American imperialism has always existed hand-in-hand with American exceptionalism. Since the idea of manifest destiny took hold in the nineteenth century, the United States has looked to expand its presence and its influence not just from shore to shore, but also to nations around the world. Viewing America as an empire—and by “empire” I mean a state that uses force to impose rulers on another country—we can better understand that the many wars and conflicts we now find ourselves embroiled in are not wars of necessity, but of choice.
Perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of the American empire is that it was a latecomer to imperial rule. While the European powers, especially Britain and France, were building their far-flung overseas empires in the nineteenth century, the United States was still engaged in its genocidal wars against Native Americans and its Civil War. America’s overseas empire building began almost like clockwork in the 1890s, once the United States finally stretched from coast to coast, thereby “closing the frontier” in North America. The next step was overseas empire.
As a latecomer empire, the United States repeatedly found itself taking up the imperial cloak from a former European imperial power. President William McKinley took America to war against Spain in 1898, grabbing Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines. It did so in the name of supporting local freedom fighters against the Spanish Empire, only to betray those freedom fighters immediately by installing U.S.-backed regimes (in Cuba) or direct rule (in Puerto Rico and the Philippines). McKinley annexed Hawaii the same year, against the wishes of most native Hawaiians.
From 1898 until the end of World War II, the United States had few prospects for expanding its imperial reach, since the British and French empires were still expanding—most notably, after World War I, into the Middle East. But World War II bled Europe dry. Though Britain was a victor in the war, and France was liberated, neither country had the economic, financial, military, or political wherewithal to hold onto their overseas empires, especially since freedom movements in their colonies were engaged in terrorism and guerilla warfare to gain their independence. Britain and France peacefully granted independence to some of their colonies but in other cases fought bloody wars against the independence movements (as the French did in Algeria and Vietnam), almost always losing in the end.
After World War II, the United States asserted global leadership, including through indirect rule. Empires are most visible when they rule directly through conquest and annexation, such as in the U.S. conquests of Hawaii, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico at the end of the nineteenth century. Yet empires also rule indirectly, when they use force, covert or overt, to depose a government they deem hostile and replace it with a government of their design that they intend to keep under their control. Indirect rule—and especially regime-change tactics—has been the more typical U.S. approach. There are dozens of cases in which the CIA or the U.S. military has overthrown governments in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, with the aim of indirect rule.
America’s postwar empire building coincided with the Cold War. More often than not, the United States justified its overseas wars and CIA-led coups as necessary to defend itself and its allies against the Soviet Union. American leaders shunned the language of empire and direct rule. Yet the simple fact is that the United States very often had its own narrow interests at heart: oil wealth in the Middle East (such as Iran, 1953); valuable farmlands and industry in Latin America (such as Guatemala, 1954); and U.S. military bases across the world.
The United States often found itself fighting a continuation of earlier imperial wars. Vietnam is a clear case in point. Following World War II, Vietnamese freedom fighters under Ho Chi Minh battled French imperial rule to establish an independent Vietnam. When the Vietnamese defeated the French in a key battle in 1954 and France decided to withdraw, the United States stepped into the fight against the Vietnamese independence fighters, a costly and bloody war that lasted until the U.S. withdrawal in 1975. By that point, more than a million Vietnamese had died at U.S. hands and more than 50,000 American soldiers had lost their lives for no reason. The U.S. warmaking also spread disastrously to neighboring Laos and Cambodia.
In the Middle East, the United States also took up the preceding wars of imperial Britain and France. America’s motives were essentially the same: to secure Mideast oil and to project military power in Western Asia, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean. In 1953, the CIA teamed up with Britain’s MI6 to overthrow the elected government of Iran in order to secure Iran’s oil for Britain and the United States (another instance of indirect rule). This was Britain’s last imperial hurrah in the region, as the United States took the lead from that point onward.
While there are select examples of war ushering in peace—America’s shining nobility in World War II and its positive, though flawed, role in the Korean War—we should not let this obscure America’s many disastrous wars of choice, when the United States went to war for terrible reasons and ended up causing havoc at home and abroad. Take President Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the war in Vietnam in 1964, done mainly to protect himself against right-wing charges that he was “weak on communism.”
Empires trapped in regional wars can choose to fight on or more wisely acknowledge that the imperial adventure is both futile and self-destructive. King George III was wise to give up in 1781; fighting the Americans wasn’t worth the effort, even if it was possible militarily. The United States was wise to finally give up the war in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam in 1975. America’s decision to cut its losses saved not only Southeast Asia but the United States as well. The United States was similarly wise to curtail its CIA-led coups throughout Latin America, as a prelude to peace in the region.
And yet the United States is now ensnared in a perpetual, indeed expanding Middle East war. To examine the political histories of Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Israel-Palestine after 1950 is to observe the United States engaged in the intrigues, wars, CIA-led coups, and military overthrows that had been the handiwork of Britain and France during earlier decades. The CIA toppled governments in the Middle East on countless occasions. When lamenting the entrenched conflict in the region, media pundits tended to overlook the U.S. role in this instability.
