BrothersJudd Blog: THE PECULIARITY IS THAT....:

March 29, 2011

THE PECULIARITY IS THAT....:

Empire for Liberty (Peter J. Leithart, 29 March 2011, Credenda)

Far from eschewing empire, many of the Founders aspired to build a “particular ‘genre’ of state that would grow in size, strength, and prosperity, exercise influence over populations that either considered themselves autonomous or resided beyond America’s political boundaries . . . and possess a centralized government.” What the Founders did reject was colonization. They expected and wanted the US to expand, definitely to fill up the North American continent, and they were willing to fight Indians to achieve that aim. But they regarded colonization with abhorrence.

Immerman’s rich and detailed book examines six major players in the formation of the American empire. Only one of the six was a US President (John Quincy Adams), several were powerful Secretaries of State (Adams, William Henry Seward, John Foster Dulles), another was an American diplomat (Benjamin Franklin), another a foreign affairs leader in the Senate (Henry Cabot Lodge), and the last a policy intellectual who has held second-tier posts in various recent administrations (Paul Wolfowitz). All of them were theorists as well as practitioners, and because the intellectual influence runs down the line from Franklin to Wolfowitz, Immerman’s book amounts to a brief history of American foreign policy.

One of the important lessons that emerges from the book is that American empire has had several different shapes. Franklin’s ambitions were impelled by demographic considerations; the United Stated had to expand to ensure that there would be sufficient land for American farmers. As Secretary of State throughout the 1860s, Seward believed that the key to American greatness was commercial expansion and he worked to form an “informal” empire of influence. During the “Great Aberration” of late nineteenth-century American colonization, Lodge banged the drum for a “national greatness” empire that would prove to the world that America was all growed up. Dulles’ main concern was security and he sought to extend the sphere of American influence in order construct a world where the US and nations like ours set the rules for everyone else.

Whatever form American empire has taken, though, it has always foundered on the clash between imperial aspirations and our commitment to liberty. If it is an empire for liberty, we should be conquering to liberate. Yet, this impulse has tangled with American exceptionalism, which has sometimes implied that Americans are uniquely suited to be free. Blacks and Indians are the heart of the dilemma: How could the US expand into a vast empire without depriving Native Americans of liberty (not to mention land and life)? And how could the US claim to be an empire for liberty when a large number of states depended on slave labor?