{"id":148260,"date":"2023-05-29T03:50:36","date_gmt":"2023-05-29T11:50:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=148260"},"modified":"2023-05-29T05:57:34","modified_gmt":"2023-05-29T13:57:34","slug":"yes-we-should-call-them-imperialists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=148260","title":{"rendered":"‘Yes, We Should Call Them Imperialists’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Gottfried wrote July 19, 2018<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\nNeoconservatives like Max Boot are fooling themselves if they think imposing ‘values’ on the rest of the world isn’t a matter of empire.<\/p>\n

Recently while reading a book by an Israeli scholar named Yoram Hazony with the provocative title The Virtue of Nationalism<\/a>, I encountered a distinction drawn by the late Charles Krauthammer<\/a> between empire building and American global democratic hegemony. Like the editors of the Weekly Standard<\/i>, for which he periodically wrote, Krauthammer believed it was unfair to describe what he wanted to see done, which was having the U.S. actively spread its own form of government throughout the world, as \u201cimperialism.\u201d After all, Krauthammer said, he and those who think like him \u201cdo not hunger for new territory,\u201d which makes it wrong to accuse them of \u201cimperialism.\u201d <\/p>\n

Hazony responds with the obvious answer that control can be imposed on the unwilling even if the empire builders are not overtly annexing territory. Meanwhile, other neoconservatives have given the game away by pushing their imperialist position a bit further than Krauthammer’s. Max Boot, for example<\/span><\/a>, has been quite open in demanding \u201can American empire\u201d built on ideological and military control even without outright annexation. <\/p>\n

The question that occurred to me while reading Krauthammer\u2019s proposal and Hazony\u2019s response (which I suspect would have been more devastating had Hazony not been afraid of losing neoconservative friends and sponsors) is this one: how is this not imperialism? <\/p>\n

Certainly the use of protectorates to increase the influence of Western powers in the non-Western world goes back a long time. As far back as the Peloponnesian War, rival Greek city-states tried to impose their constitutional arrangements on weaker Greek societies as a way of managing them politically. According to Xenophon, when the Athenians then surrendered to the Spartan commander Lysander in 403 BC, they had two conditions imposed on them: taking down their great wall (kathairein ta makra teixe) and installing a regime that looked like the Spartan one. This makes arguing that territory has to be annexed outright in order for it to become part of an American empire so utterly unconvincing.<\/p>\n

One reason the views offered by Krauthammer and Boot did not elicit more widespread criticism—and have enjoyed enthusiastic favor among Republicans for decades, culminating in the oratorical wonders of George W. Bush—may have been the embrace of another neoconservative doctrine: \u201cAmerican exceptionalism.\u201d The belief that the U.S. is a supremely good nation founded on universal principles has consequences that go well beyond electoral politics. Dennis Prager, a nationally syndicated talk radio host…extols American exceptionalism, which he says springs from American values.<\/p>\n

Those values have \u201cuniversal applicability,\u201d according to Prager,<\/a> and are \u201ceminently exportable.\u201d Glenn Beck has taken up the same theme of \u201cAmerican exceptionalism\u201d as an exportable \u201cidea”<\/a>that is meant for everyone on the planet. The \u201cideas\u201d or \u201cvalues\u201d in question are variously defined by the neoconservative media as \u201chuman rights,\u201d \u201cuniversal equality,\u201d or just making sure everyone lives like us. Whatever it is, we are told that to withhold it from the rest of the human race would be uncharitable. Our efforts to bring it to others therefore cannot be dismissed as \u201cimperialism\u201d any more than the Spanish government of the 16th century thought it was doing wrong by forcing its religion on indigenous people in the Americas.<\/p>\n

Although I\u2019m hardly a fan of his political views, former president Barack Obama once said something that I thought was self-evident but that offended even members of his own party. According to Obama, \u201cAmericans believe they\u2019re exceptional. But the Brits and Greeks believe they\u2019re special too.\u201d Obama was merely observing that it\u2019s okay for others to believe they\u2019re special, even if they\u2019re not Americans imbued with \u201cthe idea.\u201d Yet his statement was received with such uproar that he felt compelled to backtrack. Speaking later at West Point, he made it clear<\/a> that \u201cI believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.\u201d This from someone whom Fox News assures us hated America and spent every minute of his presidency denying our greatness! (And, yes, I\u2019ve heard the rejoinder to this: Obama was only pretending<\/em> to believe in the creed he dutifully recited.)<\/p>\n

It might be argued (and has been by neoconservatives many times) that the U.S. is both morally superior and less dangerous than ethnically defined societies because we advocate a \u201cvalue\u201d or \u201ccreed\u201d that’s accessible to the entire human race. But this is hardly a recipe for peace as opposed to what Krauthammer called a \u201cvalue-driven\u201d relationship with the rest of the world. British journalist Douglas Murray, in his intended encomium Neoconservatism: Why We Need It<\/a>, tries to praise his subjects but ends up describing a kind of global democratic jihadism. While Douglas admits that \u201csocially, economically, and philosophically\u201d neoconservatism differs from traditional conservatism, he insists that it\u2019s something better. He commends neoconservatives for wishing to convert the world to \u201cvalues.\u201d Their primary goal, according to Murray, is the \u201cerasing [of] tyrannies and [the] spreading [of] democracy,\u201d an arduous task that requires \u201cinterventionism, nation-building, and many of the other difficulties that had long concerned traditional conservatives.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Gottfried wrote July 19, 2018: Neoconservatives like Max Boot are fooling themselves if they think imposing ‘values’ on the rest of the world isn’t a matter of empire. Recently while reading a book by an Israeli scholar named Yoram … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21791,201,4,29611],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-148260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-america","category-conservatives","category-dennis-prager","category-neoconservatives"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=148260"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148260\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":148266,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148260\/revisions\/148266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=148260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=148260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=148260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}