America
Continues as Always
to Have Imperial Ambitions
By JONATHAN POWER
LONDON-- Bill Clinton's first foreign
policy action when he became president was to bomb Iraq. Now
five years on perhaps he is going to end up bombing Iraq
again. With a military whose firepower has no peer,
supported by a budget more than the military budgets of all
the other industrial nations of the world combined, the
temptation to work outside of UN authority and deliver a
quick one is doubtless difficult to resist. The job of U.S.
president comes with the burden of two hundred years of
America's twin aspirations--to be invulnerable and to be
able to realize its imperial ambitions.
One thing can be said with assurance
after watching Mr. Clinton as commander-in-chief for five
years: he never absorbed in any significant amounts the
worldly wisdom of his mentor, William Fulbright, the
Arkansas senator who became chairman of the Senate's foreign
relations committee and who resisted president Lyndon
Johnson's expansion of the Vietnam War with far greater
effectiveness than the Oxford student out on the streets of
London, shouting slogans at the American embassy. It was
Fulbright wno coined the phrase, in the title of his great
book on foreign policy, "The Arrogance of Power." One
wonders what term of endearment he would use for his
country, if alive today?
Clinton once said that the U.S. cannot
be "simply...another great power." But he has never put
flesh on this thought and has surrounded himself with
foreign policy advisors who could not sit comfortably in the
same room as the likes of Fulbright.
If Bill Clinton had wanted a different
foreign policy in the mold of Fulbright there were good
thoughtful people to hire--such as Ronald Steel, professor
of international relations at the University of Southern
California and author of "Temptations of a Superpower" who
has argued that "if America is not to exhaust itself in
pursuit of grandiose ambitions it must re-establish a sense
of the feasible." Or Harvey Sapolsky professor of public
policy at M.I.T. who earlier this year in a seminal article
in Harvard University's "International Security" effectively
demolished the rationale behind America's growing reach
abroad, in particular NATO expansion and a more vigorous
presence in east Asia.
Perhaps, too, he should bring in the
managing editor of "Foreign Affairs" magazine, Farsed
Zukaria, who in an artful piece in its non-establishment
rival, "World Policy Journal" strips off the layers of
obfuscation and myth-making in American foreign policy to
make plain that the U.S. has always been driven by
expansionist desires and now that it meets no real
resistance is perhaps at last going to realize its innermost
desires.
"Once the story goes," mocks Mr.
Zakaria, "there was a great and pure republic called the
United States of America. It was governed by statesmen who
husbanded the nation's power and exercised it prudently.
America's history was not one of imperialism but of economic
growth and nation building."
The only period when this comfortable,
but very widely accepted received interpretation, is
disallowed by today's conventional wisdom was during the
presidency of William McKinley who at the end of the
nineteenth century unaccountably went to war with Spain and
annexed the Philippines.
If only this were the one exception.
But the truth is, writes Mr. Zakaria, "ever since the
thirteen colonies, nestled east of the Allegheny Mountains,
relentlessly marched west to acquire and occupy the
continent, expansionism and imperialism have been part of
the American ideal."
These ambitions were not exhausted
with the conquest of California. In the 1850s, in the
aftermath of the Mexican war, American leaders waxed lyrical
on the need for further expansion. In 1853 President
Franklin Pierce said he would "not be controlled by any
timid forebodings of evil from expansionism."
American diplomats tried to negotiate
the purchase of parts of Mexico, Cuba and Hawaii. Even
Canada was a target. John Quincy Adams thought that in the
end the U.S. would annex all of North America.
For a while the Civil War tempered
these ambitions. Once over they reappeared, with new fervor.
Since Britain had allied itself with the defeated
Confederacy revenge would be sweet if its Canadian
possession to the north could be taken. Only the might of
the British navy kept the American debate, led by Abraham
Lincoln's imperial-minded, secretary of state, William Henry
Seward, within sensible bounds.
By the turn of the century America had
the wealth, the power and the means to chart its own foreign
waters, irrespective of Britain. And now, at century's end,
the world is America's oyster. The danger of such power is
the danger of those who always fly too close to the sun. To
believe that what is good for America is good for the world
is to set America up, in the due course of time, for an
equal and opposite reaction.
This is not to say that today's issue
of bringing Saddam Hussein to book is wrong. It is
profoundly right. But, although America has the military
muscle to do it alone, it has to discipline itself to take
the world along with it.
The arrogance of power, long in the
making, has to find the route to humility. But if the boy
from Arkansas cannot do it, with all his advantages, who
can?
November 12,
1997, LONDON
Copyright © 1997 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
|