Mistaking Hegemony for Empire

Abstract

However tempting it might be to regard American foreign policy as representing either the rational decisions of a single individual or the coherent output of a policy elite, the reality is different, and much more complex. For we must not only consider individuals as occupiers of bureaucratic offices; we need also to understand how their policy advocacies get shaped by their particular values and ideas. In this regard, it is simply impossible to ignore the influence exercised by neoconservativism upon the administration of President George W. Bush. And while the reassertion of American power in the aftermath of the attacks of II September 2001 certainly took some observers by surprise, there was a deeply embedded ideological foundation that served to support if not animate that reassertion-a foundation that has been a noticeable aspect of American political since at least the 1980s.Thus we would well to examine the influence of the president's neoconservative advisers during an era that some style as one of American neo-imperialism.' For sure, it would be presumptuous for anyone to claim that the neoconservatives have constituted an unalloyed and undifferentiated source of policy inspiration in the current administration; but by the same token, it would be idle to pretend that they have been without influence. And what is it they profess? Neoconservatives can be said to propound the following: a tenaciously guarded patriotism, military supremacy against all challengers, and an expansionist and interventionist foreign policy that is expected to be conducive to the flourishing of a democratic world order. In a word, they believe in nation-building. And given the outsized part currently being played by nation-builders in American foreign policy, it is fair to suggest that even those policy advisers who prefer to eschew the label neoconservative are themselves proffering guidance that falls easily within the movement's ideational field of gravity.A SCHOOL OF THOUGHTS, NOT A THOUGHTThe neoconservatism that began to take shape during the 1960s did so in reaction to the Vietnam War. As such, it represented a cultural backlash against many of the countercultural upheavals of those years. Indeed, not a few observers of American society were even prepared to decree the neoconservative movement victorious in what got dubbed the country's culture wars. But in reality, there was no such neoconservative movement, if by the latter term is suggested a group of individuals rallying behind a single objective. Rather, there were neoconservative currents of opinion. Perhaps even better, we might cite Irving Kristol, the godfather of neoconservatism, to the effect that what the label really connoted was at most a persuasion or a sensibility-hardly a movement. Or, to borrow from another neoconservative luminary, Norman Podhoretz, we might regard it as a tendency, because no one really wanted to see the arrival on the scene of anything remotely approaching a neoconservative central committee, prepared to lay down the party line to adherents.2This point having been taken, we can nonetheless trace some general (and it goes without saying, reductionist) characteristics of American neornnsprvatism:* Its adherents favour a strong executive power, meaning that they not only desire a powerful government, state, and president, but they also believe military force can and should serve to backstop a robust foreign policy.* The rhetoric of neoconservatism may be populist, but the strategy to be followed is very much corporatist, meaning that while neoconservatives do express interest in small business and workers, they also insist the large corporations and the country's richest individuals should benefit from tax relief, so as to stimulate the economy (and in this respect we can say that they share the preference of neoliberals for market-based approaches to growth).* Neoconservatives encourage religiosity and respect traditional family values, with the allocation of roles (economic as well as personal) made along gender lines; it follows that they have little love for intellectual and economic elites (held to be too liberal and materialistic), as well as for artists (judged to be too decadent). …