Rex Regnant Sed Non Gubernat

The Ideology of American Empire
by Claes G. Ryn

Claes G. Ryn is professor of politics at the Catholic University of America and
chairman of the
National Humanities Institute. He is editor of Humanitas and
author of numerous books,
including Unity Through Diversity: On Cultivating
Humanity’s Higher Ground (Beijing
University, 2000) and Will, Imagination and
Reason: Babbitt, Croce and the Problem of Reality
(2nd ed., Transaction,
1997). This article is adapted from a chapter in his America the
Virtuous:
The Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for Empire (forthcoming,
Transaction 2003).

The president of the United States has committed his country to goals
that will require world hegemony, not to say supremacy. In numerous
speeches and statements since September 2001, President Bush has
vowed to wage an exhaustive, final war on terror and to advance the cause of
a better world. ‘‘Our responsibility to history is clear: to answer these attacks
and rid the world of evil.’’1 In the president’s opinion, the United States
represents universal principles. He summarizes them in the word ‘‘freedom.’’
As mankind’s beacon of political right, the United States must, he believes,
remove obstacles to freedom around the world. Accomplishing this task is
associated in the president’s mind with using American military might. Even
before 9/11/01, in June 2001, he informed the Congress that the ‘‘Department
of Defense has become the most powerful force for freedom the world has
ever seen.’’2 Since 9/11, the U.S. government has relentlessly mobilized and
deployed that force far and wide, with effects that remain to be seen.
What had happened? In his 2000 presidential campaign, President
Bush had repeatedly called for a more ‘‘humble’’ U.S. foreign policy and
expressed strong reservations about America’s undertaking nation building
and following a generally interventionist foreign policy. A cynic might
suggest that, having won the presidency partly by appealing to Americans’
weariness of international over-extension, President Bush had now seized an
opportunity greatly to extend his power. A less cynical observer would note
that the 9/11 attacks outraged the president. They aroused nationalistic
feelings in him and shifted his focus to world affairs. Since then he has also
gained a new sense of the military and other power at his command.

