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523 The Limits of American Empire Democracy and Militarism in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries jeremi suri Debates about empire have a definite place in American history, but where? What do we gain—conceptually and empirically—by calling the United States an empire? The contributors to this groundbreaking collection of essays interrogate the “capillaries”—and sometimes arms and legs—of American expansion in the Caribbean and the Pacific during the early twentieth century. The essays point to the transformative effect that the experience of American overseas warfare, occupation, and control had on institutions such as the U.S. Army, the U.S. National Guard, philanthropic foundations, public health organizations, and even consumer groups. The editors of the collection describe the “elusive, even paradoxical” quality of these intersections between the foreign and the domestic, the “insiders” and the “outsiders,” the empowered and the dispossessed . They analyze how American activities in the Caribbean and the Pacific changed conceptions of race, culture, and authority at home, as well as abroad. All of these “catalytic” relationships comprise what the editors provocatively call the making of “a unique American imperial state”—one that has implicitly endured into the twenty-first century. There is surely some truth to these claims. The careers of figures such as John Hay, Theodore Roosevelt, and Elihu Root in the early twentieth century—as well as Dean Acheson, Henry Kissinger, and Condoleezza Rice decades later—highlight how the conduct of American foreign policy provided a platform for the mobilization and centralization of enormous power within particular crevices of American society. The careers of Roosevelt and Root, like those of Kissinger and Rice, are unthinkable without an expanding transnational American polity at the time. The power exercised by these figures was global in scope but personalized in practice.1 524 Part 9. The Elusive Character of American Global Power Roosevelt, Root, and their contemporaries carried a “big stick” overseas, as all of these essays show, but were they imperial consuls? Did they really rule or even manage an empire? Most significant, did their redefinitions of American power create a political system keyed to the exploitation of foreign societies? I am skeptical about the “empire” label because I believe it obfuscates more than it explains. It asserts a core American similarity with historical empires that overrides too many fundamental differences. The scholars in this volume are appropriately energized by their desire to escape the frequent provincialism of scholarship on U.S. history, but they are also too quick to jump to judgment about the transformations in the American state. As I will describe below, the United States that emerged from the transformations of the early twentieth century was both more democratic and more militaristic—more committed to antiimperial ideas and expansive in its reach than ever before. This explains how figures such as Roosevelt and Root could advocate sincerely for foreign wars of self-government and development. They were acting on behalf of American self-interest but also in pursuit of a strong image of anti-empire—a world of free societies associated with the United States. This image constrained American actions, prohibiting the creation of any serious high-level “colonial office” in the U.S. government. This image also constrained American debate, prohibiting any serious advocacy of a permanent American empire, especially after World War I. If we collapse the complicated politics of the early twentieth century into a catchall empire label, we will lose the significance and enduring influence of the anti-empire thinking about democracy and war that guided the American state through this period and later decades. Anti-empire rhetoric and imaginations structured political debate within the United Sates, and they influenced how Americans acted abroad. For just one example, take the Open Door policy of 1899 and 1900 described in Thomas McCormick’s excellent essay in this volume. American leaders asserted a right to trade and invest in Asia through this policy , but they also explicitly renounced the division of China or other regions of the continent into separate imperial spheres of interest—the policy pursued by the European and Japanese empires in the region. The American position on the open door matched American claims to freedom and opposition to empire. In place of empire, as traditionally constituted, a diverse range of American figures chose guaranteed access but not direct control. Some continue to call this empire, but I do not think that helps very much. American...

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