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  • Imperial Acceptance and Decline of Empire
  • Anne L. Foster (bio)
Michael H. Hunt and Steven I. Levine. Arc of Empire: America's Wars in Asia from the Philippines to Vietnam. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. 352 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, guide to historical literature, and index. $35.00.

Most scholarly debates start from a premise that the entity under contention actually exists. In debates about U.S. empire, however, historians and political scientists begin with justification for or denial of the very existence of empire. It is difficult, of course, to completely deny that the United States did at one time have a few colonies. So those who assess the United States to be essentially anti-imperialist find that this empire was not merely acquired in a fit of absentmindedness (to reference the famous quip about the British Empire), but also immediately regretted, denied, and discarded as soon as possible. Scholars at the other end of the spectrum see the United States as intrinsically imperial, having been so from the country's inception, continuing to the present day, and shaping U.S. political, cultural, and social relations. These two extreme positions until recently represented most scholarship about empire. For scholars writing during the Cold War, the political commitment of a scholar often could be discerned from his or her stance on the subject of U.S. imperialism: the stronger the argument for an imperial America, the more left-leaning the scholar. They identified the United States as exercising an informal empire through economic power, demonstrating how economic imperatives drove imperial expansion and how U.S. policymakers used the nation's trade and investment policies to influence the internal politics of other political entities. Scholars who saw the U.S. colonial adventure as a temporary aberration tended to be traditional liberals or conservatives in their political leanings. They referenced the ambivalence toward colonialism of even such imperialistic actors as Theodore Roosevelt, the rhetorical promises of self-government, and the underdeveloped nature of the colonial bureaucracy to demonstrate that the United States mistakenly stumbled into its few colonial adventures.

In recent years, however, and especially since 2001, some conservative scholars have celebrated, even advocated U.S. imperialism. Scholarship on [End Page 134] empire has become simultaneously less and more politically motivated. A burgeoning number of scholars have attempted simply to explain the nature of the U.S. exercise of power overseas on a continuum, delving more deeply into the functioning of the U.S. colonial state, the reciprocal effects of imperialism on the United States and colonized areas alike, as well as economic and cultural means of exercising power. They may or may not have a political agenda for their scholarship. Very exciting work on political education, race and racial imaginings, migration, and citizenship in the United States has been written in recent years by scholars of the U.S. empire. Meanwhile, other scholars continue to argue that empire landed only a glancing blow on the United States, leaving no lasting marks. While this group usually works to advance an image of the United States as essentially living up to its democratic ideals, again, these scholars are not necessarily using that image to promote particular policies in the present.

Into this crowded, vibrant, contentious debate step Michael Hunt and Steven Levine with an argument that starts from an assumption of U.S. empire, explains the nature of it as expressed in four wars in Eastern Asia, and identifies the seeds of U.S. imperial decline in the nature of those wars and their aftermath. Not surprisingly, given the high caliber of work these historians have previously produced, there are insights on every well-written page. But it is that last part of the argument, about U.S. imperial decline, that means it is imperative for all scholars of foreign relations, especially of U.S. foreign relations, to read Arc of Empire.

As with nearly all works on U.S. imperialism, Hunt and Levine begin by defining empire and indicating how U.S. policies and actions fulfill the definition—or, in other words, by justifying their claim that the United States had an empire. They note the need to do...

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