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By Root 1031 0

September 2002, the White House issued a new National Security Strategy (NSS), which began as follows: “Today, the United States enjoys a position of unparalleled military strength and great economic and political influence…[T]he United States will use this moment of opportunity to extend the benefits of freedom across the globe. We will actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world.” So far, the NSS sounded like something the Clinton administration could have issued. As President Clinton declared in 1996: “Because we remain the world's indispensable nation, we must act and we must lead.”2

But the NSS went further. It also declared that to forestall further terrorist attacks, “the United States, will, if necessary, act preemptively.” “We must be prepared to stop rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies.” Finally, the NSS formally announced the United States’ determination to maintain a unipolar world order: “It is time to reaffirm the essential role of American military strength. We must build and maintain our forces beyond challenge…Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States.”3

These sentiments were echoed in various quarters throughout the United States and elsewhere in the period following September 11. Well-known neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Elliott Abrams—all of whom were influential figures in the Bush administration's decision to go to war in Iraq—argued for an aggressive use of American military might to overturn authoritarian rogue governments, replacing them with democratic regimes, which, it was claimed, would be pro-market, pro-American, pro-peace, and pro-liberty.

Influential liberals also favored the invasion of Iraq. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman argued that the Iraq war, if “mounted in the right way for the right reasons,” could stabilize the Middle East, producing “a decent government in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world.” Christopher Hitchens, a longtime contributor to The Nation, supported the use of U.S. military force to uproot “fascism with an Islamic face.”4 The question was no longer whether America would use military force abroad but how it would do so—how unilaterally, how preemptively, how unimpeded by other nations’ sovereignty or international law.

Talk of an American empire was suddenly on the table, with a swell of voices—both in and outside the United States—increasingly in favor. A month after 9/11, in his much-quoted essay entitled “The Case for American Empire,” the former Wall Street Journal editor and security expert Max Boot argued that “[t]he most realistic response to terrorism is for the United States unambiguously to embrace its imperial role.” Deepak Lai's 2004 book In Praise of Empires warned of dire global consequences “[i]f the U.S. public does not recognize the imperial burden that history has thrust upon it, or is unwilling to bear it.” Around the same time, in Colossus, the British historian Niall Ferguson called on the United States to get over its “imperial denial” and take on the civilizing and modernizing burden that Great Britain had carried in past centuries.5

The argument for an American empire—including the vigorous use of U.S. military force to replace dictatorships with free-market and democratic institutions—was perfectly understandable. After World War II, America had deployed its unrivaled military to occupy and democratize Germany and Japan while taking measures to prevent those countries from ever posing a military threat to the United States again. Those postwar exercises in nation building proved enormously successful. Given the horrendous threats of terrorism, why shouldn't post-9/11 America take advantage of its military preeminence to disarm and democratize rogue states in the Middle East? Indeed, why