World AffairsOne of the dirtiest words in the American political lexicon is "empire". As Clyde Prestowitz tells us, "it represents the antithesis of the ideals on which America was founded and the very essence of the old-world wickedness Americans hoped would evaporate in the light of our own example".
In the eyes of the Founding Fathers, the impulse to colonise and to bend other nations to the imperialist yoke was quintessentially a British vice, and one which figured prominently among the evils from which the new republic must distance itself.
Thus, for Ronald Reagan, communism was not just evil; it was empire. And George W. Bush was not to be found wanting in patriotic piety during his election campaign for the presidency when he declared that the US, alone in history, had refused the imperial opportunity when it beckoned, "preferring greatness to power" as he put it, "and justice to glory". According to polls cited by Prestowitz, that is still how the majority of Americans see their place in the world - a nation blessed by God, whose interests coincide with universal human values.
Since the collapse of communism 12 years ago, however, the anti-imperialist note has been muted as policy-makers and commentators try to accommodate the realities of US hyper-power in an unfriendly world and even to confess to a touch of the British disease. After September 11th, the US is unquestionably an empire in the making, exploiting its fabulous wealth and power to fashion a world in its own image and interests.
How did it come about that a nation founded in modesty could end in the hubris and self-delusion characteristic of the current administration in Washington? Clyde Prestowitz is hardly the man to ask, you would think. He is an economist, a former US government official of the Reagan era, a writer of flawless conservative credentials in the mainstream press. And he is an elder of the Presbyterian Church, to boot.
But Prestowitz is out of a different conservative stable from the "neo-cons" who bend the ear of the president today, or the messianic zealots who are his chaplains:
The imperial project of the so-called neo-conservatives is not conservatism at all but radicalism, egotism and adventurism articulated in the stirring rhetoric of traditional patriotism. Real conservatives have never been messianic or doctrinal.
Prestowitz makes the point that the US does not so much have a religion; it is a religion, an ideology, an "ism" in its own right, embodying ideals which are not only good for Americans but in some way, it is believed, mandatory for the human race.
In part, it is this moralism, which views Americans as a people chosen to save the planet by shaping it in their own image - the common belief that what is good for American business and security must be good for the world - that is today nourishing resentment throughout the globe.
President Bush did not invent American unilateralism; he exposed it. He inherited a leadership which, for half a century, had patiently built the alliances and international institutions which lent a modicum of democratic accountability to relations between states. It was in line with Jefferson's injunction to government to show "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind".
Even at the height of its imperial reach 100 years ago, when their neighbours often saw the English as perfidious and hypocritical, Britain paid strategic lip-service to those neighbours and contrived to retain some of their goodwill. US unilateralism under the Bush administration is quite different, Prestowitz argues,with a disrespect for the opinion of others that borders on the obscene.
Prestowitz charts the rapid decline from respect to contempt that has marked the recent attitude of US policy-makers. In April, 2001, the newly inaugurated George W. Bush announced that he would not sign the Kyoto Treaty - the culmination of an American initiative in environmental policy dating back to Richard Nixon - a decision that outraged the Europeans more than almost any other move by Washington. "The Kyoto decision," says Prestowitz, "became a metaphor for American profligacy, unconcern, and arrogance."
Unlike many critics of the current administration, Prestowitz cannot be labelled and dismissed as anti-American - not just by virtue of his credentials but because of the scrupulous fairness of his analysis and his obvious lack of relish for the critical task which this book brilliantly accomplishes. (It has already gained wide acclaim across a spectrum of conservative and liberal opinion in the US.) He insists that US foreign policy intentions are usually good - hence the awkward subtitle - and that the rest of the world admires his fellow-Americans when they live up to their own ideals. His damning portrait of a country which has squandered the goodwill showered upon it in the immediate aftermath of September 11th does not destroy his own faith in the American ideal. But that ideal has been tarnished by the arrogance of the present administration and of the ideologues who provide its theoretical support. As a parting - if limp - shot to his fellow-Christians who man the prayer meetings and furnish the biblical texts on which the unilateralist crusade rests, he cites the famous words of Oliver Cromwell to the Church of Scotland: "In the bowels of Christ, please believe that you may be wrong."
If Prestowitz's critique of US imperialism focuses mostly on foreign policy, that of Dana Priest concentrates on the expansion of the military sector over the last two decades and the manner in which American diplomacy has suffered a steady decline of funding and influence in favour of the armed forces.
For four years, Priest, a journalist on the Washington Post, recorded the lives of the CINCs, as they are known in the trade - the handful of powerful commanders-in-chief who govern zones of global responsibility like proconsuls in the Roman empire.
This is the lively and intriguing story of how the mission of the US military has expanded in the last decade - dramatically so since September 11th - at the expense of diplomacy and the State Department, leaving education, social welfare and healthcare in crisis.
Militarisation has been expanding rapidly, if more covertly, since the Clinton administration took office, establishing a reliance on the armed forces in times of crisis to do the business traditionally allocated to the State Department. (It has become a commonplace to observe Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and other Pentagon leaders pronounce on the diplomatic and political interests of the US abroad, while Colin Powell and his colleagues watch helplessly from their desks in Washington.) The belief in the Pentagon is that overwhelming military force trumps diplomacy every time. To do what? The answer is not clear to Priest, to the service chiefs themselves, or to the soldiers untrained for this new purpose.
Bill McSweeney teaches International Politics at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin
Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions By Clyde Prestowitz Basic Books, 328pp, £16.99
The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military By Dana PriestNorton, 429pp, €30