Jim Kapsis, a Thomas J. Watson Jr. fellow for 1999–2000, is conducting a year-long research project on comparative peacebuilding in Cyprus, Israel and Northern Ireland.
America’s Imperial Burden: Is the Past Prologue?
by ernest lefever
Boulder, Colo., Westview Press, 1999. 196 pages. US $24
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has emerged as the world’s dominant, most innovative and resilient power. US military might is unrivalled, US industry leads the world’s technological revolution and the US dollar is the most valued international currency. As the planet enters the twenty-first century, however, the United States also clearly bears the heaviest burden of global responsibility. America will have to face a world that looks to it for leadership on the one hand, but fears the expansion of its cultural empire and political hegemony on the other. How will the country that the French call “hyperpuissance” (hyperpower), ruled by a president whom the Greeks dub “planetarchis” (ruler of the planet), position itself in the first decade of this new millennium?
In America’s Imperial Burden: Is the Past Prologue?, conservative moralist Ernest W. Lefever, founder of the Washington, D.C.–based Ethics and Public Policy Center, delves into American history and the history of the Roman and British Empires for a historical precedent by which to guide America’s “imperial” future. Lefever is both a devout Christian and patriot. He repudiates his college days when he says that he was a strict religious pacifist and claims that his experiences touring ravaged Europe after the Second World War convinced him of the legitimacy of the Christian just war doctrine. In other words, when evil arises good must strike it down. He is a fierce anti-communist, a harsh critic of liberal, left-wing thought and a believer in the peacekeeping potential of nuclear weapons.
Praised by Cold War leaders and like-minded thinkers, such as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinksi, Lefever describes himself as a “humane realist”. He believes that original sin prevents man from creating heaven on earth because the “conflict between good and evil is an inescapable element of the human drama” (p. 13). By applying this Christian reasoning to the formulation of US foreign policy, Lefever justifies the inherent human consequences and moral contradictions of superpower politics. US foreign policy should not concern itself with achieving lofty social goals (e.g., Kennedy’s “Alliance for Progress”). Instead, it should pursue strategic objectives compassionately.
The ultimate problem with Lefever’s book is that the author’s partisan passion compromises his objectivity. Although America’s Imperial Burden presents a valuable conservative perspective, its bellicose and often condescending tone undermines its seriousness. For Levefer, the world remains bipolar even after the Cold War. In the new world order as he sees it, the evil empire is composed of intellectuals, atheists, idealists, pacifists and liberals. The good guys remain the pious, conservative, meat and potatoes traditionalists who supposedly won the Cold War single-handedly. He ignores the growing role of non-governmental organisations and multinational corporations in the geopolitical game and his citations do not include a single non-Western thinker. Throughout his book, Lefever’s analysis is a prisoner of his religious zeal. Whether he is discussing the fallen empires of Rome and Britain, heaping praise on the Founding Fathers or surveying recent American history, Lefever sees only what he wants to see. His heroes, be they Abraham Lincoln or a Roman emperor, are without fault. Conversely, his villains, whether Bill Clinton or multiculturalists, are always laden with guilt.
Lefever shamelessly defends the Roman Empire, which he praises as “relatively benign and paternalistic” (p. 157). He says of Rome:
Despite the inevitable cruelties of conquest and occupation, Rome’s provincial governors were rarely brutal tyrants. They exercised their imperial authority with measured civility and refrained from suppressing local, religious, cultural, or linguistic traditions. (P. 20).
Now, the Roman Empire had many qualities, but surely tolerance is not one of them. Although Rome may have been more tolerant than other empires of its time, the Romans enslaved conquered peoples, persecuted Christians, drove the Jews out of Jerusalem and executed Jesus. They threw criminals and conquered peoples to the lions, watched for pleasure gladiators fight to the death and invented crucifixion.
When Lefever resists such self-defeating outbursts he makes more sense. He accurately describes Rome as concerned “mainly with maintaining law and order and keeping open the land and sea routes” (ibid.). Rome was successful because it was able to preserve its interests effectively. To ignore the human cost of its policies, however, is a form of revisionism. The difference between Lefever and other realist thinkers is that he tries to wed realism with morality. His concept of “humane realism” sounds innocuous enough, but ultimately morality and realism do not mix. They are the oil and water of political ideas. There is good reason why realists are often described as “cold” and moralists as “naive”. One cannot pursue a moral and political agenda simultaneously. This is the inevitable hypocrisy of American leadership. America claims to be a moral leader, but the cold reality of the Westphalian system does not permit states to be moral. States protect their interests by whatever means necessary, and their claims to morality are either grossly self-deluded or are meant primarily for public consumption.
