The Post September 11 Debate Over Empire, Globalization, and Fragmentation

Months before the September 11 attacks, a few observers, working almost entirely within the Washington, DC beltway, argued that the United States was an empire and its people the fortunate Chosen who were to spread an imperialism beneficial to all, apparently whether already stable and functioning parts of the world wanted it or not. Americans, these observers elaborated, were imperial not in the old sense of wanting to hold territory, but in their determination to expand globally American ideas based on capitalism and democracy-two concepts that actually have often been at cross-purposes throughout most of the post-1900 so-called American Century. The new imperialists rightly noted that earlier U.S. imperialism had been linked to American Progressivism and especially to the international, supposedly progressive ideals of Woodrow Wilson and the big-stick diplomacy of Theodore Roosevelt. The twenty-first-century imperialists, however, who defined themselves as Reagan conservatives, concluded that large political payoffs could bless their wing of Republicanism if they could sell the idea of an imperial foreign policy that combined American political and economic principles, unilateralism, a McDonald's-Disney culture, and-the necessary accompaniment-a military that absorbed nearly as much of the gross national product as it did during the height of the cold war, when the GNP was considerably smaller.1 Such military costs were nevertheless logical, given the ambition.