American Empire

by Joshua Freeman

  The hypocrisy of the immigration system and continued high inflow during periods of economic downturn, like the early 1990s, sparked growing hostility to immigrants themselves. Prior to 1980, five states had laws making English their official language. Over the next two decades, twenty more added such measures. In 1994, California voters by a wide margin backed the anti-immigrant Proposition 187 (the “Save our State” initiative), which Republican governor Pete Wilson, locked in a tight reelection bid, made a centerpiece of his campaign. The measure called for denying illegal immigrants virtually all government benefits, including public schooling. A federal judge immediately blocked the implementation of most of its provisions, declaring them unconstitutional. But the proposition legitimized harsh anti-immigration measures that previously had been unthinkable. The federal welfare reform bill enacted two years later barred illegal immigrants from receiving most government services (though not public schooling) and forbade legal immigrants from receiving a long list of federal benefits during the first five years after their admission to the country, including Medicaid, food stamps, and the new version of welfare.

  The anti-immigrant measures of the 1990s had little impact on the fundamental dynamics of immigration. Mexicans seeking better economic opportunities and to escape the hardships that NAFTA brought to some regions and economic sectors of their country continued to travel to the United States in large numbers, with and without visas, while businesses continued to eagerly recruit foreign-born workers, with little concern about their legal status, seeing them as a cheap, hardworking, compliant workforce. As in so many of the social and cultural disputes of the 1990s, conservatives changed public discourse and won a series of fights over specific measures but failed to reverse the basic social trajectory.

  Impeachment

  Bill Clinton’s reelection if anything intensified conservative attacks on him. Not only did he epitomize to many conservatives the things they found distasteful about how the country had changed since the 1960s, but even more importantly his ascent broke what many conservatives had come to see as their rightful control over the reins of power. From the moment he took office, Clinton faced a well-funded conservative effort to weaken or destroy his presidency by uncovering and publicizing his personal transgressions. Sloppy in his financial affairs and personal life, Clinton left enough hints of irregular, unethical, and possibly illegal behavior in his wake to keep his adversaries going and allow them to mobilize the institutions of law on their behalf.

  The investigations and lawsuits began with Clinton’s behavior while governor of Arkansas. They included allegations of corruption in connection with his investment in a real estate development scheme called Whitewater; that he used state troopers to procure women; and that he had sexually harassed a state clerical worker named Paula Jones, who sued him for damages. While most of these charges ultimately proved untrue, the murky circumstances surrounding them, the seemingly unlimited resources of Clinton’s opponents, and Clinton’s penchant for evasive responses kept the suggestions of scandal alive. In early 1994, facing renewed questions, he asked Janet Reno, whom he had nominated as the country’s first female attorney general, to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Whitewater land deal. Reno chose an independent-minded Republican, Robert Fiske. A few months later, a new law changed the procedure for selecting special prosecutors, handing the power over to a special panel of judges appointed by the chief justice of the United States. William Rehnquist, a conservative Republican with a history of partisanship before his ascension to the Court, picked a conservative-dominated panel that replaced Fiske with Kenneth Starr, who had been solicitor general during the Bush administration.

  Starr reported after a prolonged investigation no evidence of wrongdoing in connection to Whitewater. But he created a constitutional crisis by pursuing another matter. In the fall of 1997, attorneys in the Paula Jones lawsuit learned that Clinton had had sex with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky (at age twenty-two, only seven years older than his daughter). Starr soon expanded his investigation to include her. Before any of this became public, Clinton was asked in a deposition in the Jones suit if he had had sexual relations with Lewinsky, which he denied. Starr made Clinton’s effort to hide his relationship with Lewinsky the centerpiece of his investigation.

  Things quickly got tawdry. Reports of the Lewinsky affair leaked to the press, leading Clinton to publicly deny having sex with her (lying to his family and lawyers as well). Starr hauled Lewinsky before a grand jury, where she produced a dress stained with Clinton’s semen. Only then did Clinton confess that he had lied. In September 1998, Starr sent Congress a report that went into lurid detail about Clinton’s relationship with Lewinsky, charged him with perjury and obstruction of justice, and suggested that his behavior presented grounds for impeachment. (The Jones lawsuit itself faded into oblivion, thrown out by a judge for lack of evidence and eventually settled, during Jones’s appeal, by a payment from Clinton.)

  The House quickly began impeachment inquiries, with Republican leaders thinking that Clinton’s personal behavior gave them a powerful political weapon. Events proved them wrong. In the 1998 election, the Republicans lost five seats in the House and did not add to their 55–45 majority in the Senate, a departure from the historical pattern of gains by the nonpresidential party in midterm elections. Facing recriminations, Newt Gingrich resigned as House Speaker, setting off a farce of one Republican politician after another being accused of sexual misconduct, including Robert Livingston, initially chosen by the Republicans to succeed Gingrich, who resigned after the revelation of his marital infidelity. Whatever moral edge the Republicans had claimed lost its credibility.