Yet it is not likely that George W. Bush would have changed his
stated approach to foreign policy so drastically had he not been affected by a
way of thinking about America’s role in the world that has acquired strong
influence in recent decades, not least in the American foreign policy
establishment inside and outside of government. A large number of American
political intellectuals, including many writers on American foreign policy,
have been promoting what may be called an ideology of empire. Many of
them are in universities; some are leading media commentators. Today some
of the most articulate and strong-willed have the president’s ear.
When the 9/11 terrorists struck, the time had long been ripe for
systematically implementing an ideology of empire, but in his election
campaign George W. Bush had seemed an obstacle to such a course. He
advocated a more restrictive use of American power. If he had done so out of
genuine conviction, 9/11 brought a profound change of heart. The already
available ideology of empire helped remove any inhibitions the president
might have had about an activist foreign policy and helped shape his reaction
to the attack. It can be debated to what extent his advisors and speechwriters,
who were to varying degrees attracted to the ideology, along with numerous
media commentators of the same orientation, were able to channel the
president’s anger. In any case, President Bush moved to embrace the idea of
armed world hegemony. The attack on America could have elicited a much
different reaction, such as a surgical and limited response; it became instead
the occasion and justification for something grandiose.
In spite of its great influence, the ideology of empire is unfamiliar to
most Americans, except in segments that appear disparate but are in fact
closely connected. Drawing these connections is essential to assessing the
import and ramifications of the evolving Bush Doctrine.
Though heavily slanted in the direction of international affairs, the
ideology of American empire constitutes an entire world view. It includes
perspectives on human nature, society, and politics, and it sets forth distinctive
conceptions of its central ideas, notably what it calls ‘‘democracy,’’ ‘‘freedom,’’
‘‘equality,’’ and ‘‘capitalism.’’ It regards America as founded on universal
principles and assigns to the United States the role of supervising the remaking
of the world. Its adherents have the intense dogmatic commitment of true
believers and are highly prone to moralistic rhetoric. They demand, among
other things, ‘‘moral clarity’’ in dealing with regimes that stand in the way of
America’s universal purpose. They see themselves as champions of ‘‘virtue.’’ In some form, this ideology has been present for a long time.
There are similarities between the advocates of the ideology of
American empire and the ideologues who inspired and led the French
Revolution of 1789. The Jacobins, too, claimed to represent universal
principles, which they summed up in the slogan ‘‘liberte´, e´galite´, et fraternite´.’’
The dominant Jacobins also wanted greater economic freedom. They thought
of themselves as fighting on the side of good against evil and called themselves ‘‘the virtuous.’’ They wanted a world much different from the one they had
inherited. The result was protracted war and turbulence in Europe and
elsewhere. Those who embody the Jacobin spirit today in America have
explicitly global ambitions. It is crucial to understand what they believe, for
potentially they have the military might of the United States at their complete
disposal.
The philosopher who most influenced the old Jacobins was Jean-
Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), who asserted in The Social Contract (1762) that
‘‘man was born free, but he is everywhere in chains.’’3 The Jacobins set out to
liberate man. The notion that America’s military might is the greatest force for
freedom in human history recalls Rousseau’s famous statement that those
who are not on the side of political right may have to be ‘‘forced to be free.’’
The new Jacobins have taken full advantage of the nation’s outrage
over 9/11 to advance their already fully formed drive for empire. They have
helped rekindle America’s long-standing propensity for global involvement.
Knowingly or unknowingly, President Bush has become the new Jacobins’
leading spokesman, and he is receiving their very strong support. Reflexes
developed by American politicians and commentators during the Cold War
have boosted the imperialistic impulse. Many cold warriors, now lacking the
old enemy of communism, see in the goal of a better world for mankind
another justification for continued extensive use of American power. President
Bush’s moralistic interventionism gains additional support and credibility from
a number of antecedents in modern American politics. Woodrow Wilson
comes immediately to mind. But the current ideology of empire goes well
beyond an earlier, more tentative and hesitant pursuit of world hegemony,
and it has acquired great power at a new, formative juncture in history.
The most conspicuous and salient feature of the neo-Jacobin
approach to international affairs is its universalistic and monopolistic claims.
The University of Chicago’s Allan Bloom (1930–92) argued in his best-selling
The Closing of the American Mind that what he called ‘‘the American project’’
was not just for Americans. ‘‘When we Americans speak seriously about
politics, we mean that our principles of freedom and equality and the rights
based on them are rational and everywhere applicable.’’ World War II was for
Bloom not simply a struggle to defeat a dangerous enemy. It was ‘‘really an
educational project undertaken to force those who did not accept these
principles to do so.’’4 If America is the instrument of universal right, the cause
of all humanity, it is only proper that it should be diligent and insistent in
imposing its will.
The new Jacobins typically use ‘‘democracy’’ as an umbrella term for
the kind of political regime that they would like to see installed all over the world. In their view, only democracy, as they define it, answers to a universal
moral imperative and is legitimate. Bringing democracy to countries that do
not yet have it ought to be the defining purpose of U.S. foreign policy. One
may call this part of neo-Jacobin ideology ‘‘democratism.’’ It has been
espoused by many academics, Duke University political scientist James David Barber prominent among them. ‘‘The United States should stand up and lead
the world democracy movement,’’ he wrote in 1990. ‘‘We have made
democracy work here; now we ought to make it work everywhere we can,
with whatever tough and expensive action that takes.’’5
Numerous American intellectual activists, journalists, and columnists,
many of them taught by professors like Bloom and Barber, sound the same
theme. It has become so common in the major media, newspapers, and
intellectual magazines and has been so often echoed by politicians that, to
some, it seems to express a self-evident truth.
Not all who speak about an American global mission to spread
democracy are neo-Jacobins in the strict sense of the term. Some use neo-
Jacobin rhetoric not out of ideological conviction, but because such language
is in the air and appears somehow expected, or because war is thought to
require it. Many combine Jacobin ideas with other elements of thought and
imagination: rarely, if ever, is an individual all of a piece. Contradictory ideas
often compete within one and the same person. The purpose here is not to
classify particular persons but to elucidate an ideological pattern, showing
how certain ideas form a coherent, if ethically and philosophically
questionable, ideology.

