In American Empire, Andrew Bacevich provides a beautifully crafted portrait of the last decade of security policy. A former Army officer, and now a professor of international relations at Boston University, Bacevich insists that America has become an empire and that nothing is to be gained from pretending otherwise. The publication of the book in the fall of 2002, after the Bush administration has “thrown off the mask,” makes his claim rather less startling than it would have been a few years back, when policy-makers deemed it prudent to avoid the avowal of imperial pretensions. But no matter. This is a brilliant tour of the interventions of the 1990s—in Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq—and it provides in addition a superb look at civil-military relations, a subject on which the author is understandably anxious. Bacevich asks all the right questions, even if some of the answers he offers are less than fully convincing.

Bacevich easily dispenses with the “conventional notion that American statecraft in the 1990s amounted to little more than confused and capricious improvisation.” In the Republican and Democratic administrations of the 1990s, there was a coherent strategy reflecting a broad “consensus regarding the inherent desirability of military power; a commitment to maintaining U.S. global military supremacy in perpetuity; and support for maximizing the utility of U.S. military might by pursuing an ambitious, activist, agenda.” Bacevich says this of the Clinton administration, and when one realizes that Bush has covered that bet and doubled it, it seems just that the author is on to something. The end to which these labors are directed is the creation and maintenance of an “open” international order that would enable “the processes of globalization to continue and the American people to reap its rewards.” Central to the strategy “is a commitment to global openness—removing barriers that inhibit the movement of goods, capital, ideas, and people. Its ultimate objective is the creation of an open and integrated international order based on the principles of democratic capitalism, with the United States as the ultimate guarantor of order and enforcer of norms.”

To make his case, Bacevich “proposes a reconciliation with a couple of patriot-heretics, whose long-discredited ideas anticipated the snares and pitfalls awaiting a democracy playing the role of a sole superpower”: Charles Beard and William Appleman Williams. Both historians, he says, were dead wrong about the major foreign policy question of their day—what to do, respectively, about Nazism and Stalinism—but they nevertheless saw clearly the domestic underpinnings of foreign policy and placed deserved emphasis on the centrality of economic expansion and the open door in understanding the contours of American history. Above all, they understood the utility of what Williams termed the “grand illusion”: “The charming belief that the United States could reap the rewards of empire without paying the costs of empire and without admitting that it was an empire.”

That America suffers from various grand illusions is clear enough, but it is doubtful if the commitment to “openness” and ever expanding areas for exports and investments really provides the master key in explaining American policy. Clinton administration officials, to be sure, often spoke in these terms, with the president justifying the Kosovo intervention with the comment, “if we’re going to have a strong economic relationship that includes our ability to sell around the world, Europe has got to be a key. . .That’s what this Kosovo thing is all about.” Since Bacevich is at pains to show the evasions, hypocrisies, and surreal denial of the obvious that attends American policy, it is not clear why we should take such a statement at face value. Was the president saying what he really thought or only what he thought the people wanted to hear? Once one accepts, as Bacevich does, that prevarication is the coin of the realm, it is not easy to spot the occasions on which high officials slip up and blurt out the truth.

In accounting for the growing militarization of American policy, the strategy of openness provides a necessary but not a sufficient explanation. Two other factors—one structural, the other cultural—are of equal if not greater importance. On the first score, it is still not fully registered how the collapse of the Soviet Union transformed the international system and removed previous prudential restraints on the exercise of U.S. military power. The anti-Bolshevik Revolution, and the disintegration of the Soviet state that followed, not only produced “intoxicating vapors” at home, it also created an unparalleled situation in which virtually every state on the planet was dependent in some fashion on the United States. Even a nation not infatuated with dreams of unlimited economic expansion would have been hard pressed not to take advantage of its newfound position, accompanied as it was by the discovery of a new way of war with “exchange ratios” that allowed us to apply force with few U.S. casualties and little domestic fallout. Bacevich is too perceptive an analyst to ignore this structural change, but the point is given little emphasis in his overall explanation.

