The Indictment

The aim of this blog is to examine the question whether the United States is an empire, and if so, what the consequences of that reality are for our foreign relations--and even more, for our civic and cultural life. We cannot both address those questions and detail them at length even in several blog posts. So, still in our early days, let’s sketch out in broad strokes what we might be talking about, like a prosecutor making an indictment. Let us say yes, the U.S. is an empire, and state the case as baldly as possible, for ongoing elaboration and amplification. Here, in brief, is an imperial sketch of American history. Most of these descriptions are, I believe, uncontroversial:

 ​​Expansionism is fundamental to U.S. history. Prohibitions against expansion helped propel British Americans to revolution. King George had proclaimed a moratorium on settlement west of the Appalachians (so as to not further provoke Native American reprisals). Once victory over the British had been won, U.S. diplomats secured the territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi in the Treaty of Paris (1783), initiating the first, and not the last, spasm of expansion into the continental interior. This is the period of westward expansion in which Daniel Boone, for example, achieved renown.
 
The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 secured from France a territory that more than doubled the existing size of the United States, including a modern-day area from New Orleans through the Dakotas and Montana. We might pause to consider that the famed Lewis & Clark “Corps of Discovery” sent west to explore this new American territory was in fact a military unit.
 
Further acquisition of continental territory--again, from the dominions of other powers, it must be noted--included the Transcontinental (Adams-Onis) Treaty of 1819 with Spain that secured American claims to the Missouri (i.e., Louisiana Purchase) territories, set the borders between the United States and New Spain (Mexico), ceded Florida, and gave the Americans a claim to the Pacific Northwest territories. Here again territorial expansion ensued from diplomacy rather than military conquest, but no reasonable definition of imperial expansion demands military conquest alone.
 
We will gloss the story of Texas, to keep our indictment as uncomplicated as possible. Some may doubt whether the Texas saga is a truly “American” story since Texas’s annexation into the Union was accomplished at least in part by “Texicans” acting on their own interest and not solely because of imperial impulses arising from Washington. Nevertheless let us note that Texas’ war of independence from Mexico was fought primarily by cultural Americans and that their desire to annex Texas to the union found solid, if not universal, support in Washington at the time.
 
In 1846 the Treaty of Oregon resolved the outstanding border dispute with Great Britain over the Pacific Northwest, granting the U.S. full rights to modern-day Oregon and Washington to the 49th parallel (disappointing proponents of “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!”, the slogan of pro-annexationists describing the furthest northern latitudes of the Oregon territory for which they would settle). The treaty was accomplished not without significant saber-rattling on the part of the Polk Administration.
 
A year after Texas’s annexation into the Union, the Mexican War, a war of choice fomented by the bellicose Polk Administration, brought the territories of modern-day New Mexico, Arizona, and California into the Union. The so-called “Gadsden Purchase” several years later completed the story of continental expansion, and the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867-–“Seward’s Folly-–added an expansionist aperçu.
 
From the outset, the U.S. acquired territories not its own from foreign powers via purchase, diplomacy, and war or threats of war, over which it established sovereignty. At each stage, expansion involved the subordination, subjugation, and displacement of foreign peoples, in this case, Native Americans. U.S. institutions both military and civil were established to maintain peace and to protect from Native reprisals. And in some cases, expansion also meant the extension of a system of race-based chattel slavery. Expansion, hierarchy, and order: the three clear markers of empire.
 
Overarching this enterprise was a motivating ideology that explained, justified, and encouraged expansion, which over time became known formally as “Manifest Destiny.” Manifest Destiny was neither uncontested nor universally embraced. But belief in an American Manifest Destiny was widespread, remarkably durable, coherent and cohesive, and capable of adjustment under evolving historical circumstances. We will, of course, have much more to say about Manifest Destiny in coming weeks and months.
 
After the Civil War, with the political problems triggered by expansion (partially) settled, many began to look for overseas acquisitions. Not all of these bids were successful or uncontroversial (Grant's bid to annex Santo Domingo, e.g.). Many, indeed, ran afoul of concerted political opposition. Nevertheless, by the end of the 19th century, an emerging consensus in favor of overseas acquisitions, the development of a devoted strategy of and for such acquisitions, and the naval apparatus to make it possible, had all taken shape. The era of overseas colonialism had arrived. In 1893 a manufactured crisis (by American sugar interests) would allow the annexation of Hawaii several years later. In 1898 victory in war against Spain brought formal colonies in the form of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and other areas as protectorates, notably Cuba.
 
This formal colonial project at the turn of the twentieth century proved problematic. Concerns with the moral and administrative challenges of formal colonialism, and the influence of an emergent global focus on arbitration and the settling of disputes through international law put an end to American enthusiasm for colonialism. But other techniques of expansion were already being promulgated. Spreading American commerce, extending American financial leverage, and marketing the products of an immensely powerful American industry to a presumably waiting world became obsessions. American economic power would now carry the flag overseas. But even here we must pause to note the continuing reliance of American armed intervention as a backstop to American economic power. Between 1900 and the early 1930s, the Americans intervened military, or threatened to intervene military, throughout the Caribbean and Latin America dozens of times, from Haiti to Brazil to Nicaragua and nearly everywhere else.
 
After the First World War the U.S. transformed its mission. Militarism had been discredited, by the U.S.’s own colonial experience and, naturally, by the apocalyptic bloodletting of the first World War. But a sense of American mission remained. A new gospel of democratization, joined to existing enthusiasm for open markets, arose, articulated forcefully by President Woodrow Wilson. Empires were judged a relic of the past, and WWI put paid to German, Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian imperial dinosaurs. Nation-states would be the political form of the future, and the U.S., as the world’s reigning democracy, would help shepherd those new states to reality. This new orientation sputtered under the pressure of the Depression in the 1930s, but WWII returned Wilsonianism to the fore, and opposition to surviving empires, notably the British and French, and then intensely, the Soviet Union, would become the reigning American priority, a new imperial civilizing mission of anti-imperialism.
 
After WWII, Americans made Wilson’s liberal internationalism a reigning imperial orthodoxy. Americanism in the form of democracy and open markets would be exported into west Europe and Asia, and fought for and defended elsewhere around the world. In support of this mission, and in opposition to Soviet communism, the Americans would establish regional alliances all over the world (NATO being the most famous) and found a raft of supporting military bases, today now numbering in the many hundreds. The imperial frontier had gone global. What the historian Daniel Immerwahr calls the "pointillist empire" was coming into focus.
 
Even after the collapse of the USSR in the 1990s the imperial mission remained, even gaining strength. American economic and military power would now be employed aggressively to redeem the remaining backward, illiberal parts of the world. Democratic and Republican administrations would disagree on which tools were best suited to a given enterprise, but both political parties when in control of the White House regularly employed American military muscle and economic leverage in transformative geopolitical projects, 2003’s War in Iraq perhaps the most consequential. In this period, the Americans learned how to mask the imperial project on which they were embarked, including, for example, the development of an academic theory--hegemony–-to deny that what was happening, and had been happening, was empire: an imperial scholarship for an empire-in-denial. We will examine hegemony theory later.
 
U.S. history certainly appears to be an unbroken story of expansion, first continental, then overseas, and now global. Multiple strategies have been deployed, including military conquest, political and commercial domination, and even cultural preeminence. Motivating ideologies, from early doctrines of individual freedom, political independence, and Manifest Destiny, to later notions of democratic legitimacy and open markets, have animated expansionist impulses.

This is, as I say, a bare sketch, an indictment of sorts. What are the counter arguments? Leave your comments below!