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Mediterranean Quarterly 17.1 (2006) 34-47



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The Imperial Lure:

Nation Building as a US Response to Terrorism

The concept of nation building has a long pedigree in US foreign policy. It was an identifiable feature of Washington's dealings with the colonial empire it acquired in the Spanish-American War, especially with regard to the Philippines. The United States also conducted a nation-building mission lasting nearly two decades in Haiti—from 1915 to 1934.

Throughout the Cold War, nation building was less prominent, because US foreign policy had a strong realist orientation. US policy makers focused on containing and neutralizing tangible threats to America's security. Most of Washington's military interventions during the Cold War had a hard-edged strategic justification, namely, preventing the Soviet Union or its allies and clients from establishing communist control in regions that were considered important to America's well-being. Yet even during the Cold War there was from time to time a softer, more idealistic component to US policy. Although the term nation building did not come into vogue until the latter stages of the Cold War, a number of US military ventures during that era had characteristics that resembled the concept.

That was true, for example, in Vietnam. Even as US forces were escalating their combat role to prevent North Vietnam from conquering its noncommunist South Vietnamese rival, President Lyndon B. Johnson offered a carrot to Hanoi. In a speech at Johns Hopkins University in April 1965, the president proposed funding a Mekong Valley development project to bring substantial [End Page 34] economic benefits to all Vietnamese—provided that Hanoi cease its "aggression" against the south.1 The project was to be merely the first stage of stabilizing Southeast Asia and bringing North Vietnam into the US-led international community.

Johnson's peace bid failed, but it was not the end to Washington's nation-building agenda in Southeast Asia. Throughout the prolonged conflict, the United States also tried to shape the political environment in South Vietnam. Washington insisted on (more or less) competitive elections and played a large role in writing South Vietnam's constitution.

Nation building was even more clearly a feature of US policy in the interventions in Lebanon and Grenada in the early 1980s. In the former, the United States intervened to facilitate a withdrawal of Israeli forces that had launched an offensive to the outskirts of Beirut and to dampen the Lebanese civil war that had raged for nearly a decade. In the case of Grenada, US forces ousted a communist regime, restored order to the island, and orchestrated a transition to democracy.

Once the Cold War ended, American policy makers showed an increasing fascination with nation building.2 Washington's humanitarian relief intervention in Somalia quickly underwent a transformation into a United Nations–orchestrated effort to reconstitute Somalia as a viable country. As in the case of Somalia, the 1994 Haiti intervention was a pure case of nation building, since not even the most imaginative proponents of US action could portray the disorder in that country as a security threat to the United States. Nation building also was a large, if not dominant, motive in the US-led wars in Bosnia and Kosovo.3 Given the growing appeal of nation building as a strategy during the 1990s, it is not surprising that it quickly became—and remains—a major feature of Washington's war on terror in the twenty-first century. [End Page 35]

September 11 Gives Nation Building a Big Boost

Washington's post–Cold War flirtation with nation building received a huge boost with the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. Ironically, George W. Bush, who as the GOP nominee for president had sharply criticized the concept, would become its most ardent practitioner. Moreover, even those Republicans who had scorned Bill Clinton's nation-building interventions in Haiti and the Balkans now seemed born-again disciples of Woodrow Wilson.

Almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks, an assortment of foreign policy experts and political figures claimed...

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