Have we become imperial America?

The unprecedented international position of the United States in the post-Cold War period has helped catalyze an important debate in the foreign policy community about whether it has become an empire.

Until recently, it was mostly leftist intellectuals, especially Marxists, who argued that the United States was an imperial power. Marxists hold that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism.

Today, as the Bush administration seeks to rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq, it is primarily neoconservative intellectuals who say America possesses the attributes of an imperial power. They say the United States is an empire that should embrace an imperial project of spreading democracy and American values in the Middle East and throughout the world.

Two of the world’s leading conservative intellectuals recently squared off for a lively debate at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where they discussed American imperialism and the U.S. role in the world.

Debating whether the United States is, and should be, an empire were a Scottish historian and journalist, Niall Ferguson, and a U.S. foreign-policy thinker, Robert Kagan.

Ferguson vs. Kagan

Mr. Ferguson said Americans refuse to accept the fact that their country is an empire, even though the rest of the world considers it to be one and will continue to do so.

Mr. Kagan, in contrast, believes it is inaccurate to characterize the United States as an empire and that it would be “strategically catastrophic” for its relations with the rest of the world if the United States declares itself an empire.

Mr. Ferguson, who has been described as a radical Tory, is considered to be one of Britain’s leading historians. He is a professor of financial history at New York University and Oxford University, a senior research fellow at Jesus College in Oxford, and a regular contributor to leading U.S. and European newspapers.

His most recent book is the best seller “Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power,” which has been adapted into a series for British television.

Mr. Kagan is a prominent U.S. neoconservative foreign-policy writer. He is also a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a columnist for The Washington Post, a contributing editor of the Weekly Standard and a former high-level State Department official.

He is author of the best-selling book “Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order.” This book, adapted from an essay in the journal Policy Review, is the most widely discussed recent contribution to understanding trans-Atlantic relations.

Empire in denial

Mr. Ferguson, who considers himself to be “a passionate pro-American,” argued that the United States is an empire in denial and that Americans should face up to the fact that the nation is an empire and “do the job properly.”

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