New Nationalism

Two writers with considerable media visibility, William Kristol and
David Brooks, who label themselves conservatives, have led complaints that
the long-standing prejudice among American conservatives against a larger
federal government is paranoid and foolish. Big government is needed,
Kristol and Brooks contend, because the United States is based on ‘‘universal
principles.’’ Its specialmoral status gives it a great mission in the world. In order
to pursue its global task, the American government must be muscular and
‘‘energetic,’’ especiallywith regard to military power. Kristol and Brooks call for
a ‘‘national-greatness conservatism,’’ which would include ‘‘a neo-Reaganite
foreign policy of national strength and moral assertiveness abroad.’’6
Similarly, foreign policy expert Robert Kagan writes of his fellow
Americans: ‘‘As good children of the Enlightenment, Americans believe in
human perfectibility. But Americans . . . also believe . . . that global security and a liberal order depend on the United States—that ‘indispensable
nation’—wielding its power.’’7
International adventurism has often served to distract nations from
pressing domestic difficulties, but in America today, expansionism is often
fueled also by intense moral-ideological passion. Since the principles for
which America stands are portrayed as ultimately supranational (for Bloom
they are actually opposed to traditional national identity), ‘‘nationalism’’ may
not be quite the right term for this new missionary zeal. The new Jacobins
believe that as America spearheads the cause of universal principles, it should
progressively shed its own historical distinctiveness except insofar as that
distinctiveness is directly related to those principles. Though countries
confronted by this power are likely to see it as little more than a manifestation
of nationalistic ambition and arrogance, it is nationalistic only in a special
sense. Like revolutionary France, neo-Jacobin America casts itself as a savior
nation. Ideological and national zeal become indistinguishable. ‘‘Our
nationalism,’’ write Kristol and Brooks about America’s world mission, ‘‘is
that of an exceptional nation founded on a universal principle, on what
Lincoln called ‘an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.’ ’’8
This view of America’s role can hardly be called patriotic in the old
sense of that word. Neo-Jacobinism is not characterized by devotion to
America’s concrete historical identity with its origins in Greek, Roman,
Christian, European, and English civilization. Neo-Jacobins are attached in the
end to ahistorical, supranational principles that they believe should supplant
the traditions of particular societies. The new Jacobins see themselves as on the
side of right and fighting evil and are not prone to respecting or looking for
common ground with countries that do not share their democratic preferences.
Traditionally, the patriot’s pride of country has been understood to
encompass moral self-restraint and a sense of his own country’s flaws. By
contrast, neo-Jacobinism is perhaps best described as a kind of ideological
nationalism. Its proponents are not precisely uncritical of today’s American
democracy; Bloom complained that American democracy was too relativistic
and insufficiently faithful to the principles of its own founding. But it should
be noted that he regarded those principles as ‘‘rational and everywhere
applicable’’ and thus as monopolistic. Greater dedication to ‘‘American
principles’’ would by definition increase, not reduce, the wish to dictate terms
to others.

