This constant fluctuation between warmongering and pacifism, which enables both Democrats and Republicans to jump from one ideology to another, has not evaded Tooley’s attention. He therefore points out that Clinton was castigated by the Republicans for his militarism and interventionism, and yet, in a supremely paradoxical turn of events, G. W. Bush later campaigned in favour of ‘refocusing on domestic issues and a humbler foreign policy’! It thus becomes clear that the imperialist choice only depends on the circumstances, as it is essentially driven by economic motivations, or mercantile ones, to be precise. Pacifism and warmongering could each be adopted in turn by the Democrats or the Republicans. America could ally itself to literally anyone, before proceeding to wage war against them (as seen in the case of the Islamists, Iraq, Russia, etc.). This approach is not due to some ideological conviction, but is the result of a purely commercial tactic that changes in harmony with the circumstances. The military operations carried out by the Bush administration in Afghanistan and Iraq do not bear any connection to a genuine imperialistic ‘doctrine’ of the archeo-European type, but relate to a sort of control strategy whose purpose lies in enabling a certain elite to claim commercial profit.
In this regard, America lacks a real ‘foreign policy’ to speak of, merely possessing imperialistic strategies that evolve according to the circumstances, are disorderly and fraught with periods of dramatic growth and retreat, somewhat like a company that acts on the spur of the moment in order to claim any potential profit. In no way is the American notion of an ‘empire’, therefore, ‘imperial’ in essence; one could say that it is, instead, a mere mockery of ‘imperialism’. Tooley believes that it is a ‘decorum’ founded on imagery and spectacle, one that Bush managed to take advantage of by parading in military disguise, which is as impressive at the beginning as it becomes ridiculous when the bells of defeat finally toll. In a display of great pessimism regarding his country’s future, Tooley passes judgement upon those immature American leaders:
The result will always be the same: a government which, domestically, grows more and more intrusive and authoritarian, and a surrounding world which grows ever more belligerent as a result of American provocations, justified by a desire for perpetual peace.
***
From the Roman empire to the American one: is the USA at risk of becoming a dictatorship? The idea that the American ‘empire’ will suffer the same fate as the Roman Empire (albeit much more rapidly and with even more tragic consequences) has been theorised by historian and political scientist Chalmers Johnson. The cause, he believes, lies in what he terms ‘the scourge of militarism’, as stated in his work entitled ‘The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic’ (Metropolitan books, 2003). He draws a parallel between, on the one hand, the end of the Roman republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire and, on the other, the end of the American republic and the birth of an autocratic American empire which he considers to be doomed in advance, predicting a much faster and more brutal fall in its case than its illustrious predecessor ever experienced.
On certain levels, his theory converges with André Lama’s views on the decline of the Roman empire (in Of Gods and Emperors and Roman Mixtures). Johnson believes that history repeats itself; not as the eternal return of identical events, but as a sequence of identical historical principles. His study is based on the observation that, for a long time, the Roman Empire (which first vanished with Caesar, then with Augustus) continued to invoke the hollowed principle of Senatus Populusque Romanus, meaning In the Name of the Senate and the Roman People, at a time when its rule was becoming both autocratic and secretive, relying heavily upon the Roman legions and praetorians and placing greater emphasis on the hunger for military conquest than on ensuring the security and prosperity of Roman Italy. The author likens the Roman Empire to today’s United States, which is quietly desisting its own republic status to become a venturesome empire, one that is less and less ‘democratic’ and governed by an opaque autocracy in which the American armed forces are acquiring an ever more decisive role. He states that ‘American imperialism shall destroy America as surely as Roman imperialism once destroyed Rome’.
Just like Rome, America is, according to Johnson, experiencing a transitional period between being a republic and becoming an autocratic and imperialistic empire. The difference, however, is that Rome’s imperial phase lasted four whole centuries (of which three were marked by decline), whereas America’s imperial stage can only be sustained for a few pathetic decades at most, owing to history’s increasing pace.
As Rome gradually exerted enormous military effort to occupy the entire known world, it simultaneously drained itself of all substance and weakened its own ability to protect its own core. Its actions led to the emergence of an ever-greater number of enemies and resulted in an unmanageable financial burden, as is the case today with the USA itself. What Johnson lacks the courage to clearly formulate (for reasons of political correctness, perhaps?) and André Lama perfectly understood is that the Roman Empire resulted in cosmopolitanism and brought about the end of the ‘ancient Roman’ ethnic foundation, just as the birth of the almighty American empire coincides with the decline of America’s founding European substratum. Whatever the case, the parallel between a Rome that constantly strived to push its limes further through relentless military mobilisation (involving the presence of an ever-growing number of foreign mercenaries) and the headlong rush currently experienced by an America that claims to be able to control the world through invasion, occupation and the establishment of permanent military bases is, from Johnson’s perspective, a striking one.
Just like the USA, Rome’s reasoning was along the lines of a contrast between ‘us and the rest of the world’, which is the very principle of unilateralism, or rather that of ‘unequal bilateralism’, as previously defined. Such a geostrategic approach is, however, untenable, because in the long run, the rest of the world will always turn out to be stronger for simple demographic reasons.
