To usher in this new imperial age, Tony Blair comes to the White House to meet with President Bush–not to pass a torch, but to share one. What we used to call “The English Speaking Peoples” are joining hands to bring the Western idea of freedom to a part of the planet that, based on its sacred texts and a millennium and a half of history, distrusts the concept we hold so dear. The main question now is whether the souls in whose name we will make war–Iraqi men and women in the street–will see the United States, Britain and the other allies as heaven-sent liberators or as bloodthirsty infidels. The Qur’an (at least as many interpret it) and public life as lived in the Greater Middle East put the answer in doubt. Only when we see “the street” reaction to the war we are about to wage–the real reaction, not the one ginned up instantly for Al-Jazeera–will we know whether the American president and the British prime minister (and the European leaders who support them) made the right call.
History, as usual, is a cautionary guide. It tells us that we have no choice but to act in defense of the American continent–recently attacked by Al Qaida in New York, Washington and in the air above Pennsylvania–but that we shouldn’t think that countries we “save” for the sake of our own protection will love us. The season we enter now echoes that of a century ago in eerie exactitude. Then, at the end of the 19th century, America was a new power, exercising newfound global strength for the first time. In the Spanish-American War we pried Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines away from the faded old imperium of Spain. The doctrine enunciated decades earlier, the Monroe Doctrine, was enforced. But we won an empire at great cost in lives–ours and theirs–and at equal cost to our innocent sense of righteousness.
A century later, the final results of that war are mixed. We are, rightly, unapologetic in our hegemony. We claim dominion over the hemisphere–and, generally speaking, few doubt our right to do so. It’s still a key element of our security, most recently defended by President Kennedy in the Cuban missile crisis. And yet we left the Philippines (we are leaving it still). We were thrown out of Cuba (Castro remains a frayed thorn in our paw). Puerto Ricans are citizens, but can’t decide whether they really want to become Americans. Latin America as a whole trades with us, and sends us its baseball players, but smolders with suspicion and submerged resentment of the Yankee North.
Now come the questions: What about the Persian Gulf? The Arab World? The Muslim world of 1.3 billion? If the generals are right, we can “win” in Iraq, which means eliminating Saddam Hussein, his sons and his rural mafia claque and finding and destroying the many weapons of mass destruction that, I am told, are frighteningly abundant but carefully hidden below ground. But can we survive as The Power in the region we are about to “control”?
The roots of this new mission go back a century. They are described in a particularly timely new book by Warren Zimmermann. The “First Great Triumph” is a group portrait of the Republican leaders–Eastern Establishment figures all–who launched American Imperialism a century ago in a war with Spain.
We thought we had a Manifest Destiny then: to bring democracy and enlightenment (and trading arrangements for our companies) to islands that controlled sea lines vital to a newly continental nation (namely, the ocean routes on the approach to a yet-to-be-built Panama Canal). Teddy Roosevelt was the leader of the group. It included a senator (Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts), a military theoretician (Adm. Alfred Thayer Mahan), a cold-blooded Wall Street lawyer (Elihu Root) and a party elder (John Hay) who began his career as an aide to the patron saint of the GOP, Abraham Lincoln.
These men believed in the superiority of the English race and its duty to bring their version of an enlightenment of learning, Judeo-Christian values and democracy to the world. They also saw that the continental underbelly of our country would never be safe from attack if someone other than the U.S. Navy controlled the travel routes that arrow in and out of the American oceans.
They were haughty in their views, but absolutely right in their strategic thinking: we could not afford to bargain with the potential enemies on our southern flank.
A century later, it’s not the control of the sea lanes that obsesses us, but the elimination of global terrorism. In the name of keeping our own people safe, President Bush, in his State of the Union speech, implicitly proposed a new Manifest Destiny: an open-ended mission to eradicate the threat of terrorism by bringing democracy–free speech, free elections, free trade–to terrorism’s breeding grounds.
The group propounding this notion is similar, a century later, to the first one: corporate, business-oriented, systematic. Bush, like TR, is the son of wealth and privilege, possessed of a clear-eyed, combative view of the world. Dick Cheney is the fatherly, Henry Cabot Lodge figure. Donald Rumsfeld (assisted by Paul Wolfowitz) stands in the place of Mahan as the theoretician of a new kind of war, this one for minds not seas. No one has stepped forward in the role of Root, whose job it was to enforce America’s new-won “control” of the Philippines. It was a bloody mess, a truly egregious episode in our history.
History shows that we have no choice but to go forward to protect ourselves and our way of life, and to fulfill our destiny as what Lincoln called “the last, best hope of mankind.” But we should brace ourselves, for saviors aren’t always appreciated.