Alongside this systemic change there are an array of cultural or ideological factors that also deserve attention, and perhaps even pride of place, in accounting for American empire. Whereas Bacevich would emphasize how we calculate profit and loss, more important, I think, is how we add up right and wrong. The search for new markets and investment opportunities by avid corporations and 401(k) rentiers may explain most of America’s global economic policy, but the infatuation with military power is owing to deeper, if misguided, conceptions of national role and purpose, akin to (and increasingly reinforced by) religious conviction. New Testament fundamentalism, overlaid by Old Testament righteousness, sustains the conviction of the United States as a new Rome, whose mission it is to punish the guilty, establish absolute security through overwhelming military dominance, and to revolutionize the domestic order of refractory states. That messianic and Manichaean perspective makes us blind to the misgivings and fears of others, incapable of understanding how our way of war generates intense resentment and hatred, and as ready to misread enemy intentions as to view contemptibly the advice of friends. Its roots are cultural or “ideological,” not economic.

On the “question that urgently demands attention”—“what sort of empire [Americans] intend theirs to be”—Bacevich is Lippmannesque in his advice: “Scaling imperial ambitions to fit imperial assets; balancing means and ends; distinguishing between minor annoyances and large threats and between the genuinely essential and the merely desirable, … navigating between the rocks of timidity and shoals of hubris, reconciling what is necessary with what is right.” He rightly worries over the pattern of civil-military relations that developed in the 1990s and castigates as morally irresponsible the foreign policy combination of ambitious ultimatum and blistering aerial attack—an especially obnoxious policy when paired (as in Kosovo) with extreme skittishness in the employment of American ground forces and avowals of saintly humanitarian intentions. Bacevich also intimates, less persuasively, that openness itself is the culprit, though he never really calls for its rejection. The book’s intention is not to prescribe a remedy but to persuade the reader that the patient does indeed require one.

There are two potential checks on empire, two different standards to which critics might rally in opposition to what our forefathers called “the military system.” One is nationalist in orientation, the other internationalist. One would pull up the drawbridges against further immigration, introduce controls on the movement of goods and capital, and withdraw from America’s principal alliances in Europe and Asia. The other would accept free commerce with most nations, and entangling alliances with some, as an inescapable and indeed desirable component of American policy today. It would acknowledge that the United States does have basic responsibilities in the maintenance of world order, an unavoidable consequence of great U.S. power and far-reaching interdependence. It would find the remedy for empire in international association, relying in part on the good sense of traditional friends and allies to restrain the war-like propensities of the United States. Seeking cooperation with others, and rejecting unilateralism, internationalist opponents of empire would not refuse succor from like-minded friends abroad, who also see clearly the danger of American military adventurism and want it subject to restraint.

Both courses are pacific in character and share a common belief that universal empire is a menace to our security and is contrary to the deepest traditions of the republic. Both, too, are conservative. One, however, looks to the tradition of national independence, the other to the experience of federal union for the historical and normative underpinnings of policy.

Of these two courses, the latter is a more constructive and effective check on empire than nationalism. Indeed, there is a certain quaintness, if not downright obfuscation, in posing the choice in the old “internationalist vs. isolationist” vein. The United States is too big and powerful, and the impact of past actions too pronounced, for it to avoid having a profound effect on the world. Given the brute fact of American power, nationalism, even if self-consciously insular, can be a spur to entanglement and a badge of imperialism.

In addition, the refusal to revolutionize forcibly the society of states, whether by expanding democracy, liberating oppressed minorities, or waging preventive war, is as closely identifiable with the internationalist tradition as with the isolationist. Once upon a time, in the not too distant past, internationalists gave a decent respect to the principles of sovereignty and non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states. They wanted a world made safe for diversity. Only in the last two decades did the doctrine take hold that it was our solemn duty—“peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must”—to revolutionize the international system. The traditional view, predominant in American thinking in all the 19th century and most of the 20th, puts its faith in peaceful example, believing that to go abroad in search of monsters to destroy is totally inconsistent with “the sacred independence of nations” and America’s distinctive mission. Paul Schroeder wrote recently in this journal that the “two fundamental principles of modern international relations” have been “the recognition of state independence, and the willing acceptance by most international actors of the necessity and benefits of international associations and their requirements and rules.” “Independence and Union” happens also to have been the motto of 1776 and of many years beyond. The fundamental values then affirmed, which had a deep kinship with “the law of nature and of nations,” are perfectly congruent with the principles so brilliantly captured by Schroeder. This country must re-learn its duty to respect these basic principles, and the sooner the better.  
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