Imperial America

Over at Salon, Glenn Greenwald has a couple of excellent posts up (here and here) on the way the foreign policy establishment in America today is dominated by those who advocate American empire building and who think of war as a legitimate tool to be used not simply to respond to an attack but to be used whenever it suits our interests. We are the only country in the world today who can, and therefore who does, do this. A couple of good quotes:

...Put simply, there is no reasonable way to compare the use of military force by the U.S. to any other country on the planet. We spend more on our military than every other country combined. We spend six times more on our military than China, the next largest military spender. And it is a bipartisan consensus that, even as the sole remaining superpower, we should increase both military spending and the size of our military further still.

No country can even remotely compare to us in terms of the sheer magnitude of invasions, bombing campaigns, regime changes, occupations and other forms of direct interference via military force in sovereign countries. We have military bases in well over 100 nations. In the last 10 years alone, we bombed Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Sudan, Afghanistan again, Somalia, and Iraq again. Even after the end of the Cold War, we changed the governments of multiple countries from Panama to Iraq, and we've attempted (or are attempting) to do so in Iran and Venezuela. We single-handedly prop up tyrannical governments in scores of nations using financial and military aid. No other country can hold a candle to the breadth and frequency of our involvement in the affairs of other countries. That is just fact.

Obviously, that we intervene, bomb and invade far more than any other country is not, standing alone, proof that our various military campaigns are unjust. But it is rather compelling evidence that we have a far lower hair-trigger for when we use military force than any other country in the world, and we use our military force in far more places and with a far wider range of motives and reasons than any other country...

Whatever else is true, the U.S. -- over the last six years -- commenced and continues to wage the most disastrous (and possibly most unjust) war in its history and has adopted policies that have fundamentally eroded our national character and violated everything we claimed to have stood for. As a matter of undeniable, empirical fact, our standing in the world has completely collapsed. Our vaunted Foreign Policy establishment has voiced little resistance to any of this and offered much support, indispensable support, and continues to do so. It has learned nothing. Its orthodoxies are the same, its leaders unchanged, and virtually nothing has been re-evaluated...

The most significant "off limits" topic is whether the U.S. has the right to run around using military force against other countries whenever we perceive that our vaguely defined "national interests" are served by doing so. In defending the Community, Drezner specifically identifies that belief as the common, defining principle to which all members subscribe. In a different way, Farley argued the same thing:

First things first, I don't think that Greenwald is quite right about the "foreign policy community," because I suspect that members of the community don't think about such questions in the way that Glenn frames them. As Drezner hints at, experts and scholars in this area don't really think in terms of the "right to intervene", or whether US policy is "inherently good". They sometimes think about the greater good, but they more often think about US interests.

This is true. There are no debates in the Community about whether the U.S. has the right to start wars even when our national security is not threatened. And to Drezner, anyone who rejects that notion -- anyone who, for instance, believes that the U.S. should not start wars unless necessary for our self-defense -- can be dismissed as a "pacifist." But the notion that the U.S. should not attack another country unless that country has attacked or directly threatens our national security is not really extraordinary. Quite the contrary, that is how virtually every country in the world conducts itself, and it is a founding principle of our country...

It may very well serve our "national interests" to start a war because we want to control someone else's resources, or because we think it would be good if they had a different government, or because we want the world to fear us, or because we want to change the type of political system they have, or because they aren't complying with our dictates, or because we want to use their land as military bases, or because they are going to acquire weapons we tell them they are not allowed to have. But those who believe that war is justifiable and desirable under those circumstances are, by definition, espousing an imperial ideology.

Ruling the world that way through superior military force -- starting wars even when our national security is not directly at risk -- is the definitional behavior of an empire...

This is who we have become as a nation. And as Greenwald says, to even question whether this is who we ought to be, is to find oneself being dismissed as a loony leftist.