While I agree with the spirit of this essay, my 27 years of Army experience suggests that Georges Clemenceau was right: "War is too important to be left to the generals."
 

Gen. Wesley Clark, 8/15/08:
I've been very pleased to see NATO enlarge as it has over the last few years, but every, every step has to be carefully looked at. It has to have the, the backing of all NATO members, and there is some membership criteria that have to be met. One of those membership criteria incidentally is that all the territorial issues have to be resolved. they weren't resolved in the case of Georgia. The United States proposed Georgia for membership. The European allies asked some tough questions. It was decided that to give it a little bit more time. So, I don't think that the United States or NATO's responsible for this. But I do think that we could've seen this crisis coming. I think we should've worked for years to diffuse this and protect Georgia's claims on South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Russian encroachment.
 

Imperialism is about imposing political and/or territorial control over other nations. See the Russian military conquest of much of Gerogia.

In contrast, what Ajami and much of the western left call American "imperialism" is in fact a revolutionary creed to spread freedom and democracy across the world, which is in fact granting the gift of self determination to and not American control over foreign peoples.

In any case, the necessity that the President be a competent CiC has nothing to do with American imperialism no matter how you define it. This fundamental presidential competence is important because national security is the most basic of the duties of the national government and the President is the only elected representative who may exercise military command power under our Constitution. Thus, the President should be able to do the job for which we are electing him or her.
 

Ajami's essay is not about "national security" in the sense of protecting a more-or-less isolated country from attack, which George Washington was certainly concerned with. It is about what he himself calls an "imperial republic," where "national security" means protecting imperial interests. These are Ajami's terms, not mine. I'm sure he shares Bart's optimistic (most would say panglossian) notion of American motives, but that's ultimately beside the point, because many of the dominated subalterns have not and do not.
 

"Bart" DeAuthoritarian:

Imperialism is about imposing political and/or territorial control over other nations. See the Russian military conquest of much of Gerogia.

In contrast, what Ajami and much of the western left call American "imperialism" is in fact a revolutionary creed to spread 'freedom' and 'democracy' across the world...

"... with 'Shock and Awe', at the point of a gun."

As for this "freedom and democracy", ask Iran, Nicaragua, Honduras, Chile, etc. what they think about that....

Cheers,
 

Prof. Levinson:

"...most would say panglossian..."

Dr. Pangloss -- nay, even Voltaire -- wasn't that cynical.

Just as a point of historical and literary accuracy.

Cheers,
 

Still bored:

Imperialism is about imposing political and/or territorial control over other nations. See the Russian military conquest of much of Gerogia.

See also U.S. invasions of Iraq, Vietnam, various South and Central American countries, Phillipines,...

In contrast, what Ajami and much of the western left call American "imperialism" is in fact a revolutionary screed to claim to spread freedom and democracy across the world, which is in fact reluctantly, if ever granting the gift of self determination to xxx xxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxx foreign peoples.

Fixed the misspellings.
 

First, I would suggest that if you are going to blog about Ajami's post, you link to it, or at least excerpt more than a couple of sentences.

Second, I think you are posing a false choice between John Yoo on the one hand and Barack Obama on the other. There is lots of ground in between.

Third, I continue to believe that you are grossly overstating your case using terms like dictator (and now imperialism).

Imagine if I called Obama's proposed policies a form of Stalinism. Not, you know, the type of Stalinism that results in mass murder, gulags, and totalitarianism, but Stalinism in the sense that he wants a more robust social safety net than McCain. One might question whether I was using loaded terms for the express purpose of prejudicing the reader's reaction to my arguments. (Quoting Ajami does not cure this problem any more than if I premised my comment on responding to an editorial by, say, Bill Kristol, that called Obama a Stalinist.)

Given that everyone involved in the Iraq war discusses it in terms of "when can we leave" -- be it next year or 10 years from now -- I think that the term imperialism is self-evidently inapplicable. Moreover, why would we have conceded that we must leave when they (the Iraqi government) ask us to leave and that we can send no more troops there than they authorize? That hardly sounds like the definition of imperialism that is in common usage.

IMPERIALISM

SYLLABICATION: im·pe·ri·al·ism

PRONUNCIATION: m-pîr--lzm

NOUN: 1. The policy of extending a nation's authority by territorial acquisition or by the establishment of economic and political hegemony over other nations. 2. The system, policies, or practices of such a government.

OTHER FORMS:

im·peri·al·ist —ADJECTIVE & NOUN
im·peri·al·istic —ADJECTIVE
im·peri·al·isti·cal·ly —ADVERB

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

http://www.bartleby.com/61/76/I0057600.html
 

Zachary,
Your critique would, perhaps, make sense if Levinson had written an attack on John McCain, and had used a quote of Ajami's to introduce incendiary language. That is not, however, the case. Levinson uses Ajami's language because he is writing a response to Ajami--all in all, a pretty standard way of going about things.
While the conflation of imperial and imperialist which Levinson practices might be called somewhat incendiary, the use of the word imperial is certainly not, and is, moreover, integral to the whole thrust of the post.
Briefly: Ajami, following Huntington's definition, discusses America's imperial mode, in which it uses its power to reshape the world. This mode, of which Ajami approves, requires a president who is primarily a commander-in-chief. It is this idea which Levinson pursues in his discussion.
 

