Go to 0aOriginal

    Too Late for 0aEmpire
    By Jonathan 0aSchell
    TomDispatch.com

    Wednesday 26 July 2006

This article, which will appear in the August 14/21 issue of the Nation, is posted here 0awith the kind permission of the editors of that magazine.

    Repetition

    Anyone who wants to write about the constitutional 0acrisis unfolding in the United States today faces a peculiar problem at the 0aoutset. There is a large body of observations that at one and the same time have 0abeen made too often and yet not often enough - too often because they have been 0arepeated to the point of tedium for a minority ready to listen but not often 0aenough because the general public has yet to consider them seriously enough. The 0aproblem for a self-respecting writer is that the act of writing almost in its 0anature promises something new. Repetition is not really writing but propaganda - 0anot illumination for the mind but a mental beating. Here are some examples of 0athe sort of observations I have in mind, at once over-familiar and unheard:

    President George W. Bush sent American troops into 0aIraq to find weapons of mass destruction, but they weren't there.

    He said that Saddam Hussein's regime had given help 0ato Al Qaeda, but it had not.

    He therefore took the nation to war on the basis of 0afalsehoods.

    His administration says that the torture at Abu 0aGhraib and elsewhere has been the work of a few bad apples in the military, 0awhereas in fact abuses were sanctioned at the highest levels of the executive 0abranch in secret memos.

    His administration lambastes leakers, but its own 0aofficials illegally leaked the name of a CIA operative, Valerie Plame, in order 0ato politically discredit her husband.

    He flatly stated to the public that all wiretaps of 0aAmericans were ordered pursuant to court warrants, whereas in fact he was 0aauthorizing and repeatedly reauthorizing warrantless wiretaps.

    These wiretaps violated a specific law of Congress 0aforbidding them.

    His administration has asserted a right to imprison 0aAmericans as well as foreigners indefinitely without the habeas corpus hearings 0arequired by law.

    Wars of aggression, torture, domestic spying and 0aarbitrary arrest are the hallmarks of dictatorship, yet Congress, run by the 0aPresident's party, has refused to conduct full investigations into either the 0afalse WMD claims, or the abuses and torture, or the warrantless wiretaps, or the 0aimprisonment without habeas corpus.

    When Congress passed a bill forbidding torture and 0athe President signed it, he added a "signing statement" implying a right to 0adisregard its provisions when they conflicted with his interpretation of his 0apowers.

    The President's secret legal memos justifying the 0aabuses and torture are based on a conception of the powers of the executive that 0agives him carte blanche to disregard specific statutes as well as international 0alaw in the exercise of self-granted powers to the Commander in Chief nowhere 0amentioned in the Constitution.

    If accepted, these claims would fundamentally alter 0athe structure of the American government, upsetting the system of checks and 0abalances and nullifying fundamental liberties, including Fourth Amendment 0aguarantees against unreasonable searches and seizures and guarantees of due 0aprocess. As such, they embody apparent failures of the President to carry out 0ahis oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United 0aStates."

    Opposing One-Party Government

    The need to repeat these familiar points, as I have 0ajust done (while also begging the indulgence of the reader, as I do), is itself 0aa symptom of the crisis. The same concentration of governmental and other power 0ain the hands of a single party that led to the abuses stands in the way of 0aaction to address them. The result is a problem of political sanitation. The 0agarbage heaps up in the public square, visible to all and stinking to high 0aheaven, but no garbage truck arrives to take it away. The lawbreaking is 0aexposed, but no legislative body responds. The damning facts pour out, and 0aprotests are made, but little is done. Then comes the urge to repeat.

    The dilemma is reflected in microcosm in the news 0amedia, especially television - a process particularly on display in the failure 0ato challenge the administration's deceptive rationale for the Iraq War. The 0areasons for severe doubt were, at the very least, available before the war, and 0athey were expounded in many places. More truthful, contrary voices could and did 0aspeak up, especially on the Internet, the freest of today's media. But they were 0anot widely heard. They were drowned out by the dominant voices in the 0amainstream, acceding to the deceptions of power and their variations and 0aderivatives. All over the world, autocratic-minded rulers, from Italy's former 0aPrime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to Russia's President Vladimir Putin, have 0alearned that de facto control of the political content of television is perhaps 0athe most important lever of power in our day. They have learned that it does not 0amatter politically if 15% or even 25% of the public is well informed as long the 0amajority remains in the dark. The problem has not been censorship but something 0avery nearly censorship's opposite: the deafening noise of the official megaphone 0aand its echoes - not the suppression of truth, still spoken and heard in a 0anarrow circle, but a profusion of lies and half lies; not too little speech but 0atoo much. If you whisper something to your friend in the front row of a rock 0aconcert, you have not been censored, but neither will you be heard.