  On December 19, 1998, the House of Representatives voted to impeach Clinton on the grounds of perjury and obstruction of justice, making him only the second president to face trial by the Senate, and the first since Andrew Johnson. Impeachment was mostly a piece of political theater, since the Republicans lacked the two-thirds Senate majority needed to convict. Clinton’s continuing popularity helped ensure that congressional Democrats would stay loyal and his presidency would survive. In the end, forty-five senators voted to convict Clinton on one charge and fifty on the other, far short of the number needed to oust him. Through his last years in office, while the Lewinsky affair and impeachment dominated the news, Clinton remained one of the more popular second-term presidents in history. Most of the public disapproved of his personal behavior, but they appreciated the peaceful international relations the United States enjoyed during his years in office and the prosperous economy of his second term.

  Ambivalent Imperialism

  The Clinton administration acted on a set of assumptions about the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world that did not radically differ from prior administrations and that still owed a great deal to the Cold War. Clinton had the good luck to be president during a period of few major threats to American national security and global hegemony. But in accepting the givens of post–World War II foreign policy, he continued the country down a road of militarism and imperial reach, with profound dangers and unclear rewards.

  Like Bush, Clinton endorsed the idea that the United States needed to maintain a large, worldwide military apparatus, even at times of peace and with no nation possessing anything near its war-making capacity. He did make cuts in defense spending on top of those Bush had made. As a percentage of federal outlays, the defense budget fell from 26 percent in 1989 to 21 percent in 1992 and 16 percent in 2000. Several hundred military bases were closed or downsized on the recommendation of specially appointed commissions, used to circumvent the difficulty in getting members of Congress to accept job losses in their districts. But when Clinton left office, the American military empire remained gigantic, with a million and a half men under arms, thousands of bases within the United States, and more than seven hundred abroad. In 2001, the United States accounted for 37 percent of all world
wide military expenditures. Though China had more military personnel, in every other regard the U.S. military operated on a scale unapproached by other nations.

  Under Clinton, the United States maintained—and even enlarged—the overseas alliances that had been built to contain the Soviet Union. The Clinton administration pressed NATO to expand eastward, taking into its ranks Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. NATO enlargement caused considerable resentment in Russia, as former Soviet leaders claimed that Secretary of State James Baker had promised that the alliance would not move into Eastern Europe (a misunderstanding, according to the Americans). The United States and its allies had little to fear militarily from Russia. But NATO expansion served other ends besides as an insurance policy against a possible Russian resurgence. For one thing, continuing NATO’s role as a major vehicle of European policy sustained U.S. influence on the Continent, which might have been diminished if the European Union or some other strictly continental body became the major security apparatus for the region. For another thing, NATO expansion opened up new markets for U.S. weapons, important to preserving defense industries facing profit pressures with the end of the Cold War and in generating exports at a time of huge trade imbalances.

  The American military system had become its own reason for being. The military-industrial complex that Eisenhower had warned about remained an important influence on government policy and spending priorities. Having been in place for a half century or more, the defense industries, intelligence agencies, secret weapons systems, massive army, widespread overseas deployment of military personnel, web of military alliances, and economic burden of maintaining global military superiority were taken for granted by most Americans and rarely the subject of serious debate. The majority of the population had never known a time when the United States was not mobilized for war.

  Yet the United States remained a nonmartial society even as it maintained the world’s most potent military, with a relatively low cultural and social presence of the armed services outside of the immediate environs of major military facilities. Also, for a country with an archipelago of defense establishments spanning the globe and ever-growing international economic interests, the United States evinced a low level of public curiosity about the rest of the world. Most Americans had little interest in foreign places, cultures, or languages, even as much of the world became obsessed with American popular culture and English became the global lingua franca. The mixture of militarism and civilian culture, empire and cultural isolationism led few politicians or segments of the public to raise fundamental questions about military or foreign policy.

  Clinton, perhaps because of his history as a draft avoider and Republican attacks on the Democrats as weak on national defense, proved particularly susceptible to pressure from military leaders. At the start of his administration, he suffered a grievous blow when Colin Powell, as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, successfully organized opposition to his plan to end the ban on gays in the military. Pressure from the Pentagon also scuttled another Clinton initiative, his support for ridding the world of land mines. An estimated 100 million land mines remained planted around the world, in many cases the residue of long-ended conflicts, killing or maiming some twenty-five thousand people a year. Clinton’s backing helped lead to a 1996 conference that drafted a treaty banning the use of land mines. But the United States became one of the very few countries that refused to sign it after it failed to get an exemption that the military wanted to allow the continued deployment of mines along the divide between North and South Korea.

