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American imperialism describes policies aimed at extending the political, economic, and cultural control of the United States over areas beyond its boundaries.‎History · ‎American exceptionalism · ‎Views of American · ‎U.S. foreign policy debate.
Table of contents

• Reporter's Notebook
• The American Empire
• Decline and fall of the American Empire
• Decline and fall of the American Empire

To them, it is perceived as a natural consequence of the break-up of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, they see American empire positively as a network of alliances with other nation states. Thus, while the proper center of the empire is the United States, it depends on peripheral centers of power such as Britain, France or, in some cases, the United Nations. In fact, these authors do not discuss these invasions as evidence that America is an empire at all.

Instead, they are interested in the impact that these operations will have on continued American hegemony. They can cause the United States pain and damage, but they cannot destroy American hegemony. Through ill-advised unilateral action in which the US fails to recognize and make use of its imperial allies and members, the singularly powerful American empire may ultimately flounder and collapse.

From a Realist perspective, it is the failure of taking this fact into consideration, rather than the fact itself, that may spell disaster for America. In other words, if the citizens of the United States do not realize that America is effectively an empire, it risks falling apart due to a lack of understanding of its global limitations, needs and purposes. The invasion of Iraq in , and the Bush doctrine that prompted it, are furthermore, and perhaps paradoxically, seen as evidence that the Bush government has failed to realize the imperial responsibilities of the United States.

The invasion thus serves as a threat to continued American global dominance and leadership, rather than as the final evidence that America has imperialistic or neocolonial tendencies. However, it is, of course, problematic to suggest that the avoidance to celebrate or indict American empire is in any way politically neutral.

At the same time, this position does not resemble that of the more optimistic neoconservatives and liberal imperialists who tend to view American empire, or at least American hegemony, as a potential blessing for a world torn by religious conflict, sectarian violence and political oppression. Even though Boot has said that he is not sure what it means to be a neocon, his vision of American history and of current American foreign policy is probably best labeled as neoconservative, and his articles have appeared in collections of neoconservative writing.

To Boot, the Monroe Doctrine is a crucial document which can be seen as evidence that empire was contemplated early on in the history of the United States.

In fact, it may be argued that the entire text is an attempt to show that empire is part and parcel of American history and that American military history has been an attempt to enforce Pax Americana throughout the world. Neither Chalmers Johnson nor Chomsky would necessarily take issue with this. It has defeated the monstrous evils of communism and Nazism and lesser evils such as the Taliban and Serbian ethnic cleansing.

Along the way, it has helped spread liberal institutions to countries as diverse as South Korea and Panama.

Reporter's Notebook

He regrets the fact that the US government has been reluctant to embrace the term American empire, although he can understand why they do not. Johnson, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in , has repeatedly argued, like a reincarnated Kipling, that the US must shoulder its imperial burden. From the Evil Empire to an Empire for Liberty is a giant step, a contrast as great as the appalling images of the wasted twentieth century and the brightening dawn of the twenty-first.

But America has the musculature and the will to take giant steps, as it has shown in the past. Ferguson, sometimes labeled a liberal imperialist, is originally a historian of British imperialism. In Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power he attempts an interesting revision of British imperialism, painting it in much brighter colors than more critical imperial historians such as Eric Hobsbawm or Lawrence James.

The American Empire

Empires, he argues, can serve both the needs of the imperial centre, the metropolis, and the periphery. That is, they can be altruistic. What is required is a liberal empire—that is to say, one that not only underwrites the free international exchange of commodities, labor and capital but also creates and upholds the conditions without which markets cannot function—peace and order, the rule of law, noncorrupt administrations. The US is borrowing billions of dollars from Asia to fund its invasion of Iraq - How is the nation to afford such a sustained imperial enterprise?

Using a number of historical examples, Maier distinguishes between being an empire and having an empire. Taking the cue from historian Geoffrey Hoskins, Maier suggests that while Russia during the reign of the Tsar was an empire in the sense that it subjected its citizens to an authoritarian rule, Britain had an empire since it allowed the British public considerable political freedom and reserved the more dictatorial aspects of imperialism for the colonies.

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Nevertheless Maier suggests that American empire might bring with it certain benefits. This painting is part of a series of five depicting the birth, development, consummation, destruction and desolation of empire, and it is telling that Among Empires is enveloped by the consummation phase which, in turn, is represented by a Classical empire in all its white marble and splendor.