A classic example is US President George Bush’s justification for attacking Iraq during the Gulf War. He claimed that the United States and the world had to mobilise themselves against Saddam Hussein, an evil rogue leader who was threatening the freedom of innocent people and violating international law. In truth, however, the United States and its European allies invaded Iraq because their economic interests were threatened. The “just” Gulf War was fought over Middle Eastern oil and nothing else. Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait endangered the regional balance of power.
On an even greater hypocritical note, the United States openly supported Saddam with money and weapons in his aggressive war against Iran in the 1980s. The United States saw Iraq as a balancing force against a revolutionary Islamic Iran that was fiercely anti-American. The monster that the United States had helped create in the 1980s eventually turned against its master in the 1990s. Saddam did not change. American interests did. President Bush merely used the moral platform in the second Gulf War to gain the support of the American people and the international media. Lefever apparently misses this reality.
Lefever also manages to misinterpret the Founding Founders and the spirit with which they imbued the Constitution. He uses what he calls “the Founders’ understanding of the American idea and experience” to legitimise his assessment of America’s “imperial burden” (p. 11). Although he claims that the Founding Fathers were not utopians, the spirit of the Constitution was certainly idealistic. The Puritans’ utopian ideal of a city on a hill has remained at the core of the American idea. This idea evolved into the so-called American dream, the nebulous, all-encompassing concept from which Americans derive their collective identity. Lefever’s narrow understanding of this dream does not do it justice. He believes that the American dream is simply a “commitment and a promise” that was made by the Founders in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. For Lefever, this exemplifies their humane realism.
On the contrary, the very essence of the American dream is utopian, rather than utilitarian. That is why it is called the American “dream” rather than the American “promise”. It is towards the fulfilment of this ideal that America strives. It is the dream of America, rather than the American reality, which has made America great. Immigrants did not flow through Ellis Island for a promise. They came because they were chasing a dream. The dream gives hope to the poor African farmer who saves his pennies so that he may quench his thirst with an American Coca-Cola, or to the young boy in the former Yugoslavia who plasters his bedroom walls with posters of Michael Jordan. For Lefever to attack idealism, the very spring from which America arose, is to deny the American experience. His humane realism is too preoccupied with what is not possible rather than with what is. To paraphrase the late Robert Kennedy, is it not better to stop asking why and begin asking why not? America’s optimism, rather than its realism, remains the driving force behind American strength.
Lefever’s view of the Cold War is equally myopic. He castigates any and all critics of American Cold War policy. For instance, he brands Gore Vidal a “cynical and irresponsible America basher” (p. 149) for claiming that the winners of the Cold War were “the arms merchants” and the losers “the hoodwinked citizens of the United States” (ibid.). While Vidal’s criticism is extreme, surely it is not without some truth. American arms merchants were big winners. Even today, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the victory of “freedom”, the United States remains the world’s number one arms dealer. Lefever, however, never mentions this fact.
Furthermore, Lefever seems not to understand the cold realities of the Cold War. It was not fought because communism was inherently evil. It was an ideological battle on the surface, but a war of interests at heart. The Soviet regime was certainly repressive, but the United States fought the Soviet Union because it threatened greater US interests. In the mind of each ambitious superpower was the idea that only one of their ideologies could survive. This was the so-called zero-sum game that inspired Kennan’s much-abused domino theory. Each superpower wanted to dominate the world’s political and economic structures. It was merely an added bonus that American democracy protected citizens’ rights and empowered individuals.
Again, the moral aspects of America’s policy were important, but secondary to US strategic interests. If the Cold War was truly a battle between good and evil, how does one account for American atrocities? The United States was responsible for supporting brutal dictatorships in South America (e.g., Pinochet), funding paramilitary groups in Nicaragua (i.e., the Contras) and training death squads in El Salvador. In Latin America alone, thousands of innocent civilians died at the hands of American-supported dictators and militias—all this in the name of democracy and freedom.