New Universalism

Having been nurtured for many years in pockets of the academy,
American neo-Jacobinism started to acquire journalistic and political critical mass in the 1980s. It was well-represented in the national security and foreign
policy councils of the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations. As Soviet communism
was crumbling, it seemed to people of this orientation increasingly
realistic to expect an era in which the United States would be able to dominate
the world on behalf of universal principles. Missionary zeal and the desire to
use American power began to flood the media, the government, and the public
policy debate. Columnist and TV commentator Ben Wattenberg offered a
particularly good example of this frame of mind when he wrote in 1988 that
the prospects for exporting American values were highly propitious. ‘‘Never
has the culture of one nation been so far-flung and potent.’’ Wattenberg
pointed out that ‘‘there is, at last, a global language, American.’’9
After the Cold War, American culture could only spread, he
continued, with global sales of American TV shows, movies, and music.
‘‘Important newsstands around the world now sell three American daily
newspapers. There is now a near-global television news station: Cable News
Network.’’ Not mentioned by Wattenberg was that the content being
transmitted to the world might be of dubious value and a poor reflection
on America and democracy. What intrigued him was the potential to expand
American influence by exporting America’s culture.
Behind the argument that the United States and its values are models
for all peoples lurked the will to power, which was sometimes barely able to
keep up ideological appearances. Again by way of example, Wattenberg
desired nothing less than world dominance: ‘‘It’s pretty clear what the global
community needs: probably a top cop, but surely a powerful global
organizer. Somebody’s got to do it. We’re the only ones who can.’’ He called
‘‘visionary’’ the idea of ‘‘spreading democratic and American values around
the world.’’ As if not to appear immodest, he wrote: ‘‘Our goal in the global
game is not to conquer the world, only to influence it so that it is hospitable
to our values.’’10 Later he urged, ‘‘Remember this about American Purpose: A
unipolar world is fine, if America is the uni.’’11
In the major media, one of the early and most persistent advocates
of an assertive American foreign policy was the columnist and TV commentator
Charles Krauthammer. In 1991, for example, he urged ‘‘a robust
interventionism.’’ ‘‘We are living in a unipolar world,’’ he wrote. ‘‘We Americans
should like it—and exploit it.’’ ‘‘Where our cause is just and interests are
threatened, we should act—even if . . . we must act unilaterally.’’12 This point
of view would eventually become a commonplace.
The idea of spreading democracy sometimes took on a religious
ardor. In a Christmas column published in 1988, Michael Novak said about the Judeo-Christian tradition that it ‘‘instructs the human race to make constant
progress. . . . It insists that societies must continually be reshaped, until each
meets the measure the Creator has in mind for a just, truthful, free, and creative
civilization.’’ All over the world people were ‘‘crying out against abuses of their
God-given rights to self-determination.’’ The spread of democracy was for
Novak a great religious development that he compared to God’s Incarnation.
The ‘‘citizens of the world . . . demand the birth of democracy in history, in
physical institutions: as physical as the birth at Bethlehem.’’13 The enthusiasm
of the Christmas season may have inclined Novak to overstatement, but he was
clearly eager to have his readers associate democracy with divine intent.
This mode of thinking is in marked contrast to the old Christian
tradition. Christianity has always stressed the imperfect, sinful nature of man
and warned against placing too much faith in manmade political institutions
and measures. Augustine (354–430) is only one of the earliest and least
sanguine of many Christian thinkers over the centuries who would have
rejected out of hand the idea that mankind is destined for great progress and
political perfection, to say nothing about the possibility of salvation through
politics. Although Christianity has stressed that rulers must serve the common
good and behave in a humane manner, it has been reluctant to endorse any
particular form of government as suited to all peoples and all historical
circumstances. Here Christianity agreed with the Aristotelian view.

The New Democratism

Democratism has long had more than a foothold in American
government. A look back in modern history is appropriate. President
Woodrow Wilson, with his belief in America’s special role and his missionary
zeal, gave it a strong push. Harvard professor Irving Babbitt (1865–1933),
perhaps America’s most incisive and prescient student of modern Western and
American culture, commented in the early years of the twentieth century on the
imperialistic trend in U.S. foreign policy. Babbitt, the founder of what has been
called the New Humanism or American Humanism, was formally a professor of
French and comparative literature, but he was also a highly perceptive as well
as prophetic observer of social and political developments. He noted that the
United States was setting itself up as the great guardian and beneficiary of
mankind. ‘‘We are rapidly becoming a nation of humanitarian crusaders,’’
Babbitt wrote in 1924. Leaders like Wilson viewed America as abjuring selfish
motives and as being, therefore, above all other nations. Babbitt commented:

We are willing to admit that all other nations are self-seeking, but as for
ourselves, we
hold that we act only on the most disinterested motives. We
have not as yet set up,
like revolutionary France, as the Christ of Nations,
but during the late war we liked
to look on ourselves as at least the Sir
Galahad of Nations. If the American thus regards himself as an idealist at the
same time that the foreigner looks on him
as a dollar-chaser, the explanation
may be due partly to the fact that the American
judges himself by the way he
feels, whereas the foreigner judges him by what he
does.14

By the time of President Wilson the idea had long been common in
America that in old Europe conceited and callous elites oppressed the
common man. There and elsewhere things needed to be set right. Thomas
Jefferson had been a pioneer for this outlook. But from the time of George
Washington’s warning of the danger of entangling alliances, a desire for heavy
American involvement abroad had for the most part been held in check. By
the time of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, it was clear that the wish for
American prominence and activism in international affairs had thrown off
earlier restraints. Woodrow Wilson reinforced the interventionist impulse,
not, of course, to advance selfish American national motives but, as he said,
to ‘‘serve mankind.’’ Because America has a special moral status, Wilson
proclaimed, it is called to do good in the world. In 1914, even before the
outbreak of the European war, Wilson stated in a Fourth of July address that
America’s role was to serve ‘‘the rights of humanity.’’ The flag of the United
States, he declared, is ‘‘the flag, not only of America, but of humanity.’’15
Babbitt pointed out that those who would not go along with Wilson’s
‘‘humanitarian crusading’’ were warned that they would ‘‘break the heart of
the world.’’ Babbitt retorted: ‘‘If the tough old world had ever had a heart
in the Wilsonian sense, it would have been broken long ago.’’ He added
that Wilson’s rhetoric, which was at the same time abstract and sentimental,
revealed ‘‘a temper at the opposite pole from that of the genuine statesman.’’
Wilson’s humanitarian idealism made him ‘‘inflexible and uncompromising.’’16