Instead, the focus is on how and why these writers explore the notion of empire itself. From this perspective, it would seem that most take issue with mainstream American historical tradition.

As I have suggested, according to this tradition American imperialism was a brief and misguided phase occurring almost accidentally after the end of the Spanish-American War in Firstly, the revisionist histories produced by neoconservative and liberal imperialist historians can be perceived as attempts to establish a form of historical legitimacy for American empire.

Those who see American empire as possibly beneficial for both world order and American society seem particularly eager to trace its genealogy back to Jefferson and the Founding Fathers of the American Republic. Paul Johnson and Niall Ferguson both insist that when independence was declared in North America, it was quickly followed by a vision of empire. Although these writers do not rest their entire case on this origin, it appears to be important for them to establish an imperial genealogy going back to the beginnings of American democracy.

It may be presumed that connecting current imperial practice to the political philosophy of the 18 th century in this way lends a definite legitimacy to the entire project. This does not mean that these writers unconditionally embrace American empire — indeed, both Fergusson and Maier predict that American imperialism faces serious and perhaps insurmountable obstacles — but it does allow them to discuss the notion as an inherently American, and therefore legitimate, phenomenon.

The Bush administrations have struggled to acquire legitimacy for their forceful foreign policy and for remaining in Iraq despite the growing unpopularity of the war. With the discovery that Saddam Hussein did not possess Weapons of Mass Destruction, the only reason for remaining in Iraq is to stabilize the region. With the state of the nation deteriorating into civil war, this aim seems difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. Boot assures his readers that there is no need to run away from the label American imperialism because America has been an empire since its inception. Ferguson and Paul Johnson second this claim by assuring likewise that the Founding Fathers themselves were ardent imperialists, and if that is so then there can certainly be no conflict between the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and current foreign policy.

To Ryn, Freedland, and Buchanan, the creation of the American Republic was essentially an indictment of imperialism.

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In this way, these writers are reluctant to revise the traditional historical trajectory of the United States. The United States was indeed a rather insignificant strip of land on the East Coast at the end of the Revolution. Some 50 years later, through a process that can really only be described as colonization, the nation stretched from sea to sea. A large and privileged part, to be sure, yet still only a part. It is the right size — ie, huge. The Philippines, too, looms large, and the Hawaiian island chain — the whole chain, not just the eight main islands shown on most maps — if superimposed on the mainland would stretch almost from Florida to California.

This map also shows territory at the other end of the size scale. In the century before , the US claimed nearly uninhabited islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Some claims were forgotten in time — Washington could be surprisingly lax about keeping tabs. The 22 islands included here are the ones that appeared in official tallies the census or other governmental reports in the s.

I have represented them as clusters of dots in the bottom left and right corners, although they are so small that they would be invisible if they were drawn to scale. The logo map is not only misleading because it excludes large colonies and pinprick islands alike.

Decline and fall of the American Empire

It also suggests that the US is a politically uniform space: a union, voluntarily entered into, of states standing on equal footing with one another. But that is not true, and it has never been true. From its founding until the present day, the US has contained a union of American states, as its name suggests. But it has also contained another part: not a union, not states and for most of its history not wholly in the Americas — its territories.

What is more, a lot of people have lived in that other part. According to the census count for the inhabited territories in , the year before Pearl Harbor, nearly 19 million people lived in the colonies, the great bulk of them in the Philippines.

Decline and fall of the American Empire

That meant slightly more than one in eight of the people in the US lived outside of the states. For perspective, consider that only about one in 12 was African American. If you lived in the US on the eve of the second world war, in other words, you were more likely to be colonised than black. My point here is not to weigh forms of oppression against one another. In fact, the histories of African Americans and colonised peoples are tightly connected and sometimes overlapping, as for the African-Caribbeans in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. The racism that had pervaded the country since slavery also engulfed the territories.

Like African Americans, colonial subjects were denied the vote, deprived of the rights of full citizens, called racial epithets, subjected to dangerous medical experiments and used as sacrificial pawns in war. They, too, had to make their way in a country where some lives mattered and others did not. What getting the Greater United States in view reveals is that race has been even more central to US history than is usually supposed.

Once you look beyond the logo map, you see a whole new set of struggles over what it means to inhabit the US. L ooking beyond the logo map, however, could be hard for mainlanders. The national maps they used rarely showed the territories. Even the world atlases were confusing.