What Is the Problem?

One of the problems in talking about why we are in the fix we're in - and a major challenge for formulating an intellectual or an activist response - is agreeing on the nature and causes of our current condition.

We live in a time of existential crisis in three overlapping and, unfortunately, mutually reinforcing realms:

• Our planet is deeply stressed by pollution, the loss of biodiversity, and global climate change. The earth, which Buddhism and many of the other religions tell us is our mother, is in extremis.

• Further, too many of our fellow human beings live in conditions of utter poverty. More than a billion people in the world live on less than a dollar per day and half the world's population lives on less than $2 per day. Their lives are, by most measures, miserable - plagued by disease, hunger, cold, and the humiliation of homelessness. If they have homes, they may be covered by tin roofs and lacking basic amenities such as toilets or even outhouses. Their lives are characterized by the constant struggle to find food and safe drinking water. Meanwhile the richest 20 percent of the world grows richer - now consuming 86 percent of the world's wealth while the poorest 20 percent account for about 1.3 percent of world consumption.

• Finally, we are on the verge of war after war, with no end in sight. Our descendants, if we have them, will probably look back on this time as the beginning of an era of constant war, and they will wonder, much as we wonder now about the period leading up to World War I, why no one could stop the march of folly.

I do not have time to talk about how these problems reinforce each other. Rather, what I will do is concentrate on trying to say why we are on this military march of folly and then how we might get out of it.

My own interpretation of the United States in early 2003 is this: The patient presents with acute imperial behavioral tendencies. Specifically, the United States is attempting to use military, economic, and ideological power to dominate and control the globe. The drive is to maintain and use U.S. preeminence to the advantage of the United States. In other words, the underlying condition is acute imperialism, and each intervention and war, such as the current drive for counter-proliferation in Iraq, is a symptom.

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.

Contemporary U.S. Foreign Policy and What We Might Do About It

It might be tempting to overemphasize the new elements of U.S. foreign policy post-September 11, 2001, but there is a lot of continuity. In fact, it is probably more accurate to say that September 11 accelerated and reinforced preexisting characteristics and trends in U.S. foreign policy. I will just point to four continuities.

• First, increased military spending.

• Second, increased bullying of both enemies and allies and a drift away from multilateral institutions and international treaties.

• Third, U.S. military doctrine has gradually changed from deterrence to a more proactive policy. It has become one of maintaining and exercising omnipotence and control over uncertainty. Specifically, this is a shift in emphasis from containing to rolling back rogue states.

• Fourth, the United States has increasingly tended to define its interests very broadly. During the Clinton administration, the United States articulated an interest in promoting democracy - the national security strategy was "from containment to enlargement." The current administration wants to promote its version of democracy, free markets, and morality. Economics is imbued with the moral certitude of the Victorian imperialists. For example, in the national security strategy (PDF) released in September 2002, the Bush administration argues that, "The concept of 'free trade' arose as a moral principle even before it became a pillar of economics."[2] Indeed, the national security strategy defines freedom in economic terms:

  If you can make something that others value, you should be able to sell it to them. If others make something that you value, you should be able to buy it. This is real freedom, the freedom for a person - or a nation - to make a living.[3]

But Some Things Are New

September 11, 2001, introduced or accelerated five factors.

1. Greater fear in the U.S. public and among foreign-policy decision makers.

Unfortunately, because we do not know a lot about how fear works, we have tended to miss, I think, the very important consequence of fear and other emotions in dampening our ability to challenge authority, in decreasing our ability to trust others and to make peace, and in seeing how we might be perceived by others as threatening.

When fear is on the tips of our tongues, as it was during the "code orange" alert in February 2003, we tend to discuss the effects of fear on individuals and generally fail to examine how fear affects foreign-policy decision making. For example, cover stories in Time, Newsweek, and New York Magazine, and op-eds in the New York Times, all during the week of February 22, 2003, emphasized personal fears and techniques for coping with anxiety.[4]

Why is fear so important?

At her sentencing hearing before the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia, for war crimes she committed while she was president of Serbia, Biljana Plavsic told the court that she and other Serbs had been blinded by fear of their neighbors' intentions. She said, "Why did I not see it earlier? And how could our leaders and those who followed have committed such acts? The answer to both questions is, I believe, fear. A blinding fear that led to an obsession."[5] Plavsic told the tribunal, "In our obsession that Serbs should never again become victims of their neighbors, as they were in World War II, we allowed ourselves to become victimizers."[6]

Should we take such statements of victim turned victimizer at face value? If this is a process through which perceived victims become victimizers, it is one of the most pernicious remnants of political and cultural violence.