The Post–Cold War Imperative

The notion that America had a mandate to help rid the world, not least
Europe, of the bad old ways of traditional societies with their undemocratic
political arrangements has remained a strong influence on American foreign
policy. In World War II, FDR’s sense of American mission may have been as
strong as Wilson’s.
14 Irving Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1979 [1924]),
pp. 337, 295. It is a national misfortune that Americans have paid less attention to one of their
truly great thinkers than to a number of lesser European lights who impress by their denser,
more technical, less essayistic philosophical style.
15 Woodrow Wilson, Thanksgiving Proclamation, Nov. 7, 1917, The Papers of Woodrow
Wilson, Arthur S. Link, et al. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966–93), pp. 44, 525;
and Address at Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Papers, pp. 30, 254. For an in-depth study of
Woodrow Wilson and his notion of America as servant of mankind, see Richard M. Gamble,
‘‘Savior Nation: Woodrow Wilson and the Gospel of Service,’’ Humanitas, Vol. XIV, No. 1 (2001).
16 Babbitt, Democracy, p. 314.

For a long time during the Cold War, most policy makers and
commentators saw that war as a defensive struggle to protect freedom or liberty
against totalitarian tyranny. But some of the most dedicated cold warriors were
also democratists. They had a vision for remaking the world that differed in
substance from that of the Soviet Union and other communist regimes but that
was equally universalistic. With the disintegration and collapse of the Soviet
Union, these cold warriors did not argue for substantially reducing the
American military or the United States’ involvement in international affairs. On
the contrary, they believed that America should continue to play a large and,
in some respects, expanded role in the world; that, as the only remaining
superpower, America had a historic opportunity to advance the cause of
democracy and human rights. This language had long been gaining currency in
the centers of public debate and political power, and soon government officials
and politicians in both of the major parties spoke routinely of the need to
promote democracy. Many did so in just the manner here associated with neo-
Jacobinism. It seemed to them that the American ideology had not only
survived the challenge from the other universalist ideology, but had prevailed
in a contest that validated the American ideal as applicable in all societies.
The first President Bush thought of himself as a competent pragmatist,
but, as is often the case with persons who lack philosophically grounded
convictions of their own, he was susceptible to adopting the language and
ideas of intellectually more focused and ideological individuals. The rhetoric
in his administration about a New World Order often had a distinctly
democratist ring, in considerable part probably because of the ideological
leanings of speechwriters. In 1991 James Baker, President Bush’s secretary of
state, echoed a neo-Jacobin refrain when he declared that U.S. foreign policy
should serve not specifically American interests but ‘‘enlightenment ideals
of universal applicability.’’ Whether such formulations originated with Mr.
Baker or his speechwriters, the Secretary clearly liked the sound of them. He
advocated a ‘‘Euro-Atlantic community that extends east from Vancouver to
Vladivostok.’’ This ‘‘community,’’ he said, ‘‘can only be achieved on a
democratic basis.’’ The enormous size and political and cultural diversity of
the region he described did not give him pause or make him question the
United States’ willingness or ability to take charge of such a daunting cause.
No, the United States should promote ‘‘common . . . universal values’’ in
those parts of the world, he said, and ‘‘indeed, elsewhere on the globe.’’17
American power was there to be used. It seemed appropriate in cases such as
these to talk of virtually unlimited political ambition.
The surge of globalist political-ideological aspirations was even
more blatantly and pointedly expressed by the Bush Sr. administration in a
draft Pentagon planning document that was leaked to the New York Times.
It had been produced under the supervision of then Undersecretary of
Defense Paul Wolfowitz. The draft plan dealt with the United States’ military
needs in the post–Cold War era, setting forth the goal of a world in which the