  Clinton centered his foreign policy, especially during his early years in office, on economic issues, specifically promoting a global free-trade regime. He fully embraced the idea that free-market/free-trade capitalism provided the best—and perhaps the only—path toward freedom and prosperity. Clinton believed globalization—the increased integration of national economies through greater flow of goods and capital across borders—was inevitable, irreversible, and beneficial. It also served well the particular economic sectors that had supported his presidential bid and that he saw as key to domestic growth: high-tech and internationally oriented industrial concerns, the entertainment and software industries, and, above all, finance.

  The Clinton administration worked to open up foreign markets to American products; gain access for American companies to inexpensive labor, natural resources, and financial markets abroad; protect their intellectual property rights; and remold the economies of other countries along free-market lines. Clinton followed up NAFTA by negotiating additional free-trade agreements and the 1995 creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO), a new umbrella body for establishing international trade rules. Under Secretary Ron Brown, the Commerce Department became an aggressive promoter of U.S. business abroad. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, under heavy U.S. influence, pressured countries in economic trouble to move toward free markets, smaller state sectors, and reduced social benefits, using the lever of their lending capacity to override popular resistance. Opposition by the AFL-CIO to free-trade agreements that did not protect labor standards, along with conflicting interests among American trading partners, slowed the pace of trade liberalization. But only near the end of the Clinton administration, with the large, dramatic, heavily reported protests at the November 1999 meeting of the WTO in Seattle, did free-trade globalization face significant political and ideological opposition questioning the idea that its net benefits were a proven, neutral economic fact.

  As globalization triumphed, at least as ideology, the role of military power became murkier. Under Clinton, loans, investments, international treaties, technical expertise, and cultural capital were the main instruments of globalization, not guns and missiles. If once international economic expansion and military power had been closely linked, by the late twentieth century their relationship to one another had become opaque and attenuated.

  The vexing issue of humanitarian military interventions displayed the uncertainty in the Clinton administration and elite policy circles about the function of the armed services and their role in maintaining and extending American values and power. International agreements in the late 1940s had enumerated universal human rights and declared genocide to be a crime under international law. Starting in the late 1970s, the idea of defending human rights across national borders became increasingly prominent in the wake of disappointed hopes for radical reform on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Presented as a way of transcending ideology and downsizing utopian visions to concentrate on protecting basic standards of freedom, the notion of human rights meshed well with post–Cold War politics and political economy. The radical movements that had reached their height in the late 1960s had looked toward the transformation of the deep structures of society, both capitalist and communist. By contrast, human rights, as commonly defined in the 1970s and beyond, seemingly could be fully compatible with liberal capitalism.

  The United States, as the only remaining superpower, had a greater ability than any other nation or organization to use arms to support humanitarian efforts, stop armed conflicts, protect human rights, and end genocide. The very existence of its massive military raised the option for American policymakers, international organizations, and human rights groups to turn to it to solve crises. But in a world awash with misery and violence, the Clinton administration proved inconsistent in deciding when to use military force in situations that did not threaten the national security of the United States. In some cases it intervened under UN auspices, in other cases it declined, and in still others, to avoid possible vetoes at the UN, it acted through NATO. In the process, even as he avoided large-scale war, Clinton created precedents for the unilateral use of arms by the United States against foreign nations and forces that had not attacked it.

  A chain of events in Somalia, which began during Bush’s presidency, influenced the U.S. approach to intervention in the name of humanitarianism and human rights. A 1992 UN effor
t to deliver relief supplies to Somalia, which was racked by civil war, faltered as rival warlords stole food and other goods. To protect the relief operation, the UN Security Council authorized armed force and eventually asked the United States to take the lead in the humanitarian effort. Bush sent in twenty-five thousand troops, joined by thirteen thousand more from other countries. As the situation seemed to stabilize, Clinton began a withdrawal. But after the forces of Mohamed Farrah Aidid ambushed a UN detachment, the Somali effort increasingly became a conflict between Aidid and the U.S.-led forces. On October 3, 1993, Aidid’s group carried out a carefully planned ambush that led to the downing of two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters and a daylong battle in which hundreds of Somalis and eighteen Americans died. Pictures of Somalis dragging the body of a dead American through the streets of Mogadishu outraged the American public, which was unprepared to accept the loss of American lives in a place it knew little about and for a cause that did not directly affect the United States. Clinton cut his losses and within six months withdrew all U.S. forces from Somalia.

  Determined to avoid any similar loss of U.S. life, Clinton backed off from a plan to send a small contingent of troops to Haiti, where the military had overthrown President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. But in September 1994, partly out of a desire to stem the flow of refugees to the United States, he did send troops there in accord with a UN Security Council resolution. The Americans landed without resistance, paving the way for Aristide’s return to power.