Yes, America Is an Empire
Americans in 2023 flinch from the very notion that we are an empire. Daniel Strand, Assistant Professor of Ethics at the Air War College and Ethics Chair for Air University, rightly notes, “an interesting feature of American life and history is that, unlike empires of the past, we are deeply ambivalent if not hostile to that reality. Some Americans would even reject that we are an empire.” Denying the reality of American empire, Strand argues, “is bad if only because it blinds us to the reality that we are still the most powerful nation in the world. We use our power to influence and coerce other nations to act in ways we would like them. That is how empires behave.” Conservatives and conservative Christians “should be open to the claim that empire can be a good form of government and that exercising imperial rule is not in and of itself a bad thing. It can be a good thing.”
In 2011, Samuel Huntington proposed that religion and civilization would drive geopolitical conflict in the 21st century. It seems Huntington was right. Civilizational and religious conflicts have become the norm as the 21st century has progressed. Stalinist China threatens its neighbors. Autocratic Russia continues its war with neoliberal Ukraine. Recent events in the Near East show that no matter how Westerners might want to spin it, Islam and Judaism struggle to coexist in Palestine.
The United States has, since the Second World War, valued its place as a champion of Western civilization. The American military protects a global liberal economic order that has, to its credit, helped create mass prosperity not merely in the West but also in countries that might have been described as third world only a few years ago. Massive defense expenditures and a sizeable military capable of projecting power have allowed the United States to protect itself and the liberal order. But in 2023, the United States can no longer reflexively exert power in the world's hotspots to the same degree it was three decades ago. In some ways, this has been a palpable choice by American policymakers. We don't want to conscript soldiers. We don't want to tell businesses they can't outsource important industries to places where labor is cheaper. We don't want to tell pharmaceutical companies they can't interact with international doctors. We like our liberalism, and we like the idea that history has ended and religious and civilizational conflict will never again affect us. But that is wishful thinking. And until the United States takes seriously the reality of religious and civilizational conflict, we will be prone to be caught off guard, and we will continue to respond weakly.
Contemporary foreign policy responses have fallen into two categories broadly denominated as liberal and realist. In a recent piece at Compact, Michael Lind argues that so-called realists might better be described as “restrainers.” Both liberals and realists, Lind argues, “misunderstand the nature of modern power politics and thus risk disserving the nation as it confronts this new age of great-power rivalry.” Liberals, Lind notes, “hope that power politics can be replaced by international law and international organization.” Liberals “tend to interpret great-power rivalries as part of a larger ideological confrontation between liberal democracies—the wave of the future—and authoritarian regimes—the relics of the past.” In foreign policy, “liberalism identifies the American interest with a larger group of nations, united by free trade and democratic government.” Realists, burned by the Bush years and the United States' clumsy interventions in the Near and Middle East, have proposed that the United States’ involvement can do as much harm as good. Better to stay detached from the world’s problems, the realists argue.
Lind noted that neither proposition could help the United States win what he deemed a second cold war. If America’s liberal empire is worth defending, it is worth being realistic about what it takes to defend that empire. Running on the fumes of the Clinton-era pared-down military and the 1990s-2000s economy will not cut it. The United States must be serious about what it is—a liberal republican empire heavily influenced by Christian socio-moral precepts—to defend what it must.
For nearly fifty years, between 1945 and 1989, Americans defended a liberal empire we surreptitiously called “The West” against the Soviet Union. Communism forced Americans to take seriously what set the United States apart from the Soviet Bloc: representative government, Christianity, free markets, and broad civil liberties. The Cold War was undoubtedly a war of civilizations, and Americans knew it. America’s imperial power won the Cold War, and we should be honest about what it would take to defend a liberal empire in a second Cold War fought over religion, civilization, and more. Daniel Strand is right: honesty demands Americans “own up to reality and stop pretending that our vast global reach, economic, military, and culture are somehow something other than an empire of sorts. Call it what you like, but Americans would do well to accept the reality and get over their hang-ups about empire.” We should also get over our hangup about what type of an empire we are. No longer can we be a so-called pluralistic empire that baptizes any potential belief as potentially amenable to our way of life. An American empire committed to representative government, Christian social precepts, free markets, and broad civil liberties is worth fighting for. An American empire that has no identity isn’t. More importantly, an American empire with no cultural or social commitments can hardly fight autocrats who do know what they stand for.
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