Imperialism

One of the ironic things about the Cheney-Bush foreign policy is that it changed the word "imperialism" as applied to the United States from a marker of left-leaning (or, occasionally, isolationist) foreign policy criticism to a label of pride when used by neoconservatives. It's now very common among even mainstream Serious Foreign Policy Thinkers to refer to the US as an "empire".

John Judis gives a succinct summary of where the present-day concept of "imperialism" emerged in his article Bush's Neo-Imperialist War American Prospect Online 10/22/07:

There have been empires since the dawn of history, but the term "imperialism," and its modern practice, originated in the late 19th century. During that time, Britain and the major European powers struggled to carve up the less developed world into colonies, protectorates, and spheres of influence. The new empires spawned during this period didn't consist of "settler colonies" like the original American colonies or Australia, but indigenous possessions like British India or French Indochina. The United States got into the great game in 1898 when, after successfully ousting Spain from Cuba and the Pacific, the McKinley administration, prodded by Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, decided to annex the Philippines.

There were two kinds of imperial rule: direct, where the colonial power assigned an administrator - a viceroy or proconsul - who ran the country directly; and indirect, where the colonial power used its financial and military power to prop up a native administration that did its bidding and to prevent the rise of governments that did not. The latter kind of imperial rule was developed by the United States in Cuba in 1901 after Roosevelt's Secretary of War Elihu Root realized that direct rule could bring war and rebellion, as it had done, to the McKinley administration's surprise, in the Philippines. The British later adopted this kind of imperial rule in Egypt and Iraq.

Still, his definition raises the murky border between "imperialism" in the France-in-Algeria sense and "neo-imperialism" of the kind that the United States arguably exercised in Cuba and other Latin American nations. Imperialism in the straightforward sense clearly applies to situations like the one Judis describes of British rule in Egypt, where Egypt was not a formal colony of the UK, but Britain controlled its foreign policy and national finances.

Still, for the United States the Spanish-American War and the subsequent counterinsurgency operation in the Philippines, which became an American colony in the straightforwardly imperialist manner, though it was technically called a "protectorate", was an important turning point in American history and foreign policy.

Walter LaFeber in The American Age (1989) described how that period is viewed by historians:

As the twentieth century dawned, the United States stepped onto the world stage as a great power. Because of the triumphs scored between 1898 and 1900, it strode confidently now with Great Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and Japan - nations that possessed immense military strength and had used that strength for conquest. Never had an independent nation risen so far so fast as did the United States between 1776 and 1900.

Historians have argued not over whether the United States deserved great-power status by 1900 (all agree that it did), but whether Americans consciously intended to follow the expansionist policies after 1896 that projected them into such distant regions. Historian Ernest May believes that the United States had "greatness thrust upon it." But another scholar, Albert K. Weinberg, concludes that U.S. officials were no more passive at key moments than "is the energetic individual who decides upon, plans, and carries out the robbery of a bank." The years 1896 to 1900 thus become critical for the student of U.S. foreign policy in the twentieth century. For if the nation entered the ranks of great world powers at this time, it is of central importance to know how it did so. By accident? Because of a few elite officials who pushed reluctant Americans overseas? Because of the U.S. system's domestic needs that forced that system to assume global responsibilities? The well-known saying "Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined" might have meaning for U.S. diplomatic history. The reasons why the United States moved outward so rapidly in the late 1890s help us understand why it grew from these roots (or twig) into a twentieth-century superpower.

Judis describes why pursuing an imperialist policy like that envisioned in the Bush Doctrine and put into practice in the Iraq War is a losing proposition in today's world:

As the war in Iraq has turned into a quagmire, neo-conservatives who had goaded the president into action have blamed the war's failure on the administration's flawed strategy. They have propounded a series of "if only's": If only the administration had sent more troops, if only it had not disbanded the Ba'ath army, if only it had handed the leadership of Iraq over immediately to con man Ahmed Chalabi. Of these, only the addition of more troops might have quelled the insurgency, and then only temporarily. If there is any lesson from the 130-year history of imperialism, it is that the natives eventually grow restless. Since World War II, the peoples of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa have been throwing off rather than welcoming foreign control.

The Middle East, where Muslims still blanch at the Crusades and later British and French attempts to divide and rule, is particularly sensitive to outside attempts at domination. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda didn't spring from Mecca but from the battlefield in Afghanistan, from resentment of American support for Israel and of American bases on Arab soil. Bush's policy in the region has reflected a profound ignorance of this history. Wrote former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in January 2007, "America is acting like a colonial power in Iraq. But the age of colonialism is over. Waging a colonial war in the post-colonial age is self-defeating."

Tags: john judis, philippine war, spanish-american war, walter lafeber