The Past as Prologue: An Imperial Manual

The fact of American empire is hardly debated these days. Even those who fear and oppose it (in this country, the libertarian right and the remnants of the new left; abroad, a variety of voices from Paris to Baghdad to Beijing) define international politics almost entirely in relation to U.S. power -- and especially U.S. military power. The "unipolar moment" has become a unipolar decade and, with a little effort and a little wisdom, could last much longer. Even Yale historian Paul Kennedy, who in the mid-1980s predicted U.S. "imperial overstretch," has become a believer. Stunned by the initial success of the war in Afghanistan, he wrote in February,

Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power; nothing. The Pax Britannica was run on the cheap. Britain's army was much smaller than European armies and even the Royal Navy was equal only to the next two navies -- right now all the other navies in the world combined could not dent American maritime supremacy. Napoleon's France and Philip II's Spain had powerful foes and were part of a multipolar system. Charlemagne's Empire was merely western European in its stretch. The Roman Empire stretched further afield, but there was another great empire in Persia and a larger one in China. There is no comparison.

To be sure, it is still inflammatory to speak openly of empire -- hence the prevalence of euphemisms such as hegemony, preeminence, primacy, sole superpower, or, a la the French, hyperpuissance. But many of the nation's founders would not be so shocked: Alexander Hamilton, writing the first paragraph of the first Federalist Paper, described America as "an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world." Thomas Jefferson's term was "empire of liberty."

Since September 11, President George W. Bush, too, has learned that it is hard to be a humble hegemon. During the 2000 election campaign, Bush's advisers spoke contemptuously of the Clinton administration's promiscuous "engagement" in "nation building" and other "international social work," and they derided Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's claim that the United States was "the indispensable nation." But now that he is fighting a war on terrorism, the president asserts that "no nation is exempt" from the "true and unchanging" American principles of liberty and justice. He sees adherence to these principles

as a "non-negotiable demand" that forms the "greater objective" of the war. The Bush Doctrine is thus an expression of the president's decision to preserve and extend Pax Americana throughout the Middle East and beyond.

But a doctrine does not a strategy make. Since the end of the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy has been driven by short-term tactics and politics (both international and domestic). Even in the war on terrorism, the Bush administration has been reluctant to accept any link between one problem and another. Afghanistan, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iraq, radical Islamism -- all have been dealt with discretely rather than as part of a larger regional approach.

The Pentagon, too, has resisted the realities of constant constabulary missions. The defense community has preferred to hang on to the traditional war-fighting concepts of the past or leap 20 years into the future to "transform" U.S. military forces and exploit the high-tech "revolution in military affairs." The tasks of patrolling the imperial frontier -- policing the skies over Iraq, pacifying the Balkans, keeping the lid on conflicts in the Caribbean or Colombia -- have been trivialized as hovering somehow beneath the dignity of serious strategists and military planners.

Small wars and constabulary missions, however, are as American as apple pie and have been a large part of U.S. security strategy for centuries. Max Boot's The Savage Wars of Peace makes it possible to revisit that past "imperial" tradition and mine it for lessons that might improve the management of today's global order. Thanks to Boot's journalistic sense -- he is the editorial features editor at The Wall Street Journal -- those lessons make for a great story and a compelling read. Boot combines a wide-angle perspective with an eye for detail: his tale begins at precisely 7:00 pm on February 16, 1804, when "the African night was turning blue-gray beneath the faint light of a crescent moon" in the harbor of Tripoli, and it concludes with a penetrating analysis and argument "in defense of the Pax Americana." Seeing no better alternative, Boot contends that "America should not be afraid to fight 'the savage wars of peace' if necessary to enlarge 'the empire of liberty.' It has been done before."

THE FREE MAN'S BURDEN

Beyond the pleasures of Boot's narrative and the bracing military and diplomatic history stands a larger contribution to America's understanding of itself as an expansive power. Boot sees links in strategy and small-war-making across what he describes as the three periods of U.S. history. From the late 1700s to the 1890s, the United States acted primarily as a commercial power, increasingly wealthy but relatively weak militarily. From 1898 until 1941, the nation claimed a role as a global great power in both the military and the economic spheres, but only as one of several such states. But the U.S. entrance into World War II set the country on a march toward its current status as sole superpower; the United States went about defeating first Nazi Germany and imperial Japan and then the Soviet Union, even as British and French colonialism faded and disappeared.