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In short, Johnson’s theory is that the USA is attempting to shift from the status of a ‘great republican nation’ to that of a ‘global, militarist empire’ (just as Rome once did) and that this metamorphosis is bound to be fatal to it. Under the heading ‘The Brief and Happy Life of the American Republic’, he resorts to cruel words and expresses the conviction that his country lacks the ability to enjoy an imperial destiny and is doomed, at best, to become a short-lived caricature of the Roman Empire:
There are none who would dare claim that the Roman Empire was, after Augustus, an example of enlightened governance, regardless of the enthusiasm borne for it by the neoconservatives, who subscribe to it by supporting the Bush administration, just like Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post, Max Boot of the Wall Street Journal and William Kristol of the Weekly Standard. The reasons for which I invoke Roman history are not aimed at suggesting that Bush, our Boy Emperor, is another Octavius, but rather at guessing what may well happen once he is gone. The history of the Roman republic from Caesar onwards suggests that it was imperialism and militarism which put it to death, a fact that all our conservative politicians refuse to understand. The militarism and professionalisation of a sizeable permanent army establishes new and indomitable sources of power within every political unit. The government is compelled to mobilise the masses so as to eventually utilise them as cannon fodder, leading to an increase in the power of generals that lend an attentive ear to their troops’ and veterans’ demands.
Following the abolition of men’s military service in 1973, our armed forces are now a mixed professional corps, whose troops have enlisted for personal reasons, in a general desire to succeed and survive within the American society’s “blind economic alley”. Overall, they do not expect to face any gunshots and simply hope to benefit from a civil servant’s status, with a guaranteed salary, secure lodging, free healthcare, protection against racial discrimination, and the opportunity to travel and enjoy a certain so
cial consideration thanks to their commitment to serving the American nation. They are perfectly aware of the fact that the alternative choice of a civil life in today’s America would involve a difficult search for employment, the absence of job security, the regular pilfering of their savings at the hands of the economic-financial leaders and their accountants, “privatised” medical care, low-rate public schools and colleges, and astronomically priced universities. These committed militaries are ripe enough not to abide by the rhetoric of patrician politicians that have graduated from Andover, Yale and the Harvard Business School with the sole ambition of personal fortune and power, but to listen to a new Caesar, Bonaparte or Juan Peron, meaning to populistic military leaders who have little interest in the democratic kowtows of a “republic” and are tempted by imperial proclamation.
Taking into account the calamitous outcome of the Afghan and Iraqi campaigns, Johnson has no means of knowing whether Bush will be re-elected in 2004 or not. However, he does predict the following:
Whoever Bush’s successor turns out to be, he will have to negotiate with the Pentagon, its 725 military bases scattered across the world and the military-industrial complex. He will have to submit to 55 years of secretive tradition regarding the true costs of American “Defence” and remain silent in the face of the devastations that our militaries are capable of inflicting. Things can only go from bad to worse. Historians have taught us that the propensity for things to worsen is endless. Roman history suggests that the American republic’s brief happy life is in grave danger and that its metamorphosis into a military empire is a possibility that would definitely not be the best solution.
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Ever since the publication of his Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, historian and economist Niall Ferguson, who also happens to be a professor at the university of New York, has become the idol of both the anti-Bush American Right and the anti-conservatives. One of his views is that the American ‘empire’ has completely failed to learn the lessons that stem from the expansion and fall of the British Empire and is thus merely an ‘empire in denial’.
He writes:
The United States is the empire that dare not speak its name. It is an empire in denial, and US denial of this poses a real danger to the world. An empire that doesn’t recognise its own power is a dangerous one.
With its military bases sprawled across the ¾s of the world and 31 % of global wealth, the American empire is even more powerful than the British one was at the time of its zenith in 1920, Ferguson states. He warns, however, that the American empire ‘is taking on the shape of a military complex all too much’, one that is perhaps even fraught with militarism and warmongering. It relies too heavily on ‘short-term tactics and interventions’ (Haiti, Lebanon, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and so on) and lacks the ‘sustained commitment to the dirty work of rebuilding’ the countries that it intervenes in and disrupts. ‘As Iraq is showing, military commands cannot create law and order. Their job is to kill people. The British empire learned that the military must be subservient to civilian power if you are to build civil administrations’. The very notion of a ’military administration’, as applied by Washington in Iraq, is a plain and simple aberration. From Ferguson’s perspective, the American impotence (in this specific case and many others, such as Afghanistan) seems to be the result of US ignorance with regard to the basic political data surrounding imperial hegemony and the fruit of America’s unawareness of its own capacities (through self-overestimation).
‘When you talk to Americans about empire they say, “but we came into existence to fight imperialism”’. And therein lies the American contradiction: the USA has become an ‘empire against its own will’, going against its own founding ideology, which accounts for the American inability to comprehend such a situation and absorb its rules. Ever since the annexation of the Philippines in 1898, the USA has, whether the Americans like it or not, entered an imperial cycle. We know that Donald Rumsfeld, the American Secretary of Defence, once uttered this unrealistic sentence: ‘We are in no way an “empire”, nor do we act as such’. The hypocritical desire to have America maintain the appearance of a democratic republic, which Chalmers Johnson was well aware of, is ever present.
