Empire's apologists.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: American foreign policy

When two of the leading magazines in the United States put stories on their covers that deal with the hitherto taboo subject of the American empire, it's worth examining their presentations. I'm referring to "The American Empire (Get Used to It)" by Michael Ignatieff, which ran on the cover of The New York Times Magazine of January 5, and "The American Empire: Is the U.S. Trying to Shape the World? Should It?" by Jay Tolson on the January 13 cover of U.S. News & World Report.

Surprise, surprise, both articles end up defending the U.S. empire, though Tolson quibbles with the term.

Both articles embellish the record of the U.S. empire to date.

Both articles neglect the fundamental material basis of the empire.

And both articles prattle on about the United States reluctantly having to assume the imperial responsibilities that have allegedly been thrust upon it.

Buffing the Historical Record

Tolson writes, "So far, the United States has seldom--with the exception of 1898--demonstrated that it wants to directly dominate the internal affairs of other nations." This is a whopper, given the U.S. interventions, meddlings, or subversions in Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Grenada, Panama, Chile, Angola, Namibia, the Congo, Ghana, Iran, Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, to name just some. Even Tolson immediately has to hedge, citing "heavy-handed meddling ... in Iran, South Vietnam, Chile, and other nations." And he embarrassingly calls the U.S. war against Vietnam a "failed experiment in `nation-building.'"

For his part, Ignatieff writes: "America's success in the twentieth century owed a great deal to the shrewd understanding that America's interest lay in aligning itself with freedom."

Such platitudes crumble upon even the most cursory examination of the record. The United States didn't overthrow Arbenz, Mossadegh, Lumumba, and Sukarno to ensure freedom but to make way for U.S. capital and to project U.S. power.

Or check out the actual words of chief U.S. policy planner George Kennan in the late 1940s and 1950s. As Noam Chomsky has noted, Kennan was quite jaundiced about the need to align the United States with freedom. "It is better to have a strong regime in power than a liberal government if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by Communists," Kennan wrote. He also favored, in his words, "police repression by the local government" because "the results are on balance favorable to our purposes."

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