United States would be the sole and uncontested superpower. The draft plan
assigned to the United States ‘‘the pre-eminent responsibility’’ for dealing with
‘‘those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies
or friends, or which could seriously unsettle international relations.’’ The
goal of American world dominance was presented as serving the spread of
democracy and open economic systems. American military power was to be so
overwhelming that it would not even occur to the United States’ competitors to
challenge its will.18 This vision of the future might have seemed the expression
of an inordinate, open-ended desire for power and control, uninhibited by
the fact that the world is, after all, rather large. But significantly, many
commentators considered the vision entirely plausible. The Wall Street Journal
praised the draft plan in a lead editorial favoring ‘‘Pax Americana.’’19
Bill Clinton made clear in his 1992 presidential campaign that he
would pursue a foreign policy similar to, if not more expansive than, the
Bush administration’s. In 1993 his Secretary of State-designate Warren
Christopher addressed a group of neoconservative Democrats, including
Penn Kimball, Joshua Muravchik, Peter Rosenblatt, Albert Shanker, and Max
Kampelman, to assure them that he would fully back the president’s
commitments to making promotion of democracy a central tenet of U.S.
foreign policy.20 Christopher’s successor, Madeleine Albright, was even more
comfortable with this stance. Democratist ideology was by now clearly
dominant in top policy-making circles in Washington and elsewhere. It both
generated and sanctioned an assertive, expansive use of American power.
When running for president, George W. Bush appeared to have
substantial qualms about this broad use of American might. He questioned
the desire to impose solutions to problems in all regional and local trouble
spots around the world, seeming to recognize that such efforts betrayed
arrogance and an undue will to power that other countries might resent. His
adoption of a wholly different, far more assertive tone after the 9/11 attacks
was surely induced in large part by war-like conditions. Although the change
was probably motivated more by pragmatic than by ideological considerations,
President Bush’s rhetoric began to take on a neo-Jacobin coloring, as
when he spoke of the ‘‘axis of evil,’’ a phrase coined by neoconservative
speechwriter David Frum.
In subsequent speeches, the president has often come to resemble
Woodrow Wilson in assigning to the United States, the exceptional country, an exceptional mission in the world. He has asserted that an attack upon the
United States was an attack upon freedom: ‘‘A lot of young people say, well,
why America? Why would anybody want to come after us? Why would
anybody want to fight a war with this nation? And the answer is because we
love freedom. That’s why. And they hate freedom.’’21 Identifying America with
the universal cause of freedom, Bush has even adopted Wilsonian imagery.
Echoing Wilson in 1917, he said that the American flag stands ‘‘not only for our
power, but for freedom.’’22 Although the president used the term ‘‘freedom’’
rather than ‘‘democracy,’’ which is the one favored by the new Jacobins, he
seemed to agree with the notion that any enemy or critic of the United States is
an opponent of universal principle. ‘‘They have attacked America,’’ he said
three days after 9/11, ‘‘because we are freedom’s home and defender.’’23
Proponents of American empire had moved with great speed to head
off any reluctance on the part of a devastated and disoriented American
public to deal quickly and comprehensively with terrorism around the globe.
Already on the morning after the attacks, when it was still not clear who was
responsible, the Washington Post carried an article by Robert Kagan calling
for sweeping countermeasures. The U.S. Congress should, Kagan insisted,
declare war immediately on the terrorists and any nation that might have
assisted them. The situation required that America act with ‘‘moral clarity and
courage as our grandfathers did [responding to the attack on Pearl Harbor].
Not by asking what we have done to bring on the wrath of inhuman
murderers. Not by figuring out ways to reason with, or try to appease those
who have spilled our blood.’’24 On the same day William Bennett, Jack Kemp
and Jeane Kirkpatrick issued a statement calling for war against the ‘‘entire’’
Islamic terrorist network.25