2. We have added terrorism to our list of immediate threats and now equate terrorists with rogue states.

The United States now argues not only that rogue states might pose a threat sometime in the future, but that they do pose an immediate military threat. In fact, instead of focusing on terrorists, we are using rogue states as a proxy for terrorists. This in part explains the focus on Iraq.

3. Also new is the political ascendance of the far-right hawks with an imperial agenda and a much greater concentration of foreign-policy information and decision-making power in the hands of the executive branch.

Congress and many intellectuals are self-censoring or are abdicating their critical role in the super-patriotic post-attack environment. Anyone who disagrees is portrayed as either mentally ill (e.g., Scott Ritter, the former inspector who disagrees with the U.S. march to war) or as just not patriotic enough.

4. The Bush administration has introduced three new military terms - preeminence, capabilities-based planning, and preemption.

Specifically, the articulated goal of U.S. strategy is maintaining "preeminence." As the president said at West Point, "America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge . . . ."[7] The point of preeminence is to maintain a world economic and political order that the United States feels comfortable with, to support its expansive view of the American self. According to the Defense Department, the "enduring national interests" of the United States, which are to be secured by force if necessary, include "contributing to economic well-being," which itself includes ensuring the "vitality and productivity of the global economy" and "access to key markets and strategic resources."[8]

The second innovation is the shift from basing military planning on intentions and likely threats to the "capabilities-based approach," where the United States attempts to "anticipate the capabilities that an adversary might employ" and "focuses more on how an adversary might fight than who the adversary might be and where war might occur."[9]

Indeed, if one focuses on what might happen, the scenarios for threats proliferate. As General Ralph Eberhart, who is in charge of the military's role in homeland security, says of the possible threats, "the list goes on and on. We can all envision the terrible things that might happen."[10]

So military planning is based on what might happen, the capabilities that others have or might get, not necessarily on what is more or less likely, and what we know about the intentions of others. And the proliferation of scenarios tends to heighten our fear.

Worse, because the military has not really given up on threat-based planning, we have - from the military's perspective - the best of both worlds. We must meet the threats posed by certain adversaries, but we must also meet and exceed all potential threats with capabilities of our own.

The third innovation is the preemptive war doctrine. As the administration says, "the best defense is a good offense." The United States will use conventional forces and, if necessary, nuclear forces to dispose of imminent threats.[11]

Perhaps underappreciated about the so-called preemptive doctrine is that it is not only legitimate preemption - where a state acts in self-defense to preempt an immediate and certain assault - but a preventive offensive war doctrine. It is a policy of beating down potential allies before they can possibly challenge the balance of power.

Why is the distinction between preemption and preventive offensive war important? Preemption is legitimate, legal, and it can be prudent on the reasoning that to engage in preemption is to use force when you know that an attack is imminent and the other has the capacity to do great harm if you do not act right then. A preventive offensive war strategy is considered illegal, illegitimate, and imprudent because you start war to preserve a balance of power against a potential future adversary. They are not about to attack, they may not even have the means yet to attack, but a preventive war is begun to make sure they cannot pose a challenge in the future.

Again, the aim of preventive war doctrines is to maintain military advantage. You strike first because waiting means that you might lose your military advantage. You are not sure the other is going to attack. They may not even yet be capable of doing so. But you strike first to make sure they never get the capacity to harm you. The problem with this, of course, is that such a presumption of ill intentions may be wrong and war may become a self-fulfilling prophesy. It brings a war that might not otherwise have happened. It also makes everyone else nervous about your intentions and helps create a world of greater instability.

Our fear is institutionalized in these goals and policies - preeminence, capabilities-based planning, and preemption. Our empire is an empire of insecurity.

Is There a Way Out of the Logic of American Empire?

The British historian A. J. P. Taylor once said: "The British did not relinquish their Empire by accident. They ceased to believe in it." That is the challenge. How can we make effective political arguments so that people no longer believe in the necessity of American empire?

To answer that question, I suggest we think back to effective political arguments in previous eras - namely the antislavery and anticolonial arguments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In those instances, activists were trying to undermine and eliminate economic, social, political, and military beliefs and practices that seemed normal and legitimate, where the balance of belief and power favored practices that had been taken for granted for thousands of years.

In trying to eliminate slavery and colonialism, activists used two kinds of arguments, practical and ethical arguments, to make incremental changes that first undermined and then eventually helped to abolish those institutions. They did this in 5 steps - denormalization, delegitimation, providing an alternative, changing the balance of political power, and institutionalizing their gains - that they kept repeating over and over again.

