America: a Beacon, not a Policeman	Empire Madness--Kagan-Kristol Exchanging freedom for Empire--Book Analysis in REASON 8/01 & Thomas Fleming on American Empire, 1999	Americans Against World Empire  Homepage

Foreign Policy Folly   

by William Ruger  Excerpts from REASON MAGAZINE analysis of America's empire lobby and its costs to come in lost freedom. Go to  http://reason.com/0106/cr.wr.foreign.html  for entire review.

A worrisome conservative strategic vision ----IHS alum William Ruger critiques PRESENT DANGER:  CRISIS AND OPPORTUNITY IN AMERICAN FOREIGN AND DEFENSE POLICY,   edited by Robert Kagan and William Kristol

From the Review--     "PRESENT DANGERS hardly offers the conservative vision it advertises, at least in the American sense of the word. First, it is a policy that will threaten rather than preserve many of America’s traditional values, such as individual liberty, small government, and anti-militarism. As has been pointed out by a number of historians, war and preparing for war are the soils that nurture the growth of state power, burdensome taxation, conscription, and militarism. If American conservatism should stand for anything, it should be the goal of limited government. Yet the primacist policies offered here guarantee the opposite: a leviathan."

"The United States today is a superpower without rival, perhaps even a modern empire. It dominates the world like no other state since Rome commanded the Mediterranean. America’s legions are deployed all over the globe, its generals act like proconsuls, and its ships and submarines rule the seas. The United States’ allies depend on American military power for their security, fearing that it will someday fold up its standards and return home. Even the United States’ rivals acknowledge its power while hoping for its decline.

"But how long can this "unipolar moment" last? And is such an imperial position necessary to secure and advance America’s interests and values? Present Dangers, a volume edited by Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment and William Kristol of the Weekly Standard, is a salvo aimed squarely at those who are skeptical that this moment can endure and that the United States requires a Roman solution for the needs and health of the American republic. Present Dangers is a compilation of pieces by many of today’s most prominent conservative internationalists. Although performed by a chorus, the authors sing a relatively consistent medley in support of Kagan and Kristol’s call for an American foreign policy of "benevolent global hegemony.".................

"First, the United States must increase defense spending by up to $100 billion per year and build a missile defense system. Such an increase would rocket the defense budget up to as much as $400 billion per annum. Second, because "threats to the interests of our allies are threats to us," the U.S. must make a more serious commitment to its allies. Third, instability and uncivilized behavior in vital regions should be treated very seriously because "eventually, the crises would appear at our doorstep."

"Finally, with strong allies and a robust military at its back, the United States would be free to "set about making trouble for hostile and potentially hostile nations.".....

"While certainly worth reading and pondering, Present Dangers outlines a foreign policy that is a recipe for disaster.......... . Most important, their foreign policy vision is strategically unsound and more likely to damage American interests and values than promote them. Considering the impressive roster lined up in this book, it is surprising and unfortunate to see them err so dramatically. It is more surprising still that these conservative wisemen have taken their cues from Theodore Roosevelt and been guided down a path that is actually not conservative at all.

"The most significant weakness of Present Dangers is that the foreign policy it prescribes is built on a flawed understanding of international politics. Its authors fail to appreciate that seeking to maintain hegemony is an excessively costly and ultimately fruitless effort. By Kagan and Kristol’s own calculations, the minimum cost to implement their policy will be more than $1 trillion every three years. This does not even account for expenditures arising from any interventions, let alone wars, that may become necessary to maintain American primacy. Such spending "needs" are truly remarkable considering that U.S. military spending already accounts for more than one-third of military expenditures worldwide, and few of our rivals are among the top 10 spenders. (In fact, the biggest spenders are actually friendly states.).......................

"Indeed, as most students of international politics know, the exertions of maintaining hegemony will only increase the incentives for others to balance American power. This is particularly the case when the hegemon explicitly sets about "making trouble" for those who fail to conform to its preferences. In fact, Peter Rodman’s chapter on Russia presents evidence that current U.S. dominance may already be provoking counterbalancing behavior.

"Furthermore, it is commonly known that hegemons bear the seeds of their own destruction. The cost of underwriting the international order is borne mostly by the dominant power, thus allowing others to free-ride............"Another flaw in the logic of this book’s overarching vision is its assumption............ that threats to others are actually threats to the U.S. itself..........