Without admitting to it, military officials have seized the opportunity presented by the 11th of September to accelerate the imperial agenda, yet only a very small number of neoconservatives have dared to use such a term publicly.
Professor Ferguson believes in the existence of good and bad empires. In his view, the British Empire belongs to the former category, since, from the mid-19th century onwards, it spread both liberalism and democracy in the lands it claimed, protected women and reduced the infanticide rate. It embodied, in short, a civilising factor that tore entire peoples away from their backward customs, barbaric traditions, ignorance and famine. He states that ‘a liberal empire can do good’. He adopts word-for-word the ideology espoused by 19th-century European colonialism, which was not necessarily foolish, he says, when one compares the current state of those colonised peoples with their situation prior to imperial influence (especially in Africa).
The American empire is, however, an entirely different issue, as it has neither revealed itself to be civilising, nor pacifying, but has, in spite of enjoying a power far greater than that of imperial Great Britain, only been a source of ‘troubles and disorder’. Professor Ferguson is not overall hostile to the concept of an American empire, which is why his ideas have flattered the conservatives that oppose Bush. He merely demands an Empire that draws inspiration from the British notion and no longer embraces militarism. One of his foundational opinions is that ‘an American empire must take over from the late British Empire, and still be an anglophone and Anglo-Saxon imperium’. The American empire must thus, according to him, improve and become more ‘gentle’; otherwise, it is doomed to vanish.
It is this kind of doctrine that fascinates Tony Blair and numerous British elites: they are to renounce their ‘Britishness’, their British identity, and dissolve it within the American imperium, the successor of the British Empire. The problem is that, considering the ethnic modification which North America has been undergoing, this new empire is destined to become less and less Anglo-Saxon. Let us also point out that in the United Sates, those who oppose neo-imperialism and follow the views expressed by Ferguson do not in any way reject the imperial principle of American hegemony. They merely find Bush’s methods to be inadequate and counterproductive as a result of their militarism and brutality, but do not reject their basic principle. They also condemn all isolationism. In their eyes, it is always in America’s greatest interest to persevere in ‘civilising the world’. This goes to show that the NAI is not the opposite of ancient American tradition, but merely its disproportionate expression.
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The fact remains, however, that the ‘anti-imperial’ doctrine is gaining strength in America. Following the occupation of Iraq, a group known as the ‘Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy’ (CRFP) was formed, comprising various American intellectuals and people of influence (university staff, journalists, politicians, and so on). Its objective is to ‘persuade Americans that the imperial policy followed by the Bush administration is moving in a very dangerous direction’. This new thought and pressure group has obviously adopted the arguments often reiterated by Buchanan, according to whom the USA simply lack the necessary military and budgetary means to implement its remodelling policy upon the Middle-East and (a fortiori) the world. The CRFP sees itself as the opposition’s metapolitical ‘spearhead’ in the face of the neoconservatives.
They state:
We believe that the headlong rush that aims to transform the USA into an “empire” must immediately be stopped. We stand united in a desire to redirect the American security policy in a realistic direction, by means of serious and applicable measures that protect our vital interests and are compatible with true American values.
The argument that they present is that the
fortunes which have been squandered in Iraq in order to pacify and rebuild the country could have been spent on American domestic security and that this fateful occupation procedure has contributed to the Middle-East’s instability, given the Islamists a new front to fight along, endangered the global security of all Americans, isolated the USA from its own allies, weakened the US army and its credibility, etc.
Among those who have signed the CRFP manifesto, one encounters Douglas Bandow, Reagan’s former advisor, Scott McConnell, an editor at The American Conservative, and numerous other Rightist personalities belonging to the business world and the university spectrum. However, one can also find some Leftists such as Charles Kupchan from the Council of Foreign Relations, a man who once acted as Clinton’s advisor, which goes to prove the magnitude of the wave rising up against the ruling neoconservative and warmongering ideology. This metapolitical propaganda group has chosen Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to be its main targets. Christopher Prebble, who is also a CRFP member, believes that the American vision of global strategic and military domination, which is now an openly declared ambition, can only lead to disaster. The CRFP manifesto expounds on that:
Even if the terms “empire” and “imperialism” are officially rejected, an imperial fever has indeed emerged, overwhelming politicians within the Left and the Right. In order to understand the current state of affairs, all one has to do is to read the following formula expressed by Max Boot, one of the most prominent neoconservative theoreticians: “America’s Destiny is to Police the World”.
The charter adopted by this new movement, entitled The Perils of Empire, emphasises the following argument: the pursuit of the current neo-imperialistic policy will result in a global defeat for America the likes of which the it has never known. It was once the case that the USA became involved in armed conflict so as to defend its allies, even if the pretexts and motivations were not always ideal; today, America resorts to justifications that no one believes in order to attack others and establish an empire:
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