Imperial America

Back in 1975, Richard Neuhaus wrote in Time Toward Home that “America is an imperial power,” elaborating that “Suppose we could drop from our history all our self-images, ideals, notions of destiny and everything else that makes up what we have called America’s public piety. America would still be an imperial power. In any conceivable scenario short of nuclear annihilation, the United States will for the foreseeable future be among the strongest, maybe the strongest, power on earth. The ways in which American influences are, for better and for worse, inextricably intertwined with the policies, aspirations and fears of other peoples defy enumeration.” America’s imperial status is a fact like “the fact that Saudi Arabia has more oil than Japan.” One might wish things were different, but “it is a factor to be taken into account.”

This power itself forces Americans to ask questions about the meaning of America. Power is never self-legitimating, and the scramble for self-definition is an effort prove that we have “some right ” to the power we have. That lends an earnestness to the American character that other, less powerful nations can happily avoid: “A citizen of Denmark need not be troubled by the questions that trouble us. He probably has no illusions that Denmark is in the vanguard of history, and, if he does, they are harmless illusions that do not impinge upon the rest of the world. He does not have to fret about the ways in which Danish military, political, economic and cultural influences change the lives of other, for better and for worse.”

For his own part, Neuhaus insists that America, even as an imperial power, must define its role in the world in terms of the lines from Emma Lazarus inscribed on the Statue of Liberty (“Give me your tired . . . .”). America cannot define its national interest without taking “into account the interests of the rest of the world, especially of the world’s poor and oppressed.” The then-popular “Kissinger version of realpolitik, with its casual indifference to the majority of the world that is poor, violates fundamental tenets of the American public piety.”