For example, with slavery, anti-slave trade and abolitionist activists in Britain, which was the largest slave trader in the eighteenth century, argued against slavery and changed the institution. Specifically, they:

• Denormalized slavery - they argued that it was not natural; they made slavery seem strange and disputed the longstanding notion of "natural" slaves.
• Delegitimized it - slavery was not done for a good reason, it was illegitimate; slavery was not in god's providence or holy plan.
• Provided an alternative that is better and seemed achievable - free labor was better on moral and economic grounds.
• Changed the balance of political power that supported those institutions by changing beliefs and focusing their energies. They fractured elite consensus and increased the power of those who supported their views. They used, for example, boycotts of slave-grown produce and sent petitions to Parliament.
• Institutionalized their gains incrementally. They regulated slave practices and the slave trade, gradually abolishing both.

Institutionalization increased the openness of the system. They could gradually pull the antislavery movement up by its argumentative bootstraps as one argument for slavery after another was demolished.

What these movements did not do was jump directly to changing the balance of political power and trying to institutionalize new beliefs. They spent decades on the first three steps. Slavery and the slave trade were first regulated in the late 1700s and Britain abolished the trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1834.

You could tell a similar story about the anticolonial movement. In other words, it was not economics that caused the change. It was partly that, but change was largely due to a change in beliefs as a result of effective political argumentation, which was used to help fracture elite consensus and organize political opposition.

How Could the Lessons of These Movements Be Applicable Today?

I will suggest that while we have to, of course, pay attention to the short run and support immediate antiwar activism, the long-run strategy has to focus on these five steps:

• denormalizing the dominant beliefs of U.S. empire

• delegitimizing them

• providing an alternative

• changing the balance of belief and power

• institutionalizing incremental gains

But at this early stage, we are better off focusing on the first three steps. Specifically,

• denormalizing militarism, fear, and the economic necessity of empire

• delegitimizing imperialism and preemption and preventive war doctrines

• providing and comparing alternatives, and building the new world conceptually

The best place to start with alternatives may be in terms of sustainable energy and a real strategy to combat terrorism and rogue states.

If we do a good job on these three steps it will be easier to support efforts to do the next steps of changing the balance of political power in the United States and globally. Specifically, as they grow in numbers in the United States, activists could attempt to decrease the isolation of the U.S. left and the peace movement both domestically and internationally. We must eventually work to change the views of members of the Democratic and Republican parties and elect different people to Congress. But I do not think this can be an immediate concern. If we lead, the politicians will follow.

And of course we also have to institutionalize any of the gains by constraining the United States in multilateral institutions, demilitarizing, and demobilizing.

What Kinds of Arguments Will Be Effective?

Three kinds of arguments might be effective at this point. First, there is what we might call rhetorical provocation. Provocations are outrageous or startling statements that shake things off track for a short period of time, but which plant the seeds of deeper criticism and get the attention of the U.S. media - such as a call for renewing the draft or the strange commercial about how SUV-driving habits support Osama bin Laden.

Artists can also provide important provocation because their work is emotional and can be used to increase empathy and understanding of others. One of the most effective provocations of the antislavery movement was the distribution of thousands of cross-sections of a slave ship by Thomas Clarkson. In the current situation, examples of artists' provocations include Peter Sellars's recent adaptation of Euripides's ancient Greek tragedy, Children of Herakles, which he updates to tell the plight of modern-day refugees, or Tony Kushner's new play, Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy, about Laura Bush reading a storybook to dead Iraqi children.[12]

And of course, civil disobedience is a provocation, but the content of the argument is sometimes obscured by the act and civil disobedience must be very carefully staged.

• A second set of arguments consists of a deeper analysis that can fracture the elite consensus. That deeper analysis has to:

• continue to unpack the illogic and dangers of U.S. foreign policy most vulnerable to critique are preventive war doctrine the U.S. is hiding under the rubric of preemption and capabilities based defense planning. Some policies of the administration may work, but others are clearly destabilizing and reckless.

• make linkages to issues where the Bush administration is vulnerable, to peace movement issues. E.g. the administration is vulnerable on the environment and the economy. Which takes us back to where I started: the three horses of the apocalypse: environmental decay, poverty, and war are linked.

This is related to the third kind of argument. We desperately need an articulation of alternative foreign, environmental, and energy policies for the United States. The alternatives are not simply isolationism or robust imperialism - as the administration calls it, preeminence. The United States must be a responsible power.

