Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [7]
In retrospect, perhaps the most striking feature of this period was the widespread assumption that the United States would not get into the business of warmaking or military coercion. Here was a country with unrivaled military might and the most devastating arsenal of weapons known to man. Yet in the 1990s many both inside and outside the United States simply assumed that the world's new hyperpower would not use its military aggressively for expansionist, empire-building purposes. Instead, when it came to U.S. military power, the most debated questions were whether the use of force for purely humanitarian purposes was permissible (as in Bosnia or Rwanda), and what America should do with its “peace dividend”—the billions of dollars it would no longer have to spend on defense. America was, it seemed, the world's first hyperpower that was not an empire, the first hyperpower with no militaristic imperial designs.
But September 11, 2001, changed everything. Within a month, the hyperpower was at war. A year later, the United States issued a new National Security Strategy, emphasizing “the essential role of American military strength,” asserting the right to “act preemptively,” and declaring a commitment to maintaining American unipolar military superiority. Suddenly, talk of an American empire was everywhere. Articles appeared—not only in such publications as the Wall Street Journal and Weekly Standard, but also in the New York Times and Christian Science Monitor—openly championing American imperialism. “Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out,” wrote Max Boot in his much-quoted “The Case for American Empire,” “for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.” The “answer to terrorism,” asserted historian Paul Johnson, is “colonialism.” Early in 2003, Harvard human rights scholar Michael Ignatieff asked, “[W]hat word but ‘empire’ describes the awesome thing America is becoming?” and argued that American imperialism was “in a place like Iraq, the last hope for democracy and stability alike.” Around the same time, Niall Ferguson called on Americans to shed their fear of “the ‘e’ word” and to take up Great Britain's former imperial mantle.14
What exactly did these proponents of an American empire have in mind? Obviously, no one was calling for President George W Bush to be named Emperor of the Middle East as Queen Victoria was once named Empress of India. Rather, for most of its advocates, the idea of an American empire refers to the aggressive, interventionist use of U.S. military force, with or without international approval, to effect regime change and nation building—to replace dictatorships, rogue states, and other threatening regimes with pro-market, pro-democratic, pro-American governments. As one commentator put it, America's “twenty-first-century Imperium” is one “whose grace notes are free markets, human rights, and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known.”15
So understood, the calls for an American empire after 9/11 were not unreasonable. After all, following World War II, the United States army had taken advantage of a moment of unparalleled military might to occupy and reconstruct Germany and Japan. If America had succeeded then, how could it not, in the face of the incalculable threat of terrorism, do the same for the post-9/11 world? How could it not pick up the reins of Rome or Britain and undertake to civilize, modernize, and pacify the world?
After 9/11 this position was supported by a wide range of voices in the United States, including many who never embraced the term empire and who would probably describe themselves as intensely anti-imperialist. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman may be the most notable example. While presciently skeptical of the Bush