The Emerging American Imperium

One of these days, the American people are going to awaken to the fact that we have become an imperial nation, even though public opinion and all of our political traditions are hostile to the idea. It is no overweening ambition on our part that has defined our destiny in this way, nor is it any kind of conspiracy by a foreign policy elite. It happened because the world wanted it to happen, needed it to happen, and signaled this need by a long series of relatively minor crises that could not be resolved except by some American involvement. The British empire may not really have been created in a fit of absent-mindedness, as a prominent historian once claimed, but there does seem to be an awful lot of absent-mindedness about the way an American imperium — a more subtle term than empire — has come (and is coming) into existence.

The evolution of NATO is a perfect illustration. NATO was conceived as a coalition of the U.S. and Western Europe’s major military powers to resist Soviet aggression. But nonmilitary nations — Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Greece — fearful of having their national interests ignored, clamored to join and were admitted. Now Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic are in the process of joining, giving rise to some controversy in the U.S. about unduly “provoking” Russia. But NATO as currently constituted, with or without those new applicants, is as provocative as a pussycat.

The meaning of NATO today is that the U.S. has provided the nations of Europe with a unilateral guarantee of their existing borders against aggression. This is what these nations want above all. And what price does Europe pay in exchange for this guarantee? Nothing, apparently — but only apparently. Beneath the surface, and surreptitiously, the nations of Europe are giving up a lot. It is now a fact, still short of overt diplomatic recognition, that no European nation can have — or really wants to have — its own foreign policy. There are not even any signs that European nations want a European foreign policy independent of the U.S. They are dependent nations, though they have a very large measure of local autonomy. The term “imperium” describes this mixture of dependency and autonomy.

Europe today has no ambitions beyond preserving its welfare state as best it can and doing as much profitable business as possible with the rest of the world. Its military expenditures keep declining and are made ever more reluctantly. The state of military preparedness is pitiable, the will to use power utterly lacking — witness the case of Bosnia, where Europe refused to act until the U.S. took the lead. The very spirit of patriotism is a faint shadow of its former self. Which is why Europe is resigned to be a quasiautonomous protectorate of the U.S. For the moment, Washington is not demanding Europe’s quasiautomatic support of U.S. foreign policy. But pressure toward this end will become irresistible.

For Americans, this decline of Europe — its withdrawal as an independent force in world affairs — is a sad event. Europe, after all, is the mother of Western civilization, of which the U.S. is an offshoot. Most Europeans seem to believe that Europe will remain a major cultural force even as its political presence diminishes. But history teaches us that power and culture tend to be wedded to one another. Already there are signs of Europe’s cultural decadence. Its version of the welfare state and its radically secular society are no longer any kind of model for the rest of the world, where economic growth is favored more than “social security” and where religion is an ever more vital force. Europe today seems content to become a larger version of Sweden — and who goes to Sweden to find the keys that will unlock the future? It is very difficult these days to get students in any part of the world (including the U.S.) to learn a European language — other than English and Spanish, the languages of the Western Hemisphere. In continental Europe itself, English is the second language in all countries.

In a recent brief visit to Europe, I discovered that Europeans do not know — and seem not to want to known — what is happening to them. They still regard the U.S. with benign condescension. They are persuaded that the increasing importance of religion in American life is a passing fashion. They cannot even take seriously the obvious importance of religion in the Islamic world, regarding it as an instance of “cultural lag.” Any American who wishes to acquaint himself with this pervasive and anachronistic Eurocentrism can subscribe to The Economist, a superbly written and sophisticated journal that sounds worldly but is, in today’s world, unwittingly parochial.

It is not only in Europe that one can witness an American imperium in the making. Latin America, ever hostile to “Yankee imperialism,” nevertheless is coming to recognize the legitimacy of U.S. leadership. The expansion of free trade between the U.S. and Mexico, soon to be joined by other Latin nations, is no mere commercial phenomenon. Free trade is followed by large American investments, which Latin America badly needs, and these investments lead inevitably to a gradual Americanization of Latin America’s popular culture and way of life. All this is made easier by the huge Latin American immigration to the U.S., so that Americanization can easily be seen as a genuine symbiosis rather than any kind of “takeover.”

And then there is our involvement in Southeast Asia. The nations of this area are far less frightened by the prospect of a relatively light-handed American “imperium” than by the prospect of Chinese domination, which has always been of the heavy-handed variety. So they are involving us in their politics, and — since this is an economically important and militarily strategic area — we are permitting ourselves to be involved. One can point to the fact that, in recent months, events in Cambodia have frequently made front-page news in the U.S. How did this happen? After all, we have no commercial interests in Cambodia; on its own it has no strategic importance; and it is a rare American who can find it on a map. But Cambodia is of considerable importance to the other nations of Southeast Asia — Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Burma, even Vietnam — and they need our involvement as a counterweight to China. That involvement is under way, and one senses that no great planning or forethought at the highest levels in Washington has accompanied that involvement. It simply seemed the natural thing to do. A great power can slide into commitments without explicitly making them.

The world has never seen an imperium of this kind, and it is hard to know what to make of it. In its favor, it lacks the brute coercion that characterized European imperialism. But it also lacks the authentic missionary spirit of that older imperialism, which aimed to establish the rule of law while spreading Christianity. (Our missionaries live in Hollywood.) What it does offer the world is a growth economy, a “consumerist” society, popular elections and a dominant secular-hedonistic ethos. It is a combination that is hard to resist — and equally hard to respect in its populist vulgarity. It is an imperium with a minimum of moral substance. While the people of the world may want and need it now, one wonders how soon they will weary of it.

Mr. Kristol, an American Enterprise Institute fellow, coedits The Public Interest and publishes The National Interest.