"Lastly, rather than a policy rooted in conservatism, the vision presented in Present Dangers instead succumbs to what F.A. Hayek called the "fatal conceit" of modern liberalism: "that man is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes." While a few contributors, notably Friedberg, are careful to avoid this conceit, one senses in this book a certain hubris about the ability to control events in world politics. Once you believe that "everything depends on what we do now," it is easy to stumble down a path to doom. "Instead, the United States must realize its limited capacity to control events in international politics. Indeed, it must rid itself of the unrealistic belief that every seam is connected and that the United States should or could repair any tear in the fiber of world peace and stability. Once these fallacies are understood as such, America, and perhaps even conservatism, can safely return to normalcy."

William Ruger (wruger@hotmail.com) is a Ph.D. candidate in politics at Brandeis University and was a visiting instructor at Brigham Young University from 1997 to 2000.

The Empire Strikes Out  by Thomas Fleming,

The Independent (London) , March 7, 1999, Sunday SECTION: COMMENT; Pg. 27

THE US HAS REPLACED SOVIET RUSSIA AS THE WORLD'S IMPERIALIST BULLY, ARGUES

    Negotiations over the future of Kosovo are scheduled to resume in a week's

time, but the mood in Washington is far from conciliatory. Last week the

US Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, again threatened to bomb Yugoslavia if

the Serbian President, Slobodan Milosevic, continued his

crackdown on the Albanians. Bill Clinton made similar threats and spoke of the

"inexorable logic of globalisation". Madeleine Albright was even more

plain-spoken during the final days of talks at Rambouillet last month. Cutting

through the usual foggy rhetoric about regional stability and democracy,

the Secretary of State told the Albanian delegates that they had to sign the

agreement, because otherwise Nato could not bomb the Serbs when they

refused to ratify the agreement.

According to the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, no agreement is

valid if it has been "procured by the threat or use of force". In fact, once

upon a time the whole point of diplomacy was to find non-violent solutions to

international conflicts. For American diplomats, apparently, the reverse

is now true. Peace has to be justified, while bombing is self- evidently a

good thing, whether the target is an oil pipeline in Iraq, as it was last

week, a

pharmaceutical factory in Sudan - or anywhere in Serbia.

The United States has come a long way in a very short time. In the weeks after

the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989, American political leaders

began calculating the "peace dividend" to be realised once the troops were

brought home and the weapons factories shut down. Within months,

however, those same politicians were discovering new dangers to world peace:

South American drug lords, Middle Eastern dictators, and the empire-

building Bosnian Serbs, whose entire population could fit comfortably into the

ruins of Detroit.

In fact, there is an American military presence in over 100 countries around

the globe. Saddam Hussein and the Serbs still top the list of international

threats, but the director of the CIA recently warned the American Congress

against the armed might of North Korea, which could develop a two- stage

missile that - if it found a way of adding its current single-stage missile on

top - just might be able to hit some iceberg off the coast of Alaska.

This is what life is like in the "world's only remaining superpower". We

Americans go to bed at night cringing in fear over what the Serbs and

Koreans are plotting, and because we do not trust our ground forces to storm

the walls of Pristina or Pyongyang, we must rely on the threat of Nato

air-strikes.

Now that the Soviet empire belongs to history, and for the foreseeable future

Germany is in no position to go back to rattling sabres, the United States

is top dog - unchallenged in its might, but irresponsible in its leadership

and uncontrolled in its appetite for hegemony. Some American conservatives

(in Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard, for example) are already calling for an

American "imperium", which they have tried, unsuccessfully, to

distinguish from an American empire. (Americans don't study Latin.) Whatever

we agree to call it, American adventurism - so reminiscent of Soviet

adventurism under Brezhnev - represents the greatest force for evil in the

world today.

The comparison of Brezhnev's Russia with Clinton's America is not entirely far

-fetched. Of course, life in Moscow was grimmer than it is in Santa

Barbara, but at least Soviet citizens were spared some of the seamier

blessings of American-style democracy: child pornography on the news stands,

virtual sex on the internet, and on TV the prime-time confessions of Monica

Lewinsky - the goddess of sexual consumerism.

