The Main Roots of U.S. Imperialism

Fear. We in the United States and in our government are deeply frightened. We fear the military and other threats that others actually or might pose, and we desire to control those threats.

This enormous fear is of course ironic because ours is perhaps the time of greatest U.S. power, when the United States should feel most secure. After all, at about $400 billion dollars per year, we spend more on the military than the next 25 nations combined and many times more than the seven countries identified as potential enemies - Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria. U.S. military spending now accounts for about 36 percent of world military spending.

The second cause of American imperialism is the institutionalization of militarist beliefs. Militarism is the view that military force is usually efficacious - that is, that the only way to ensure that others do what you want is by the threat and use of military force. Militarism is now an unreflective habit. We can see this in the failure to demobilize and demilitarize following World War II and the end of the Cold War. One of the best recent accounts of this militarism is by the anthropologist Catherine Lutz, in her book Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century,[1] as Lois Lorentzen shows in her paper for this conference. Other evidence of the deeply embedded militarism of the United States is the consistency and growth in U.S. military spending, even before the terrorist threat emerged. In an ironic and perverse sense, our militarism is a large part of the cause of our fear. Because others think we have misused our military power, they want to defend themselves from or hurt the United States.

The third root of U.S. imperialism is the conviction of true belief in the benefits of U.S. hegemony, and a rational pursuit of imperial goals. Specifically, for example, the conviction is widely held that the prosperity and survival of the U.S. economy and our lifestyles depends on access to cheap oil and markets. In other words, if we had to pay too much, our economy would suffer. I do not necessarily think we should accept this way of thinking, but we certainly must acknowledge it. Part of the conviction in the virtue of hegemony is also rooted in our arrogance, the longstanding belief in American exceptionalism. This hubris is the contemporary equivalent of what the nineteenth-century British explorer David Livingstone called "Christianity, commerce, and civilization." In the contemporary version of "Christianity, commerce, and civilization," the United States opposes militant Islam, closed markets, and the barbarism of nondemocratic states that hurt their own people. The United States asserts fundamentalist Christian values in a semisecular way, has a policy of forcing structural adjustment despite growing evidence that it does not work, and asserts the superiority of Western culture over others.