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By Root 1074 0

Administration's claims of weapons of mass destruction and deeply suspicious of the role of U.S. oil interests, Friedman nevertheless defended the war in Iraq in order to “oust Saddam Hussein” and “to partner with the Iraqi people” in building a much-needed stable, democratic society with “freedom, women's empowerment, and modern education.” Similarly, Michael Ignatieff, “arguably the most prominent liberal supporter of the U.S. invasion of Iraq,” wrote that “[i]t remains a fact—as disagreeable to those left wingers who regard American imperialism as the root of all evil as it is to the right-wing isolationists”—“that there are many peoples who owe their freedom to an exercise of American military power.”16

But what all these writers overlooked—whether they used the term empire or preferred to call it democratization and nation building—was history. In a new form, America today faces a problem as old as empire itself, a problem so fundamental that it brought down most of history's past world-dominant powers. For lack of a better term, I will refer to this as the problem of “glue.”

This problem is the subject of Samuel Huntington's controversial book Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity. With an anti-politically correct vengeance, Samuel Huntington argues that continued immigration—particularly from Spanish-speaking regions like Mexico—threatens to destroy America's core “Anglo-Protestant” values of “individualism,” “the work ethic,” and “rule of law.” Unless America reasserts its identity, Huntington warns, it may “evolve into a loose confederation of ethnic, racial, cultural, and political groups, with little or nothing in common apart from their location in the territory of what had been the United States of America.”17

Huntington has been much maligned. The truth is that he almost goes out of his way to be inflammatory and insulting—suggesting, for example, that Mexican Americans are multiplying like rabbits and that they may try to take back California, Utah, and Texas. Nevertheless, I think Huntington is correct to worry about whether American society has sufficient “glue” to hold together its many different subcommunities. Many of history's past hyperpow-ers, including Achaemenid Persia and the Great Mongol Empire, fell because they lacked an overarching political identity capable of holding their ethnically and religiously diverse subjects together.

But Huntington makes two critical mistakes. First, as I will show, hyperpowers have fallen prey to fragmentation and disintegration precisely when their core group turns intolerant, reasserting their “true” identity, adopting nativist or chauvinist policies, and attempting to expel or exclude “aliens” and “unassimilable” groups. From this point of view, the surest path to the destruction of America's social fabric lies in efforts to tie American identity to a single, original ethnic or religious group. Perversely, this is just what Huntington is doing when he identifies America's true identity with WASP culture and WASP civic values, notwithstanding his insistence that people of any race or background (except apparently Latinos) can adopt these WASP virtues.

Even more fundamentally, Huntington fails to see that America's real problem of glue lies abroad, rather than at home. Inside its borders, the United States has been uniquely successful in creating an ethnically and religiously neutral political identity strong and capacious enough to bind together as Americans individuals of all ethnicities, religions, and backgrounds. But here's the problem: America does not exert power over only Americans. Through its unrivaled military might (including military bases in more than sixty countries, widely seen as “intrusions on national sovereignty”), its extraordinary economic leverage, and its omnipresent multinationals, consumer brands, and culture, America's dominance is felt in every corner of the world. And outside its borders, there is little if any glue binding the United States to the billions of people around the world it dominates.