American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (review)

In this wide-ranging work, Bacevich, a professor of international relations at Boston University, offers a coherent framework to unify thinking about recent American history. American Empire actually brings together the United States of McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt, the Wilsonian years, World War II, the Cold War, and the post-Cold War eras. The unifying theme is essentially the Open Door. American leaders, Bacevich argues, have acted consistently throughout this period of more than a century to advance economic interests, a policy concern that subtly underlay every policy initiative from Lend-Lease to Containment, and with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the last major competitor, has now brought about a new American empire.

A former Army officer who recounts that he identified himself with those who "accepted the orthodox interpretation that U.S. policies were necessary to defend the free world from communist aggression" (p. vii), Bacevich nevertheless found oddly congruent the views of such progressive historians as Charles A. Beard and William Appleman Williams. Critiques that may have been overdone for their own times, Bacevich argues, fit well with the broader evolution of American power and influence: "The reality that Beard feared has come to pass: like it or not, America today is Rome, committed irreversibly to the maintenance and, where feasible, expansion of an empire that differs from every other empire in history. This is hardly a matter for celebration; but neither is there any purpose served by denying the facts" (p. 244). The strategy of openness, and that of fostering democracy, essentially open the door for the economic penetration that is at the heart of how the American empire differs from previous imperial enterprises. There is much more, but the most interesting feature of Bacevich's analysis is that it points to continuity in the actions of leaders as diverse as Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, William J. Clinton and, for that matter, Woodrow Wilson. This continuity postulates the post-Cold War era not as a new phase sui generis but as the logical development of what had already occurred. Bush-father may have floundered as president, and he probably comes in for Bacevich's strongest criticisms, while Clinton proved wildly successful at pitching the globalization theme, but both tilled the same field and built toward our present circumstances.

The new empire has a stick as well as its carrots, and military forces feature in the author's analysis. Here Bacevich points up the incomplete nature of the transformation that has been discussed so much over the past decade. Full spectrum dominance is easy to conceptualize, but actual U.S. forces and organization remain very much as they did when the Cold War dictated very different military missions. As the author sees it, "during the first decade after the Cold War a gaping disparity emerged between the rhetoric and the reality of U.S. military policy" (p. 137). Yet interventions like Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Iraqi No-Fly zones had more likeness to gunboat diplomacy than to conventional war. It remains to be seen if the current terror war and Iraqi conflict will extend Bacevich's point or hark back more to the old ways of warfare, but these events will not contradict his analysis that "a greater reliance on coercion as an instrument of policy offered only one manifestation of the increasing militarization of American statecraft after the Cold War" (p. 167). As for the current president, "Bush's war on terror and for freedom was at its core a war on behalf of the American project of creating an open and integrated world" (p. 232). A lot of this, however, does not sound all that different from historical empires after all.

American Empire is engaging, provocative, and cogently argued. Andrew Bacevich has given us...