator “moron” or “Hitler” — won’t get you censured by our Senate or earn a tongue-lashing from our president, but is more likely to get you ten minutes on CNN. We are considered haughty by Berlin not because we send a Germanicus with four legions across the Rhine, but because Mr. Bush snubs Mr. Schroeder by not phoning him as frequently as the German press would like.

Empires usually have contenders that check their power and through rivalry drive their ambitions. Athens worried about Sparta and Persia. Rome found its limits when it butted up against Germany and Parthia. The Ottomans never could bully too well the Venetians or the Spanish. Britain worried about France and Spain at sea and the Germanic peoples by land. In contrast, the restraint on American power is not China, Russia, or the European Union, but rather the American electorate itself — whose reluctant worries are chronicled weekly by polls that are eyed with fear by our politicians. We, not them, stop us from becoming what we could.

The Athenian ekklesia, the Roman senate, and the British Parliament alike were eager for empire and reflected the energy of their people. In contrast, America went to war late and reluctantly in World Wars I and II, and never finished the job in either Korea or Vietnam. We were likely to sigh in relief when we were kicked out of the Philippines, and really have no desire to return. Should the Greeks tell us to leave Crete — promises, promises — we would be more likely to count the money saved than the influence lost. Take away all our troops from Germany and polls would show relief, not anger, among Americans. Isolationism, parochialism, and self-absorption are far stronger in the American character than desire for overseas adventurism. Our critics may slur us for “overreaching,” but our elites in the military and government worry that they have to coax a reluctant populace, not constrain a blood-drunk rabble.

The desire of a young Roman quaestor or the British Victorians was to go abroad, shine in battle, and come home laden with spoils. They wanted to be feared, not liked. American suburbanites, inner-city residents, and rural townspeople all will fret because a French opportunist or a Saudi autocrat says that we are acting inappropriately. Roman imperialists had names like Magnus and Africanus; the British anointed their returning proconsuls as Rangers, Masters, Governors, Grandees, Sirs, and Lords. In contrast, retired American diplomats, CIA operatives, or generals are lucky if they can melt away in anonymity to the Virginia suburbs without a subpoena, media exposé, or lawsuit. Proconsuls were given entire provinces; our ex-president Carter from his peace center advises us to disarm.

Most empires chafe at the cost of their rule and complain that the expense is near-suicidal. Athens raised the Aegean tribute often, and found itself nearly broke after only the fifth year of the Peloponnesian War. The story of the Roman Empire is one of shrinking legions, a debased currency, and a chronically bankrupt imperial treasury. Even before World War I, the Raj had drained England. In contrast, America spends less of its GNP on defense than it did during the last five decades. And most of our military outlays go to training, salaries, and retirements — moneys that support, educate, and help people rather than simply stockpile weapons and hone killers. The eerie thing is not that we have 13 massive $5 billion carriers, but that we could easily produce and maintain 20 more.

Empires create a culture of pride and pomp, and foster a rhetoric of superiority. Pericles, Virgil, and Kipling all talked and wrote of the grandeur of imperial domain. How odd then that what America’s literary pantheon — Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, and Alice Walker — said about 9/11 would either nauseate or bewilder most Americans.

Pericles could showcase his Parthenon from the tribute of empire; Rome wanted the prestige of Pax Romana and Mare Nostrum; the Sultan thought Europe should submit to Allah; and the Queen could boast that the sun never set on British shores. Our imperial aims? We are happy enough if the Japanese can get their oil from Libya safely and their Toyotas to Los Angeles without fear; or if China can be coaxed into sending us more cheap Reeboks and in turn fewer pirated CDs.

Our bases dot the globe to keep the sea-lanes open, thugs and murderers under wraps, and terrorists away from European, Japanese, and American globalists who profit mightily by blanketing the world with everything from antibiotics and contact lenses to BMWs and Jennifer Lopez — in other words, to keep the world safe and prosperous enough for Michael Moore to rant on spec, for Noam Chomsky to garner a lot of money and tenure from a defense-contracting MIT, for Barbra Streisand to make millions, for Edward Said’s endowed chair to withstand Wall Street downturns, for Jesse Jackson to take off safely on his jet-powered, tax-free junkets.

Why then does the world hate a country that uses it power to keep the peace rather than rule? Resentment, jealousy, and envy of the proud and powerful are often cited as the very human and age-old motives that prompt states irrationally to slur and libel — just as people do against their betters. No doubt Thucydides would agree. But there are other more subtle factors involved that explain the peculiar present angst against America — and why the French or Germans say worse things about free Americans who saved them than they did about Soviets who wanted to kill them.

Observers like to see an empire suffer and pay a price for its influence. That way they think imperial sway is at least earned. Athenians died all over the Mediterranean, from Egypt to Sicily; their annual burial ceremony was the occasion for the best of Hellenic panegyric. The list of British disasters from the Crimea and Afghanistan to Zululand and Khartoum was the stuff of Victorian poetry. But since Vietnam Americans have done pretty much what they wanted to in the Gulf, Panama, Haiti, Grenada, Serbia, and Afghanistan, with less than an aggregate of 200 lost to enemy fire — a combat imbalance never seen in the annals of warfare. So not only can Americans defeat their adversaries, but they don’t even die doing it. Shouldn’t — our critics insist — we at least have some body bags?

Intervention is supposed to be synonymous with exploitation; thus the Athenians killed, enslaved, exacted, and robbed on Samos and Melos. No one thought Rome was going into Numidia or Gaul — one million killed, another million enslaved — to implant local democracy. Nor did the British decide that at last 17th-century India needed indigenous elections. But Americans have overthrown Noriega, Milosevic, and Mullah Omar and are about to rid Iraq of Saddam Hussein, to put in their places elected leaders, not legates or local client kings. Instead of the much-rumored “pipeline” that we supposedly coveted in Afghanistan, we are paying tens of millions to build a road and bridges so that Afghan truckers and traders won’t break their axles.

In that regard, America is also a revolutionary, rather than a stuffy imperial society. Its crass culture abroad — rap music, Big Macs, Star Wars, Pepsi, andBeverly Hillbillies reruns — does not reflect the tastes and values of either an Oxbridge elite or a landed Roman aristocracy. That explains why Le Monde or a Spanish deputy minister may libel us, even as millions of semi-literate Mexicans, unfree Arabs, and oppressed southeast Asians are dying to get here. It is one thing to mobilize against grasping, wealthy white people who want your copper, bananas, or rubber — quite another when your own youth want what black, brown, yellow, and white middle-class Americans alike have to offer. We so-called imperialists don’t wear pith helmets, but rather baggy jeans and backwards baseball caps. Thus far the rest of the globe — whether Islamic fundamentalists, European socialists, or Chinese Communists — has not yet formulated an ideology antithetical to the kinetic American strain of Western culture.

Much, then, of what we read about the evil of American imperialism is written by post-heroic and bored elites, intellectuals, and coffeehouse hacks, whose freedom and security are a given, but whose rarified tastes are apparently unshared and endangered. In contrast, the poorer want freedom and material things first — and cynicism, skepticism, irony, and nihilism second. So we should not listen to what a few say, but rather look at what many do.

Critiques of the United States based on class, race, nationality, or taste have all failed to explicate, much less stop, the American cultural juggernaut. Forecasts of bankrupting defense expenditures and imperial overstretch are the stuff of the faculty lounge. Neither Freud nor Marx is of much help. And real knowledge of past empires that might allow judicious analogies is beyond the grasp of popular pundits.

Add that all up, and our exasperated critics are left with the same old empty jargon of legions and gunboats.