President George W. Bush took America to war against the Taliban-led government of Afghanistan in 2001 and against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in 2003, according to the remarkably naïve neoconservative game plan to rid the greater Middle East of regimes hostile to U.S. interests. The American imperial vision proved to be a fantasy, and the U.S.-led violence came to naught—worse than naught—in terms of U.S. interests.
The issue is not whether an imperial army can defeat a local one. It usually can, just as the United States did quickly in Afghanistan and in Iraq. The issue is whether it gains anything by doing so. Following such a “victory,” the imperial power faces unending heavy costs in terms of policing, political instability, guerilla war, and terrorist blowback.
There are also countless bloody cases in which the United States and local allies tried and failed to overthrow a government and instead fomented a prolonged war. The ongoing war in Syria is a case in point.
Our intervention in Syria in support of a rebellion against Bashar al-Assad was ostensibly done on humanitarian grounds. Yet we know from WikiLeaks and other sources that U.S. strategists were looking for a way to topple Assad for years before 2011, hoping that economic instability and IMF-backed austerity would do the job. The United States and Saudi Arabia wanted him out because of Iran’s backing of the regime. When the Arab Spring erupted in early 2011, the Obama administration seized on it as an opportunity to nudge Assad out the door.
When Assad showed his staying power, President Obama ordered the CIA to coordinate efforts with Saudi Arabia and Turkey to defeat the regime through support for anti-regime fighters on the ground. Thus, the quick exit of Assad once dreamed of by U.S. strategists turned into a full-blown regional war, with the United States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Russia, and Iran all competing for power through proxy fighters including jihadist groups. With backing from Iran and Russia, Assad could not be removed.
The U.S.-led intervention in Libya was also allegedly for humanitarian purposes, to protect civilian populations against Moammar Khadafy. While Khadafy was eventually toppled, his removal required a NATO-led war over several months and, as in Syria, the civilian population ended up suffering horrific harms. Whether the overthrows have succeeded or failed, the long-term consequences have almost always been violence and instability.
The United States is now ensnared in a perpetual, indeed expanding Middle East war, with drones and air strikes increasingly replacing ground troops. In the past, U.S. ground troops committed atrocities, such as My Lai in Vietnam, that were seared into the national conscience. Now that we have drone strikes and bombing runs (as in Syria and Yemen), most of the killings are out of sight, beyond the media’s reach. In any event, the U.S. public is completely habituated to war. The U.S. destruction of hospitals, wedding parties, or prayer meetings with dozens or hundreds of civilian casualties hardly registers a moment’s notice.
The United States is trapped in the Middle East by its own pseudo-intellectual constructions. During the Vietnam War, the “domino theory” claimed that if the United States withdrew from Vietnam, communism would sweep Asia. The new domino theory is that if the United States were to stop fighting in the Middle East, Islamic terrorists such as ISIS would soon be at our doorstep.
The truth is almost the opposite. ISIS is a ragtag army of perhaps 30,000 troops in a region in which the large nations—including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey—have standing armies that are vastly larger and better equipped. I argued for years that the regional powers could easily drive ISIS out of the territories it held in Syria and Iraq if the regional powers chose to do so, and indeed that proved to be the case in 2017, when both Iraq and Syria retook ISIS territory. The U.S. military presence in the Middle East is actually the main recruiting tool for ISIS and other terrorist groups. Young people stream into Syria and Iraq to fight the imperial enemy.
Terrorism is a frequent consequence of imperial wars and imperial rule. Local populations are unable to defeat the imperial powers, so they impose high costs through terror instead. Consider the terrorism used by Jewish settlers against the British Empire and local Palestinians in their fight for Israel’s independence and territory; or Serbian terrorism deployed against the Hapsburg Empire; or Vietnamese terrorism used against the French and United States in Vietnam’s long war for independence; or American terrorism, for that matter, that independence fighters used against the British in America’s war of independence.
This is of course not to condone terrorism. Indeed, my point is to condemn imperial rule and to argue for political solutions rather than the oppression, war, and terror that come in its wake. Imperial rulers—whether the British in pre-independence America, the Americans in Cuba and the Philippines after 1898, the French and Americans in Vietnam, or the United States in the Middle East in recent decades—foment violent reactions that destroy peace, prosperity, good governance, and hope. The real solutions to these conflicts lie in diplomacy and political justice, not in imperial rule, repression, and terror.
So while our current logic compels us to continue ongoing conflicts in order to avoid the spread of terrorism, we should just avoid wars of choice in the first place. If you doubt that they are “of choice,” consider that in these cases—the Spanish-American War, the Vietnam War, and the Mideast wars—the United States attacked the other countries first, not in self-defense, as in World War II. The sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor in 1898, most likely caused by an onboard explosion in the ship’s coal bunkers, became a cause for war when the sinking was attributed to Spain. Lyndon B. Johnson expanded the war in Vietnam on the pretext that North Vietnam had attacked the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin, but Johnson knew that the claim was false. Nor had Saddam, Assad, or Khadafy attacked the United States. The claim that Khadafy was about to commit genocide against his people was propaganda. In the case of Iraq, the pretext was Saddam’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.