If the president thought that American actions might have contributed
to the hostility to the United States in the world, he did not, and in the
circumstances perhaps could not, say so publicly. What he did say and has said
repeatedly is that the United States must be diligent, active, and forceful—
preemptive even—in dealing with present or potential threats of terrorism.
Paradoxically, given his earlier calls for American humility, he has presided
over a massive push for greater American involvement in the world and for a
21 Remarks of President to United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America 2002
Legislative Conference, June 19, 2002, www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06; Peter
Slevin, ‘‘The Word at the White House: Bush Formulates His Brand of Foreign Policy,’’ vastly more intrusive role for government in the daily lives of U.S. citizens. In fairness to a politician who is not also an intellectual and a historian, war has its
own logic, and it may be premature to draw definitive conclusions about the
president’s statements and actions in the wake of 9/11, which was an act of
war. But the fact is that President Bush’s assertive approach and universalistic
rhetoric has been seized on by American democratists who have been
preparing the ground for a war and for a wider pursuit of empire. Charles
Krauthammer praised the president for applying ‘‘the fundamental principle of
American foreign policy—the promotion of democracy.’’26 Political activist and
writer Midge Decter pointed out that after 9/11 America could do something to
clean up the world. She urged her countrymen ‘‘to hang onto what is most
important to remember: that our country, the strongest on earth, has been
pressed by circumstance—I would say, has been granted the opportunity—to
rid the world of some goodly measure of its cruelty and pestilence.’’27
In mid-September 2002, President Bush sent to the U.S. Congress the
president’s annual statement on strategy, the National Security Strategy,
which gave clear evidence that he was abandoning his earlier calls for a more
‘‘humble’’ U.S. foreign policy. Though the report was framed as a strategy for
combating terrorism, the stated objectives supererogated any need to
respond to acute external or internal threats. The report defined what
amounted to a new and highly ambitious role for America in the world.
Released the day after the president asked the Congress to authorize the use
of preemptive military force against Iraq, it provided justifications for
American intervention against potential security threats, while also formulating
a new and much broader international agenda. The report in effect set forth
a doctrine of American armed hegemony. The president justified this
ascendancy as serving both America’s security needs and its efforts to
promote freedom, democracy, and free trade. The Washington Post said that
the Strategy gave the United States ‘‘a nearly messianic role.’’ It meant not only
acceptance but also extension of the old Wolfowitz draft plan. Indeed,
Wolfowitz is now Deputy Secretary of Defense and a highly vocal and
assertive proponent of American activism around the world. According to the
report, America’s strength and influence in the world is ‘‘unprecedented’’ and
‘‘unequaled.’’ The United States, ‘‘sustained by faith in the principles of
liberty and the value of a free society,’’ also has ‘‘unparalleled responsibilities,
obligations, and opportunities’’ beyond its borders. The report calls for
possessing such overwhelming military power as to discourage any other
power from challenging American hegemony or developing weapons of mass
destruction. It overturns the old doctrines of deterrence and containment.
Committing the United States to a much expanded understanding of security,
it argues that the United States must reserve the right to act preemptively and unilaterally against potentially threatening states or organizations. But the
president approved an even wider goal. The Strategy commits the United
States to making the world ‘‘not just safer but better.’’ In explaining the report,
a senior administration official said that besides leading the world in the
war against terrorists and ‘‘aggressive regimes seeking weapons of mass
destruction,’’ the United States should preserve the peace, ‘‘extend the benefits
of liberty and prosperity through the spread of American values,’’ and
promote ‘‘good governance.’’ In familiar-sounding words, the report describes
America’s strategy as a ‘‘distinctly American internationalism that reflects the
union of our values and our national interests.’’28

