Imperial Waltz

Is American power good, bad, or distressingly reluctant?

Michael Young from the January 2005 issue

Colossus: The Price of America's Empire, by Niall Ferguson, New York: Penguin Press, 384 pages, $25.95

An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, by David Frum and Richard Perle, New York: Random House, 284 pages, $25.95

Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East, by Rashid Khalidi, Boston: Beacon Press, 223 pages, $23

Writing of Britain's Victorian empire, James (now Jan) Morris observed that the imperial experience released emotions "laced with the hope of profit, the pleasure of authority and the chance of doing good." He added that "the theme grows heavier as it progresses, an instinct matures into a duty, a duty curdles into a craze, a craze becomes a burden." By the end of the cycle, the empire, accepted at the start, is "utterly discredited."

Those emotions of empire, this time the American version, are captured, separately, in David Frum and Richard Perle's An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, Rashid Khalidi's Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East, and Niall Ferguson's Colossus: The Price of America's Empire. Frum and Perle see American domination as an opportunity to do good. Khalidi fast-forwards to the discredit ultimately heaped on empire. Ferguson provides a partial synthesis of the two perspectives (minus Khalidi's animosity). Conscious of how the American empire blends the hope of profit with the desire to do good, as well as the pleasures and rights of authority, he worries that the United States may be dangerously ignorant of its imperial fate.

While only Khalidi deals solely with the Middle East, all the authors keep a steady eye on the region. A recurring theme is their concern with the spread of open societies and free markets--or the charade of that project--particularly in the Arab world. Frum and Perle are undone by speaking out of both the liberal and the illiberal sides of their mouths, even as they deny that the U.S. is an empire at all. Khalidi self-destructs thanks to his inability even to consider a benevolent aspect to empire. Ferguson, who has no doubts about America's imperialism, recognizes the liberalizing potential of its power while playing down its darker side.

Ferguson's creativity is emancipating. An inescapable conclusion about the modern Middle East is that indigenous liberal reform has been a spectacular illusion. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. As Arab countries embarked on post-colonial independence, they became less free. Most Arab civil societies have been bludgeoned into silence by their regimes, with even the more representative systems denying their citizens true political participation.

Ferguson, positing the need for a liberal American empire, suggests a possible mechanism for change from the outside, even as he wonders whether the U.S. is up to the task. And while there has been much denigration of the notion that democracy and free markets can be imposed, Ferguson suggests it is indeed possible. More pertinently, the 9/11 attacks underlined how the success of this ambition in the Middle East is intimately tied to U.S. national security.

There is of course the problem of defining empire. For former Pentagon official Richard Perle and former Bush speechwriter David Frum, America is not an empire because free societies cannot be ruthlessly expansionist--givers of freedom don't wantonly accumulate power. They write in closing that "America's vocation is not an imperial vocation. Our vocation is to support justice with power. It is a vocation that has earned us terrible enemies. It is a vocation that has made us, at our best moments, the hope of the world."

Perle and Frum banish thoughts of a U.S. empire because the motivation for American action--particularly against terrorism, the main theme of their book--is altruistic. Global American democracy is antithetical to empire, or it might vindicate those arguing that terrorism is the price the U.S. must pay for its global domination. In essence, if you're hegemonic, then why act surprised when you're attacked? Yet the two issue a call to arms: "At this dangerous moment many in the American political and media elite are losing the nerve for the fight....We can feel the will to win ebbing in Washington; we sense the reversion to the bad old habits of complacency and denial."

Perle and Frum's romantic belief in America often seems contradictory. In their blueprint for the U.S. war on terrorism, they show a readiness to suspend the liberties the republic stands for if these were somehow to limit the government's ability to advance its interests forcefully. They are far more partial to the exercise of power than they are to liberalism.

In this regard, nowhere are Perle and Frum's arguments less convincing than in how they address the Middle East, where the authors allow their pro-Israel prejudices to get the better of their judgment. They offer a robust defense of the Iraq war, which they see as a possible route to Middle Eastern democracy. While the escalation of the insurgency has overcome talk of democracy in Iraq, let alone in the wider Arab world, one can argue in defense of Perle and Frum that the ambitions of the liberalization project should not be judged by the poor execution of the occupation.

Regarding the Palestinians, the elephant in the living room of those who argue that U.S. influence in Iraq can help spread Middle Eastern liberalism, Perle and Frum side with the worst on Israel's far right. In a shallow passage they write that in the Arab and Muslim world "the Palestinian issue has never been about compassion, mercy, or even justice. First and always, the issue has been about vengeance."

This belief is not only untrue; it suggests that force alone can resolve the Palestinian problem. Perle and Frum offer little to a Palestinian state: It should be an entity that has no means of destroying Israel, that can maintain order and stop terrorism but also accept "demilitarization" and "renounce all claims to the territory of a secure and defensible Israel." The latter formulation is loaded: The dispute is essentially about land, and Israeli governments have used the "secure and defensible" caveat to annex Palestinian territory. In the end, Perle and Frum propose that, like Arab Jews who moved to Israel, "the exiled Palestinians should likewise be accepted as citizens of Arab countries in which they now live."

Swallowing disappointment is hardly a compelling cure for Palestinian-Israeli hostility, especially when Palestinians are a generation away from being a demographic majority between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. Moreover, the resettlement of Palestinian refugees in Arab countries is a sore point in a region where the perception is that Israel rests on a foundation of ethnic cleansing. Perle and Frum, as self-identified agents of liberal self-determination, cannot leave the matter there. What is good for the Iraqis must be good for the Palestinians. But they do leave it there, ignoring the fact that America's inability to resolve this contradiction has undermined Arab confidence in the sincerity of its democratization project in the Middle East.