Americans don't want an empire

ANDREW GREELEY

_T he United States of America
is a paper tiger. It reverses
the dictum of Theodore
Roosevelt. It speaks loudly
and carries a small stick.
Americans are told by their lead-
ers that their country is the last
superpower in the world, that we
have the duty to bring democracy
to the rest of the world, that we
have the might and the right, the
power and the virtue, to impose by
ourself our will on the planet.
This is rubbish, not to use a
more scatological word. The
United States is not much good as
an imperial power because it lacks
two of the qualities essential for ef-
fective imperialism: a population
that is ready to absorb serious ca-
sualties in the cause of the empire
and leadership that is sufficiently
cynical to abandon moralism when
there is a chance to deal.
It will do no good to lecture the
American people on their obliga-
tion to endure substantial loss of
life in a cause that the leadership
thinks is a national duty. Ameri-
cans will rise up in righteous anger
if they have been attacked and de-
stroy the foe, make no mistake
about that -- as the Japanese did
in 1941. But they quickly become
impatient with the endless, small
wars, in which young Americans
die without any clear purpose and without any "light at the end of the
tunnel."
That may be immature of Amer-
icans, but that's the way we are.
We lack the stern moral determi-
nation that the Wall Street Jour-
nal preaches to us several times a
week. We are not exactly pas-
sivists, but we are isolationists. We
always have been isolationists. Tell
us that we must do something
about Darfur or Kosovo or
Rwanda and we ask: Why us? If
the rest of the world is interested
in doing something, OK, but don't
expect us to go it alone for long.
After Korea and Vietnam, that
should have been clear.
We went along with the Iraq in-
vasion because our leaders were
able to persuade us that it was a
war to punish the Sept. 11 terror-
ists when in fact it was about the
belief that a "democratic" Iraq

___________________
Wars like Korea and
Vietnam and now Iraq
always end badly.

would shift the balance in the
Middle East.
The Journal likes to compare
us to the Western Europeans who
have been spoiled by prosperity
and the failure of their virility.
They want peace at any price, so
they can continue to enjoy the so-
cialist comforts of their co-
nsumerist lives. But such a descrip-
tion applies to Americans too, save
for a birth rate that is a bit above
replacement. Prosperous countries
have no stomach for war, espe-
cially when they realize that the
people they are fighting are not the
people who attacked them. Ameri-
cans never voted to become the en-
forcers of democracy and justice
everywhere in the world all by
themselves. Hence, wars like Ko-
rea and Vietnam and now Iraq al-
ways end badly.
After the Great War of 1914 to
1945, the idea of collective security
emerged. The nations of the world
would band together to protect one
another. In practice this meant
that the United States protected
Western Europe's fragile emergent
prosperity from the Russians.
That notion has deteriorated into
a theory that America is the great
policeman of the world, with an oc-
casional tiny "coalition of the will-
ing" tagging along until the party
in a given country that sent troops
to Iraq was voted out of power.
Iran is not perceived as a threat
now, so former British Foreign
Secretary Jack Straw called our
plan to bomb Iran "nutty" --
which it surely is. If the rest of the
world, including those most likely
to be threatened by fanatical mul-
lahs are not concerned, why should
Americans be worried?
Since 1916 the United States
has fought in five wars (excluding
the first Iraq war). In each of these
conflicts we came to the rescue of
others and gained nothing for our-
selves. Nor did we receive much
gratitude for our efforts. How just
those wars were is open to ques-
tion. Some probably were, others
certainly were not. But they were
not self-serving conflicts. Some-
how the hubris of power, which
seems to possess our leaders every
couple of decades, seduces them
into conflicts they can never win.
They cannot admit to themselves
that the world's most powerful
country is a paper tiger because its
people are not imperialists.