Since the birth of the United Nations in 1945, such wars of choice are actually against international law. The UN Charter allows for wars of self-defense and military actions agreed upon by the UN Security Council. The UN Security Council may approve military interventions to protect civilian populations from the crimes of their own government under the doctrine of “Responsibility to Protect.” No country can go it alone other than in self-defense.
Many Americans dismiss the UN Security Council on the grounds that Russia will veto every needed action. Yet this is absolutely not the case. Russia and China indeed agreed to a military intervention in Libya in 2011 in order to protect Libya’s civilian population. But then NATO used that UN resolution as a pretext to actually topple Khadafy, not merely to protect the civilian population. Russia and China also recently teamed up with the United States to achieve the nuclear agreement with Iran, to adopt the Paris Climate Agreement, and to adopt the Sustainable Development Goals. Diplomacy is feasible. Getting one’s way all the time is not.
There’s a good reason such wars are illegal: they have been disasters, one after the next. In the Spanish-American war, the United States gained an empire and fertile farmland in Cuba, but also decades of political instability there and in the Philippines, eventually resulting in Philippine independence and an anti-American revolution in Cuba. In World War I, the U.S. intervention turned the tide toward the victory of France and the United Kingdom over Germany and the Ottoman Empire, only to be followed by a disastrous peace settlement, instability in Europe and the Middle East, and the rise of Hitler in the ensuing chaos fifteen years later. In Vietnam, the war led to 55,000 Americans dead, 1 million or more Vietnamese killed, genocide in next-door Cambodia, destabilization of the U.S. economy, and, eventually, complete U.S. withdrawal.
In Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, the regimes were quickly defeated by U.S.-led forces, but peace and stability proved elusive. All of these countries have been wracked by continuing war, terrorism, and U.S. military engagement. And in Syria, the United States was not even successful in toppling Assad—and led to the entry of ISIS into Syria.
It’s not so hard to rev up the American public to fight a war, even a horribly misguided one, if the government claims falsely that the United States is under attack or is acting in the service of some grand humanitarian cause. Yet these have been the pretexts, not the reasons, for the wars of choice.
There is one foreign policy goal that matters above all the others, and that is to keep the United States out of a new war, whether in Syria, North Korea, or elsewhere. In 2017 alone, President Trump struck Syria with Tomahawk missiles, bombed Afghanistan with the most powerful nonnuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal, and sent an armada toward nuclear-armed North Korea. We could easily find ourselves in a rapidly escalating war, one that could pit the United States directly against nuclear-armed countries of China, North Korea, and Russia.
Such a war, if it turned nuclear and global, could end the world. Even a nonnuclear war could end democracy in the United States, or the United States as a unified nation. Who thought the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan would end the Soviet Union itself? Which of the belligerents at the start of World War I foresaw the catastrophic end of four giant empires—Hohenzollern (Prussia), Romanov (Russia), Ottoman, and Hapsburg—as a result of the war?
There are actions we can undertake to prevent new wars and covert engagements. As a first step, the CIA should be drastically restructured, to be solely an intelligence agency rather than an unaccountable secret army of the president. When the CIA was created in 1947, it was given the two very different roles of intelligence and covert operations. Truman was alarmed about this dual role, and time has proved him right. The CIA has been a vital success when it provides key intelligence, but an unmitigated disaster when it serves as the president’s secret army. We need to end the military functions of the CIA, yet Trump has recently expanded the CIA’s warmaking powers by giving the agency the authority to target drone strikes without Pentagon approval.
Second, it is vital for Congress to reestablish its decision-making authority over war and peace. That is its constitutional role, indeed perhaps its most important constitutional role as a bulwark of democratic government. Yet Congress has almost completely abandoned this responsibility. When Trump brandishes the sword toward North Korea or drops bombs on Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, Congress is mute, neither investigating nor granting nor revoking any legislative authority for such actions. This is Congress’s greatest dereliction of duty. Congress needs to wake up before Trump launches an impetuous and potentially calamitous war against nuclear-armed North Korea.
Third, it is essential to break the secrecy over U.S. foreign policy-making. Most urgently, we need an inquest into U.S. involvement in Syria in order for the public to understand how we arrived at the current morass. Since Congress is unlikely to undertake this, and since the executive branch would of course never do so, the responsibility lies with civil society, especially academia and other policy experts, to coalesce around an information-gathering and -reporting function.
Fourth, we need urgently to return to global diplomacy within the UN Security Council, as I’ll consider further in part IV.
Finally, the United States must get out of those conflicts it’s already involved in. This means an immediate end to its fighting in the Middle East and a turn to UN-based diplomacy for real solutions and security. The Turks, Arabs, and Persians have lived together as organized states for around 2,500 years. The United States has meddled unsuccessfully in the region for sixty-five years. It’s time to let the locals sort out their problems, without their being inflamed by outside powers, and supported by the good offices of the United Nations, including peacekeeping and peace-building efforts. Just recently, the Arabs once again wisely and rightly reiterated their support for a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians if Israel withdraws from the conquered territories. America’s unhelpful interventions are sure to fail. As we’ll see in the next chapter, the complex history of this region—made all the more complex through foreign meddling—requires that the states involved take the lead. We should support their decisions with diplomacy, not war.