A very thought-provoking series of essays. Certainly, Machiavelli's thoughts about the necessity for a republic to become 'imperial' were at the back of the Founders' minds. See, e.g., the scholarship of J.G.A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner. It might be pointed out that crucial to Machiavelli's praise of the Roman dictatorship was the fact that, after his term, the dictator was liable to prosecution for any harm his measures entailed.
 

fraud guy said...

BD: Imperialism is about imposing political and/or territorial control over other nations. See the Russian military conquest of much of Gerogia.

See also U.S. invasions of Iraq, Vietnam, various South and Central American countries, Phillipines,...

This selection of countries makes a illustrative contrast.

Our conquest of the Phillipines for the purposes of territorial and political control is a perfect example of imperialism.

In contrast, our Cold War liberation of countries occupied by the Soviet Empire, like the liberation of Western Europe from the Nazis the generation, is a perfect example of granting the gift of freedom to foreign peoples.

My argument was not that America is incapable of imperialism. Our country was established through conquest. Rather, I am simply pointing out that what the western left currently calls American "imperialism" is nothing of the sort. This label is Orwellian.
 

sandy levinson said...

Ajami's essay is not about "national security" in the sense of protecting a more-or-less isolated country from attack, which George Washington was certainly concerned with. It is about what he himself calls an "imperial republic," where "national security" means protecting imperial interests.

Imperial interests would be other nations which we politically or territorially control. Apart from a few possessions remaining from our imperial phase, we have no "imperial interests" around the world to protect.

Rather, the US does have extensive economic interests and treaty obligations around the world which we have an interest in protecting. We have been doing this since the Barbary Wars.
 

On empire: during the Cold War and afterwards, the US government overthrew some dozen elected regimes: for instance, Mossadegh in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala, Jagan in Guyana, Sukarno in Indonesia (resulting in “bleeding Bali” and the slaughter of some half a million “communists”), Allende in Chile (today is September 11 – and in mourning our fellow citizens, we might also mourn the Chileans slaughtered at the behest of Nixon and Kissinger), the Sandinistas in Nicaragua (1984 elections, sadly, were far more democratic in public coverage and funding that the contemporaneous election of Ronald Reagan here), the liberation theologian Aristide in Haiti who dissolved the Haitian army under Bush 1 and Bush 2, etc. These “interventions,” done mainly by the CIA and without discussion or even much publicity in the United States are why people find protests about “democratic peace” hollow (the US doesn’t go to war with advanced white democracies any longer, but it does overthrow nonwhite elected regimes (so the idea that the government is out to create and defend democracy abroad will not stand empirical examination).

In more depth, Chalmers Johnson has written three books on the catastrophe left over from the Cold War of American military bases and training programs abroad (Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire and Nemesis). As a passionate defender of American empire in Vietnam once upon a time and a leading political scientist, Johnson’s points are particularly illuminating. For instance, n the post-Cold War period, the US has some 800 military bases abroad (Sorrows, ch. 6); no other regime has, on its own behalf, any. (I spent some time in Mallorca, and found the sixth fleet out in the ocean near Palma. When I taught in Granada in Spain, a Morrocan waiter (a graduate in computer science of the Universidad de Granada who could not get that kind of job in Spain) who befriended my 7 year old, told me about how the ships had gone to Morocco when King Hassan I died – before they announced King Hassan II – in case of “public” disturbances. In Morocco, he told me, he would have been murdered by the government for speaking critical thoughts about this American-supported regime. I initially found the level of US intervention shocking although if you think about the initial American backing of Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden, the sheer madness of the Empire –long warned against by foreign policy realists may come home to you).

The US currently arms many nasty regimes in the world against each other (as far as I know the only people that the US has not armed at all is the Palestinians); the government subsidizes through tax-payer dollars (unknown to tax powers) American weapons producers to “make a killing” abroad. The US is the leading researcher in new weapons (about 2/3 of the money, France is substantial; other rogue regimes combined besides the United States make up a tiny percentage of international arms research). International treaties in the post-Cold War era to ban weapons sales and limit weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear ones, are of course not fostered by the United States (I propose several such sadly “utopian” ideas in “New Institutions for Peace and Democracy” in Sir Nicholas Kittrie, Sir James R. Mancham and H.E. Rodrigo Carazo Odio, eds., The Future of Peace in the Twenty-First Century on the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Peace Prize, 2003). Having a fact-based discussion of these matters in the mainstream media and the Democratic and Republic Parties, sadly, currently can not get on the “agenda” of American “democracy.”

