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Prayer for You
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America As Empire: Global Leader or Rogue Power?
America As Empire: Global Leader or Rogue Power? by Jim Garrison People used to think of America as a global leader. Now a majority of the world thinks of America as a rogue power. Why? The answer to this question has to a large degree to do with what America has become. America has made the transition from republic to empire. It is no longer what it was. It was founded to be a beacon of light unto nations, a democratic and egalitarian haven to which those seeking freedom could come. It has now become an unrivaled empire among the nations, exercising dominion over them. How it behaves and what it represents have fundamentally changed. It used to represent freedom. Now it represents power. It was when I began to realize that my country had crossed the threshold from republic to empire that I began to study the history of empire. It was the only concept large and dynamic enough to explain what was going on, providing a larger framework, a more complex metaphor with which to understand America and the world. Republics imply single nations democratically governed, which was what America was founded to be. The very essence of empire is the control of one nation over other nations. While America remains a republic within its own borders, it has become an empire in relation to the rest of the world. The inordinate power of the United States disturbs people on the American left and excites people on the American right. Liberals are uneasy with the fact that America has so much power, especially military power. They would prefer that America simply be part of the community of nations, and use its power to further human welfare. Conservatives, on the other hand, are jubilant that America is finally breaking out of multilateral strictures and is unilaterally asserting its imperial prerogatives abroad. For them, national self-interest, enforced by military supremacy, should be the guiding principle of U.S. policy. The liberal notion that America confine its power within multilateral frameworks and the conservative desire to apply American power unilaterally for narrow self-interest are both inadequate. There is a deeper and more complex reality going on. Whatever qualms people may have about it, America has become an empire and there's no turning back. As Hercaclitus taught us, one can never enter the same river twice. The transition from republic to empire is irreversible, like the metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly. Once power is attained, it is not surrendered. It is only exercised. The central question before America, therefore, is what i t should do with all the power it has. How should it assert its authority and for what end? This is a crucially important question. If it uses its power to build democracy at the global level with the same genius with which it built democracy at a national level, the United States could leave a legacy so powerful that the world will become knitted into a singularity of democracy and freedom -- a single global system. The truth of the current global situation is this: Until there is a sufficiently strong matrix of global institutions to ensure global stability and prosperity, there is literally no one else to lead the world but America. This means that the highest vision for the American empire is to serve the global need for effective governance. To achieve this task, America must consciously view itself as a transitional empire, one whose destiny at the moment of global power is to midwife a democratically goverened global system. It must see its historic task as a challenge not to dominate, but to catalyze -- to establish the integrating institutions and mechanisms necessary for the effective management of the emerging global system such that its own power is subsumed by the very edifice it helps to build. Jim Garrison's book, America As Empire: Global Leader or Rogue Power?, is available HERE. |
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© 1995-2008 -- Rob Brezsny. All rights reserved
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