John B. Judis has an eye-opening article up on Foreign Policy. Imperial Amnesia draws parallels between the current neoconservative attempts to dominate and transform Iraq, and the late 19th-/early 20th-century imperialist attempts to dominate and transform the Philippines and Mexico. Both Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt initially set out with goals of changing the world order through American imperialism, and discovered that it simply wouldn’t work. The parallels are striking, and the repeat of history is a compelling argument against what the Bush administration is attempting right now in the Middle East.
Wilson eventually concluded that the United States could not transform the world through imperial aggression. Despite its size and power, America simply could not run the entire globe through military and economic dominance. Instead, Wilson proposed using America’s power to dismantle the global imperial infrastructure, promoting self-rule worldwide. His ideas were met with acceptance by many nations, and they are still relevant to modern global politics.
The United States cannot afford to be in the business of taking over other sovereign nations and refusing to give them up until their people settle on a government we find agreeable. It always results in resentment and revolution, and a massive toll on the economies and lives of both the smaller country and the United States. Imperialism didn’t work in the Philippines in the 1890s or Mexico in 1913, failed miserably in Cuba and Vietnam during the Cold War, and continues to flail about in Afghanistan and Iraq to this day.
Instead of attempting to pacify the world one nation at a time, the United States must devote its resources to removing the imperial legacy built during the 18th and 19th centuries. We should be persuading imperial powers to give up their holdings. We should stamp out business practices that create a stranglehold on the economies of smaller nations and replace such one-sided economic imperialism with real fair trade. We should allow nations to come to democratic rule on their own terms, in their own time. We should intervene with military force where necessary to prevent atrocities, as in the Balkans and Somalia, but such intervention must be multilateral, agreed upon by the entire global community.
The lessons learned in the Philippines and Mexico are hardly a hundred years in the past, and yet policy-makers have already forgotten them. Imperialism is an obvious root cause of many world problems. Dabbling in imperialism simply is not an option, not when so many already despise the United States. If we are to be a beacon of reason and sanity in the world, we must stop acting irresponsibly and become a model democratic and free society. Removing imperialism from our foreign policy would go a long way toward convincing the world that we’re serious about this whole liberty and justice thing.