The US violates current international laws against torture (extraordinary renditions to Syria like the Canadian engineer Maher Arar who was unlucky enough to land in Laguardia; Guantanama and Bagram and Abu Ghraib, etc.). Its imperial flouting of international law and the American Constitution (the supremacy clause Article 6 section 2) is a distinctive aspect of the Bush-Cheney period, symbolized by John Bolton and characteristic of neoconservative mania…It is a tragedy that neoconservatism (authoritarianism, “unilateralism”) is deeply rooted in the foreign policy establishment, including among Democrats. Since negotiations and soft power are the only hope for the empire (see the Bush administration’s negotiations over North Korean weapons), there has been some bipartisan (sadly, often pro-Empire) relief at Obama’s sanity on this issue.

During Vietnam, Morgenthau spoke of an “academic-political complex” which conjoins Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex.” It is that grostesque construction of interest and power which has enabled neoconservative fantasy to wage wildly destructive (of others and ourselves) belligerence.

On political theory and commander-in-chief power/constitutional dictatorship: there are two competing strains which are worth emphasizing. Socrates, Aristotle, Thucydides, Montesquieu, Madison and Jefferson and Marx all emphasize how republics which engage in imperial projects turn into decadent Empires and collapse. Montesquieu’s book, The Grandeur and Decadence of the Romans rightly concludes: “and how did all this history of republican heroism and empire end but with the satiation of 5 or 6 monsters?” The republican name for the decadence we have been observing in America is public “corruption” (the sacrifice of the common good for tyrannical i.e. oligarchic and personal interests).

The strain they criticize has been developed in Platonism – the idea of a wise ruler who rules without laws i.e. tyrannically is the covert theme of the Republic (the idea of a philosopher-king if one pays close attention to the text) - and sadly enough even of Aristotle’s Politics (books 3 and 5). These ideas were taken up by Leo Strauss and are today illustrated by his acolyte William Kristol and Kristol’s teacher, Harvey Mansfield who has written extensively on these issues (on Machiavelli, Taming the Prince and in the Wall Street Jounral and Weekly Standard). They are the mantra of neoconservatives…

A competing strain in Machiavelli and Locke is a study of imperial power, conjoining with Platonism, which “sets aside the law” in emergency situations i.e. for a public good. Locke’s Second Treatise spoke of (royal) prerogative. But both were aware of the dangers of tyranny – and Locke famously favored revolutions against royal prerogative gone too far (one may kill a tyrant like “any lion or tiger” in a state of nature). That the American regime is in decline – mired in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan – with a concomitant erosion of law and liberty at home as well as facing extreme economic difficulties, especially for ordinary people is an old story (one can read it in Thucydides or Madison or Marx). The analogy between the ideology of the neocons (down to wanting bombing Iran with nothing to back it up to this day or belligerence toward Russia) and the Emperors Montesquieu names is telling.
 

Rather, I am simply pointing out that what the western left currently calls American "imperialism" is nothing of the sort.

Even Zachary's dictionary quote opens up room to allow both Ajami's and Levinson's takes on what constitutes the imperial mode; you're being too narrow-minded. Furthermore, as Bezgoal quietly reminds us, Ajami approves not only of the term but its particular deployment here--Ajami is certainly not synonymous with the "western left."

In fact, his association with Wolfowitz and the Middle East Forum of "Campus Watch" fame make him a solid member of your own political camp. This makes your blustery comments, as well as Zachary's, something akin to a dog chasing its own tail.
 

Compare and contrast:

["Bart" DeConfoozed]: Our conquest of the Phillipines for the purposes of territorial and political control is a perfect example of imperialism.

with:

[more "Bart" DeConfozed, from the very same comment]: I am simply pointing out that what the western left currently calls American "imperialism" is nothing of the sort.

As they say, res ipsa loquitur.

(I'd note that Fraud Guy specifically mentioned the Philippines amongst other examples)

... This label is Orwellian.

This commenter is simply confoozed.

Cheers,
 

"Bart" DeClueless:

In contrast, our Cold War liberation of countries occupied by the Soviet Empire...

... weren't done through "Shock and Awe", or military invasions at the point of a gun. In fact, the people of these countries might take umbrage at the credit "Bart" is claiming for the Yoo Ess of Effin' Aye here....

Cheers,
 

Alan Gilbert:

In more depth, Chalmers Johnson has written three books on the catastrophe left over from the Cold War of American military bases and training programs abroad (Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire and Nemesis).

Stephen Kinzer's "Overthrow" covers this sanguinary and ultimately counter productive history excellently as well.

But you won't find it on "Bart"'s bookshelf ... or McCain's. If Palin actually had heard of it, she'd probably try to ban it.

Cheers,
 

Alan:

Precisely which countries in the world do we rule politically or under military law as part of our "empire?"

The idea that we have this worldwide empire under our control is disabused with nearly every UN general assembly vote.
 

"Bart" DePalma:

The idea that we have this worldwide empire under our control is disabused with nearly every UN general assembly vote.

And Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, etc. had their own votes in the U.N. too. So the "Evil Empire" was a fable?!?!?

Cheers,
 

The idea that we have this worldwide empire under our control is disabused with nearly every UN general assembly vote.

And verified with every US veto on the Security Council. :)