For the two decades after Vietnam American consumers had to be content with

"getting and spending", and our imperial urges were tranquillised by

soft porn and prescription drugs, but with the election of a former spy-chief

to the presidency, the globalists came out of the closet, dresssed for

combat. The Gulf War was the turning point. Despite George Bush's slick

diplomacy, his administration never made it plain either to Congress or to

the people what we were doing in Iraq. It was all about oil. Or the legitimacy

of the Kuwaiti royal family. Or a demonstration that we had finally got

over Vietnam. It didn't matter which pretext was trotted out, Congress

approved and the American people loved it. Our top guns were kicking ass and

running about the same risk as having a night on the town in Los Angeles.

Granted, we did not topple Saddam Hussein; in fact we accomplished virtually

nothing - except this: we showed our rivals who was running the

world. The Japanese were flooding the American market with cheap cars and

television sets; the Europeans were progressing steadily towards an

economic and political union that would potentially beat American competition;

but we had the guns and the bombs. Of course, we always did have

them, but so long as the Soviets were around we were reluctant to use them.

Now the gloves are off. The Europeans must not succumb to delusions

of independence, when even Chiquita banana turns out to have more clout than

the entire European Union.

It is too easy to blame Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright for American

foreign policy. The truth is, there is virtually no political opposition to the

new imperialism, except in the sense that the Republicans are even more eager

to use military force. The one honourable exception is Senator Bob

Smith, the New Hampshire Republican running for his party's presidential

nomination. Describing Mr Clinton's threat to bomb the Serbs as

"outrageous", Mr Smith went on to declare that "Kosovo is as much a part of

Yugoslavia as New Hampshire is of the United States". His sense of

political geography is shared by few of his colleagues, and it will win him

few votes in the upcoming primary elections.

There are those who like to say that all this bullying and bombing is the

fault of evil politicians, because the heart of the American people is

uncorrupted. This a dangerous fantasy: although half of Americans polled in a

recent survey said they couldn't find Kosovo on a map, some 55 per

cent are in favour of bombing the place. The TV Nation has thrown its support

behind President Clinton, and all they will care about, if we do start

bombing, is the complete safety of the American boys and girls who drop the

bombs and fire the missiles. Mothers and fathers have always worried

when they sent their children off to war and we have always prayed that our

kids would kill their kids and come home safe and sound. The difference

today is that we Americans believe we have a right to impose our will on the

world without running any significant risks. If the Serbs succeeded in

inflicting a few hundred casualties, the American public would demand either

an end to the campaign or the use of nuclear weapons, preferably some

of the clean little tactical devices the Pentagon has been working on.

In their hearts most Americans mean well. In many respects, the American

empire is still the smiley-faced theme-park that Europeans remember. We

can never hope to match the domestic tyranny of Chinese Communists or the

jackbooted religious zealotry of Islamic fundamentalist states. We don't

like jackboots or concentration camps over here; we prefer soft pornography,

recreational drugs, and cable television. Hedonism does a far more

effective job of controlling the yahoos than crackdowns or forced-labour

camps, and if only Saddam and Slobodan would give up their futile

resistance to Americanisation, their people could enjoy all the blessings of

imperial citizenship: a Big Mac in every microwave, a satellite dish in front

of every trailer, and endless reruns of Seinfeld, Melrose Place and Friends.

From time to time the French try to limit the number of American films that

can be shown in France, and a few months ago I saw an anti-McDonald's

demonstration in front of the duomo in Milan, but when Uncle Sam sends out the

call for allied peace-keeping troops, the French and the Italians will

be there. Like the Ionian Greeks who accompanied Xerxes in his campaign to

enslave Hellas, they will do what they have to do.

Americans, of course, don't study either Latin grammar or Greek history. This

is where the English have the advantage. In a coy wink at the truth,

Tony Blair's government has named the Kosovo mission "Operation Agricola"

after the Roman general who pacified Britain, first by bribing the

savages with consumer luxuries and then by mercilessly crushing all

resistance. Agricola was the father-in-law of the historian Tacitus, who summed

up Roman imperial policy in a speech given by a British chieftain: "They make

a desert, they call it peace." Or, in the contemporary idiom of the US

Senate, they conduct missile strikes and they call it peaceful resolution.

Thomas Fleming is editor of 'Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture'.

LOAD-DATE: March 8, 1999

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