Lefever is most comfortable when attacking the monolithic “left”. He claims that as America enters the twenty-first century,
the American idea and experience are under siege by multicultural advocates, historical revisionists, and outright nihilists whose views have abetted the decline of the American family, public education, and the place of religion in the public square. (P. 159)
In other words, feminism, racial integration and free will are anathema to the American experience. Lefever is bitter because his way of life, rather than that of America, is being threatened.
For Lefever, the years of McCarthyism and the Korean War were a golden period in recent American history when a “free” America fought valiantly against an “evil” Soviet empire. He brazenly defends the Wisconsin senator and other anti-communist witch-hunters whom he praises for their “insight and honesty” (p. 88), while he lambasts the “liberal media” for branding them “fascists”. Lefever claims that the anti anti-communists “distorted and trivialised the most important political and moral issue of our time”. He justifies McCarthy’s actions by saying, “we were willing to sacrifice some peripheral liberties to safeguard our basic freedom” (ibid.). Is Lefever suggesting that the first Amendment of the Constitution is negotiable? McCarthy’s House Committee on UnAmerican Activities destroyed the lives of thousands of Americans simply because of their political beliefs. There seem to be few things more un-American than that. Contrary to Lefever’s assertions, American paranoia during the 1950s, as epitomised by McCarthy and his followers, came much closer to destroying America than Soviet Communism ever did.
Lefever continues his assault on liberalism with a tirade against “the countercultural 1960s” (p. 11), which he blames for weakening America’s strong post–Second World War foreign policy. He never attempts to understand the 1960s revolution and dismisses it as a liberal nightmare. But what else can be expected of a commentator who calls the 1960s battle cry—Make Love, Not War!—“perverse”? Lefever never considers that the 1960s were a just reaction to an American regime that was denying basic human rights to an entire segment of its people—the African Americans—and that was sending American boys to Southeast Asia to fight a war that few Americans have ever understood. The 1960s revolutionaries did not cause the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam debacles. America’s leaders did that all on their own. The 1960s did not destroy America. They made America stronger. They gave equal rights to a marginalised African American community, empowered America’s suppressed women and gave renewed meaning to the Bill of Rights. The hippies, protesters and civil rights activists of the 1960s sparked a cultural revolution that was felt around the world. They are as much responsible for America’s present hegemony as US military strength or McDonalds. Lefever, however, does not give them their due.
Lefever wants America to be a responsible global leader in the next millennium but says “there is no honorable way for Washington to turn over its imperial burden to an international body” (p. 146). He believes the US-supported United Nations missions to Somalia and Haiti were mistakes that put American lives at risk for little reward. He would prefer that America used its power solely to achieve clear, limited, strategic objectives. But why should Americans only accept the imperial burden when it is convenient? As the world’s lone superpower, America’s responsibility is elevated. It cannot act like a parent who tells his children, “Do as I say rather than as I do.” This is the root of America’s image problem abroad.
Of course, it is inevitable that a global power will endure public scrutiny. This is the burden of America’s position. While America cannot please the rest of the world all of the time, it can work harder to practise what it preaches. Congress can take the first step by approving President Clinton’s budget requests that help support US foreign service officers abroad. American diplomats are the front line of American foreign policy. Recent congressional cuts in foreign service funding, at a time when the government coffers are overflowing, are completely irresponsible. Furthermore, the attitude of Congress towards the United Nations is unconscionable. It continues to deny billions of dollars owed to the United Nations because of moral quibbles by conservatives over UN-supported family-planning programmes. If the United States is dissatisfied with the United Nations then it should lead its reformation instead of complaining about its ineffectiveness and moral depravity. As Kofi Annan recently said, the United Nations cannot be the scapegoat of powers who choose not to commit themselves to solving the world’s most difficult crises.
Lefever’s book is simply too narrow, hostile and blindly conservative to deserve any real praise. His attempt to blend humanism with realism proves a futile recipe; his sweeping criticisms of the left ring hollow; and his understanding of the American experience is distorted. If America is to be a true leader of the world in this millennium, then it will have to avoid much of Lefever’s advice. It will have to adapt to a world that is uncomfortable with its hegemony, but which cannot help seeking its leadership. America must demonstrate to the world that it is a benign giant, rather than an opportunistic behemoth. That will be no easy task.
