Wayne O'Leary

End of the American Empire

Over a century of sporadic American imperialism began to draw to a close in August with Joe Biden’s decision to terminate the US presence in Afghanistan. Things have not gone smoothly. It’s a case, perhaps, of poetic justice; a country whose periodic adventurism abroad has been uncomfortably at odds with its professed ideals appears at last to have come face to face with the conflicted nature of its foreign policy.

The US was never cut out to be an imperial power, despite a long history of trying to become one; it aspires to be a model democracy, and that runs counter to efficiently maintaining an empire. Even so, a messianic imperial impulse runs deep in the country’s roots.

It made its first appearance in the writings of John L. O’Sullivan, a journalist and Jacksonian political activist inspired by the westward movement, who, along with other expansionists, agitated for occupying the Oregon Territory and bringing Texas into the Union. It was America’s “manifest destiny,” O’Sullivan wrote in 1845, to overspread, possess and develop the entire North American continent given to it by God.

Further, it was the mission of America to spread personal freedom, freedom of conscience, freedom of trade and business pursuits, and general equality of opportunity throughout the world. “We are the nation of human progress and who will, what can, set limits on our onward march,” O’Sullivan proclaimed.

It was heady stuff, even if you allow for the tawdry attraction of land speculation and (in the case of Texas) a desire to acquire added territory for slavery. This early manifestation of quasi-imperialism led to the Mexican War (1846-48) and the subsequent US appropriation of California and the Southwest, as well as the simultaneous acquisition of disputed Oregon and the Pacific Northwest via treaty with Great Britain.

Nevertheless, the true expression of American imperialism, as historian Frederick Merk pointed out a generation ago (“Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History”), was the version foisted upon us at the turn of the 19th century by the 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt. Manifest destiny, Merk argued, was basically continentalism, the absorption of North America; true imperialism, the variation introduced by TR and friends, was aggressively nationalistic and involved reducing distant peoples overseas to colonial subjects.

The American people, Merk concluded, wanted neither one and would, given their druthers, have preferred the competing ideal of setting an example of freedom to the outside world, a passive, uplifting example others might copy. The truth contained in that third option is just now dawning on the last generation of imperialists, and the Biden withdrawal, sloppily carried out as it’s been, evidences that fact.

It’s been a long, hard lesson to learn. In the meantime, for a century and a quarter beginning in the late 1890s, we’ve lived off and on with TR’s dream. Starting with the Spanish-American War and the events that followed, the US, within the space of two years (1898-1900), acquired an empire covering 125,000 square miles and described as stretching across half the world’s circumference, encompassing Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, Samoa, and the Philippine Islands.

The imperial motives varied; they included demonstrations of racial superiority, the pursuit of military glory, advancing the flag, a moral obligation to “civilize” the benighted, religious proselytizing on behalf of Christianity, and, above all else, economic profit — the desire for virgin markets, cheap raw materials, and job creation at home. The Roosevelt imperialists never denied their economic motivation, what one of them, Sen. Albert J. Beveridge (R-Ind.), called “our opportunity,” but always it was cloaked in a religious patina. God, said Beveridge, had selected the US as his chosen nation to stamp out international chaos, save civilization, and “lead in the regeneration of the world.”

Others weren’t so sure. Mark Twain, observing the bloody enforcement of TR’s subjugation of the Philippines in 1901, wondered aloud if conferring Western civilization on the people “sitting in the darkness” (the Filipinos) was such a good thing, or morally justifiable. He sarcastically suggested a new American flag — white stripes painted black and a skull-and-crossbones replacing the stars.

This is the legacy we are finally leaving behind as America pulls out of Afghanistan after 21 years of imposing order from above. Not that all the things Americans attempted were bad. There was the celebrated effort to expand freedom for women and girls, which seemed at times, judging by US media coverage, to be the major reason for our being there. In essence, it was part of a general campaign to implant the American way of life in the Middle East that included other aspects of nation building (democratic government, free enterprise, et al.) and went far beyond a simple war on terrorism. George W. Bush confidently set the precedent in 2001; it will end ingloriously with Joe Biden.

The sudden US exit from Kabul, a carbon copy of the chaotic airborne departure from Saigon in 1975 following our equally ill-fated attempt to nation-build in Vietnam, illustrated America’s ineptness as an imperial power. (The British handled imperial defeat better, leaving behind a functioning democracy in India in 1947.) America’s imperial legacy includes not only a failure to replicate the positives of our way of life, but an outright negative legacy in the form of neocolonial corruption.

From narcotics trafficking and black-marketeering under US puppet Prime Ministers Nguyen Cao Ky and Nguyen Van Thieu in South Vietnam to graft, bribery and patronage scandals under Afghan Presidents Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani (the latter having reportedly fled the country after tapping into the government treasury), the prevailing imperial theme has always been, “Show me the money!”

An estimated $2 trillion in foreign-assistance spending was wasted over two decades in Afghanistan, half of it by the US military in a futile exercise to train and equip a neocolonial surrogate defense force. The Pentagon’s epic failure in intelligence and strategy, which victimized the White House, can’t be overestimated. Neither can the political reliance on an urbanized, quasi-Western governing class ensconced in Kabul that lacked any understanding of its own rural hinterland.

But in the end, the failure to tame Afghanistan was one of American imperial hubris — a stubborn attempt to succeed where the ancient Persians, Alexander the Great, the Turks, the British (who fought three wars there), and the Soviets had all failed. The mistake was in disregarding history.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2021

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