Toward the United States as a Responsible Power

Throughout the history of the republic, the United States has alternated among three ways of interacting with the rest of the world. For much of the early part of its history, the United States was isolationist, essentially little concerned with the area beyond the continent. The United States has also behaved as a great imperial power, using its enormous military strength to control others and get its way in the world. The most notable bout of imperialism occurred at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, when the United States acquired Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines in a relatively quick war against Spain. And the United States has also been what we might call a responsible power, participating in international institutions, and using its economic, political, and military resources to do good in the world when it has been asked to do so.

Each of these behaviors - isolationism, imperialism, and responsible multilateralism - has been championed by Americans with a particular view of the role of the United States in the world. The isolationists hold a view of the United States as an autonomous power who should be wary of "entangling alliances" and overextending U.S. power. In their view, the American self ought to be extremely narrowly defined. Political advocates of isolationism include George Washington and, more recently, Patrick Buchanan.

The champions of empire hold nearly the opposite understanding of America's self and its role in the world. In their view, the United States is the embodiment of the virtues and aspirations of humanity. Our values - democracy, capitalism, and individual rights - are and ought to be practiced by the rest of the world. Moreover, since the United States has the intellectual and material resources to lead (what Joseph Nye calls soft and hard power, respectively) we should do so - others should acquiesce. And because we are great, our interests are great - we are rightly concerned with what goes on elsewhere in the world, and it is not unnatural for us to want to try to affect, if not control, outcomes everywhere. Political advocates of empire most famously include Teddy Roosevelt and George W. Bush and the nineteenth-century admiral Alfred T. Mahan.

The advocates of responsible multilateralism understand the United States as one of several great powers in the world. Their view is that the American self cannot be isolated, but nor should it be hegemonic. Our economic and military power might be great, but we had better use it responsibly and with the assent of others. Responsible multilateralists see the United States as living in an interdependent world. Advocates of responsibility believe that we should not be shy about America's democratic values, but we cannot impose them. If we throw our weight around, Americans might win in the short term, but we lose respect and defuse our power in the long run. We are better off working with others to strengthen international institutions and safeguard U.S. interests in peace and stability. The political champions of responsibility included Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and more recently Jimmy Carter, and, to a certain extent on odd days, Colin Powell.

We are now at a point when the advocates of empire are again ascendant. They have arisen at a propitious time for their view. Globalization means the United States can think of itself as having truly global economic and political interests. Isolationism does not make sense for an interdependent economy. Further, the advocates of responsibility have been defeated politically in the United States, while advocates of responsibility in the Democratic and Republican parties have acquiesced to the advocates of empire.

The dangers of imperial aspirations are great. All empires fall: They overreach and are unable to control everything, all the time, everywhere; or their hubris prompts others to mount coalitions to challenge their ascendance; or their domestic populations revolt against the enormous costs in blood and treasure required to maintain an empire.

Rather, while we can be an empire at least in the short run, we should resist the siren call of imperialism. Responsible multilateralism is a much more prudent project.

Endnotes

1. Catherine Lutz, Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001). [Return to text]

2. The White House, National Security Council, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (September 17, 2002): 18, http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.pdf (PDF). [Return to text]

3. National Security Council, National Security Strategy, 18. [Return to text]

4. Time.com, "Living in Terror," Cover Archive sec., February 24, 2003, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/archive/covers/0,16641,1101030224,00.html. [Return to text]

5. Michael Brissenden, "Plavsic Pleads Guilty to War Crimes," News Online, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, December 19, 2002, http://www.abc.net.au/am/s749749.htm (accessed December 26, 2002). [Return to text]

6. Marlise Simons, "Crossing Paths: Albright Testifies in War Crimes Case," New York Times, December 18, 2002, sec. A. [Return to text]

7. U.S. Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review Report (Washington, DC: U.S. GPO, September 30, 2001): 30 and 62, http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/qdr2001.pdf (PDF), see also George W. Bush, "Remarks by the President at 2002 Graduation Exercise of the United States Military Academy," (West Point, NY, June 1, 2002), http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020601-3.html. [Return to text]

8. Defense Department, Quadrennial Defense Review Report, 2. [Return to text]

9. Defense Department, Quadrennial Defense Review Report, 14. [Return to text]

10. Ralph Eberhart, quoted in Philip Shenon and Eric Schmitt, "At U.S. Nerve Center, Daily Talks on the Worst Fears," New York Times, December 27, 2002, sec. A. [Return to text]

11. For a more extended discussion of the doctrine of preemption, see Neta C. Crawford, "The Best Defense: The Problem with Bush's 'Preemptive' War Doctrine," Boston Review, February/March 2003, http://bostonreview.net/BR28.1/crawford.html. [Return to text]