A New Kind of War

The foreign policy of George W. Bush’s immediate two predecessors,
Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton, had a strong Wilsonian tilt. But neither president
followed any sustained, consistent strategy. By contrast, the Bush Doctrine as
set forth in the National Security Strategy and other places commits the
United States to a bold, comprehensive, and elaborate foreign policy.
The publicly and formally stated U.S. goal, in sum, is to establish global
supremacy. The United States would set itself up as the arbiter of good and
evil in the world and, if necessary, enforce its judgments unilaterally.
Reservations expressed in Europe and elsewhere about American
unilateralism and global aspirations have been scorned and dismissed by
proponents of empire as a failure to recognize the need to combat evil in the
world. Kenneth Adelman, a former deputy ambassador to the UN and a
highly placed advisor on defense to the U.S. government, couched his
advocacy of imperial designs in terms of fighting terrorism. ‘‘I don’t think
Europeans should cooperate with the United States as a favor to the United
States. They should be very grateful to the United States and cooperate
because we have a common enemy—terrorism. In my mind, it’s a decisive
moment in the conflict between civilization and barbarism.’’29
Since America is at war it is, in a way, not surprising that some of its
leaders should be portraying America as being on the side of good and those
not eager to follow America’s lead as aiding and abetting evil. Stark rhetoric has
been used before to get Americans to support or sustain war, but the war aims
spoken of today are derived from a consciously universalistic and imperialistic
ideology. Therein lies an important difference, and a great danger.
The belief in American moral superiority knows no party lines. In an
article critical of the George W. Bush administration’s way of preparing for war against Iraq, Richard C. Holbrooke, ambassador to the UN under
President Clinton, expressed a view ubiquitous in the American foreign policy
establishment: ‘‘Over the past 60 years, the United States has consistently
combined its military superiority with moral and political leadership.’’30 The
word ‘‘consistently’’ is telling. The notion that, unlike other nations, America is
above moral suspicion, provides the best possible justification for the desire to
exercise American power.
It seems to the proponents of the ideology of American empire that,
surely, America the virtuous is entitled to dominate the world. Some of them
have worked long and hard to make this point of view dominant in American
foreign policy. President Bush was merely echoing what others had been
saying when he stated: ‘‘There is a value system that cannot be compromised,
and that is the values we praise. And if the values are good enough for our
people, they ought to be good enough for others.’’31
Many members of the so-called Christian right share the view that
America has a special mission, but give this notion a triumphalist religious
cast beyond the moralism typical of neo-Jacobin ideology. They believe that
the United States, as led by a man of God, has a virtually messianic role to
play, especially in the Middle East, where God’s chosen people, Israel, must
be supported by the United States against their enemies. Breaking sharply
with the mainstream of traditional Christianity, which has made a distinction
between the things of God and the things of Caesar, this form of religion
identifies a particular political power, America, with God’s will. George W.
Bush’s rhetoric has sometimes suggested that he is drawn to such thinking.
‘‘Evangelical’’ Christianity of this kind may rest on rather simplistic theological,
biblical, and historical assumptions and arguably have virtually no influence
over America’s dominant national culture, but it provides considerable political
support for neo-Jacobinism, which does have such influence. In its practical
effects on United States foreign policy, this religious triumphalism puts a
religious gloss on neo-Jacobinism. It does not Christianize U.S. foreign policy,
but makes it less humble and more belligerent.
Both in domestic and international affairs the new Jacobins are strongly
prejudiced against the traditions of old, historically evolved nations and
groups. These only retard the emergence of a new order based on what they
consider universal principles. In their view, the distinctive traits of different
societies and cultures should yield to the homogeneity of virtuous democracy.
The new Jacobins are trying to clear away obstacles to the triumph of
their ideology and of their own will to power. They exhibit a revolutionary
mindset that will inexorably lead to disaster. Alongside what President Bush called ‘‘history’s unmarked graves of discarded lies’’32 lie the graves of the
self-righteous, the people whose moralism concealed, even from themselves,
their importunate will to power. As Ronald Reagan preached, the idealistic
utopians and the well meaning are responsible for some of the world’s worst
evils. Self-righteousness blinds one to one’s own sins.
Even if the opinions examined in this article are assessed in the
most generous and charitable spirit, their element of political-ideological
imperialism is hard to miss. A philosophically and historically inclined
observer is reminded of the terrible and large-scale suffering that has been
inflicted on mankind by power-seeking sanctioned or inspired by one or
another kind of Jacobin moral and intellectual conceit. Communism, one of
the most radical and pernicious manifestations of the Jacobin spirit, has
disintegrated, at least as a major political force. But another panacea for the
world is taking its place. The neo-Jacobin vision for how to redeem humanity
may be less obviously utopian than that of communism. It may strike some as
admirably idealistic, as did communism. But the spirit of the two movements
is similar, and utopian thinking is utopian thinking, fairly innocuous perhaps
if restricted to isolated dreamers and theoreticians but dangerous to the
extent that it inspires action in the real world. The concern voiced here is that
neo-Jacobinism has come to permeate American public debate and is finally
within reach of controlling the military might of the United States.
Prudence, realism, compromise, and self-restraint are indispensable
qualities in politics. They have been reflected in traditional American
institutions, in great decisions made by American statesmen, and sometimes
in American public opinion. They have constituted the first line of defense
against all manner of foreign and domestic threats, including surges of passion
and eruptions of extremism. Given the atrocities of 9/11 and the need for a firm
American response, the prominence of crusaders in the Bush administration is
perhaps not surprising. But it is also a sign that needed old American virtues are
weakening or disappearing. The continued ascendancy of neo-Jacobinism
would have disastrous consequences. By acting under its influence
America’s leaders may be setting in motion fateful developments
that they and their successors will not be able to control.