Washington continues to have imperial ambitions

By Jonathan Power

LONDON (JP): Bill Clinton's first foreign policy action when he became president was to bomb Iraq. Now five years on perhaps he is going to end up bombing Iraq again.

With a military whose firepower has no peer, supported by a budget more than the military budgets of all the other industrial nations of the world combined, the temptation to work outside of UN authority and deliver a quick one is doubtless difficult to resist.

The job of U.S. president comes with the burden of two hundred years of America's twin aspirations--to be invulnerable and to be able to realize its imperial ambitions.

One thing can be said with assurance after watching Clinton as commander-in-chief for five years: he never absorbed in any significant amounts the worldly wisdom of his mentor, William Fulbright, the Arkansas senator who became chairman of the Senate's foreign relations committee and who resisted president Lyndon Johnson's expansion of the Vietnam War with far greater effectiveness than the Oxford student out on the streets of London, shouting slogans at the American embassy.

It was Fulbright who coined the phrase, in the title of his great book on foreign policy, The Arrogance of Power. One wonders what term of endearment he would use for his country, if alive today?

Clinton once said that the U.S. cannot be "simply...another great power." But he has never put flesh on this thought and has surrounded himself with foreign policy advisors who could not sit comfortably in the same room as the likes of Fulbright.

If Bill Clinton had wanted a different foreign policy in the mold of Fulbright there were good thoughtful people to hire--such as Ronald Steel, professor of international relations at the University of Southern California and author of Temptations of a Superpower who has argued that "if America is not to exhaust itself in pursuit of grandiose ambitions it must re-establish a sense of the feasible."

Or Harvey Sapolsky professor of public policy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who earlier this year in a seminal article in Harvard University's International Security effectively demolished the rationale behind America's growing reach abroad, in particular NATO expansion and a more vigorous presence in East Asia.

Perhaps, too, he should bring in the managing editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, Farsed Zukaria, who in an artful piece in its non-establishment rival, World Policy Journal strips off the layers of obfuscation and myth-making in American foreign policy to make plain that the U.S. has always been driven by expansionist desires and now that it meets no real resistance is perhaps at last going to realize its innermost desires.

"Once the story goes," mocks Zakaria, "there was a great and pure republic called the United States of America. It was governed by statesmen who husbanded the nation's power and exercised it prudently. America's history was not one of imperialism but of economic growth and nation building."

The only period when this comfortable, but very widely accepted received interpretation, is disallowed by today's conventional wisdom was during the presidency of William McKinley who at the end of the 19th century unaccountably went to war with Spain and annexed the Philippines.

If only this were the one exception. But the truth is, writes Zakaria, "ever since the 13 colonies, nestled east of the Allegheny Mountains, relentlessly marched west to acquire and occupy the continent, expansionism and imperialism have been part of the American ideal."

These ambitions were not exhausted with the conquest of California. In the 1850s, in the aftermath of the Mexican war, American leaders waxed lyrical on the need for further expansion. In 1853 President Franklin Pierce said he would "not be controlled by any timid forebodings of evil from expansionism."

American diplomats tried to negotiate the purchase of parts of Mexico, Cuba and Hawaii. Even Canada was a target. John Quincy Adams thought that in the end the U.S. would annex all of North America.

For a while the Civil War tempered these ambitions. Once over they reappeared, with new fervor. Since Britain had allied itself with the defeated Confederacy revenge would be sweet if its Canadian possession to the north could be taken. Only the might of the British navy kept the American debate, led by Abraham Lincoln's imperial-minded, secretary of state, William Henry Seward, within sensible bounds.

By the turn of the century America had the wealth, the power and the means to chart its own foreign waters, irrespective of Britain. And now, at century's end, the world is America's oyster. The danger of such power is the danger of those who always fly too close to the sun. To believe that what is good for America is good for the world is to set America up, in the due course of time, for an equal and opposite reaction.

This is not to say that today's issue of bringing Saddam Hussein to book is wrong. It is profoundly right. But, although America has the military muscle to do it alone, it has to discipline itself to take the world along with it.

The arrogance of power, long in the making, has to find the route to humility. But if the boy from Arkansas cannot do it, with all his advantages, who can?