    The one major breach in the monopoly has been made by 0athe Supreme Court, especially in its decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld requiring 0aapplication of the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice 0ato detainees. The decision's reasoning, if it carries the day in practice, would 0aroll back many of the usurpations by the executive, which has already claimed 0athat it will apply the Geneva Conventions to prisoners in U.S. custody (though 0athere is doubt what this will mean) and will seek a constitutional opinion by 0athe Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court on its wiretapping. When the 0aSupreme Court speaks, it is more than repetition. It is effective action.

    Yet in the last analysis, the outcome of the contest 0awill be decided in the political arena, where public opinion and, ultimately, 0avoters are the decision-makers. It's notable that the reaction to the Supreme 0aCourt's decision in Hamdan by one Republican Congressional leader was to accuse 0aDemocrats who applauded the decision of wanting "special privileges for 0aterrorists."

    One-party monopoly of power is not the only 0ainhibiting factor. Any oppositionist who is honest will keep in mind that a 0amajority, however narrow, of Americans voted that one party into power in a 0aseries of elections. Especially important was the presidential election of 2004, 0awhen many, though not all, of the abuses were already known. (And then the 0aelection itself was subject to grave abuses, especially in Ohio.) The weight and 0ameaning of that majority does not disappear because it was demonstrably 0amisinformed about key matters of war and peace. It's one thing to oppose an 0aillegitimate concentration of power in the name of a repressed majority, another 0ato oppose power backed and legitimated by a majority. In the first case, it will 0abe enough to speak truth to power; in the second, the main need is to speak 0atruth to one's fellow citizens.

    As the end is restoring democratic process, so the 0ameans should be democratic. It's true that since 2004 the President's positive 0aratings in the polls have plummeted, but there is no guarantee that this shift 0ain opinion will translate into Republican defeats in the forthcoming 0aCongressional election, and a renewal of Republican majorities in both houses of 0aCongress would add another stamp of approval to the Bush policies, however 0amisguided.

    The mechanisms inhibiting opposition to state power, 0aespecially when backed by electoral majorities, are not something new. Even in 0athe freest countries there is at all times a conventional wisdom, which may 0awander more or less far from reality. Sometimes it strays into a fantasyland. 0aThen marginal voices (which of course are not correct merely because they are 0amarginal) have a special responsibility to speak up, and sometimes they shift 0athe mainstream - as happened, for instance, in the 1960s regarding the Vietnam 0aWar and legal segregation. For the better part of a century, segregation fit 0asquarely within the banks of the American mainstream. Then it didn't.

    A Persistent Pathology

    As the mere mention of Vietnam suggests, the 0arepetition dilemma also has causes that go deeper into the past. I embarked on 0ajournalism in 1966 as a reporter in Vietnam. The experience led, naturally and 0aseamlessly, to a decade of writing about the war, the opposition to the war and, 0afinally, when the war "came home," to the constitutional crisis of the Nixon 0ayears and its resolution via Nixon's resignation under threat of impeachment. 0aThe war and the impeachment were connected at every point. It wasn't just that 0aNixon's wiretapping was directed against Daniel Ellsberg, war critic and leaker 0aof the Vietnam-era Pentagon Papers; or that the "plumbers" outfit that carried 0aout the Watergate break-in was founded to spy on, disrupt and attack war 0acritics; or that Nixon's persistence in trying to win the war even as he 0awithdrew American troops from it drove him into the paranoia that led him to 0adraw up an "enemies list" and sponsor subversions of the electoral process - it 0awas that his entire go-it-alone, imperial conception of the presidency 0aoriginated in his pursuit of his war policy in secrecy and without Congressional 0ainvolvement.

    And now, thirty years later, we find ourselves facing 0aan uncannily similar combination of misconceived war abroad and constitutional 0acrisis at home. Again a global crusade (then it was the Cold War, now it is the "war on terror") has given birth to a disastrous war (then Vietnam, now Iraq); 0aagain a President has responded by breaking the law; and again it falls to 0acitizens, journalists, judges, justices and others to trace the connections 0abetween the overreaching abroad and the overreaching at home. In consequence, 0anot only are we condemned to repeat ourselves for the duration of the current 0acrisis but a remarkable number of those repetitions are already repetitions of 0awhat was said thirty years ago.

    Consider, for instance, the following passage from a 0aspeech called "The Price of Empire," by the great dissenter against the Vietnam 0aWar Senator William Fulbright.

    "Before the Second World War our world role was a 0apotential role; we were important in the world for what we could do with our 0apower, for the leadership we might provide, for the example we might set. Now 0athe choices are almost gone: we are almost the world's self-appointed policeman; 0awe are almost the world defender of the status quo. We are well on our way to 0abecoming a traditional great power - an imperial nation if you will - engaged in 0athe exercise of power for its own sake, exercising it to the limit of our 0acapacity and beyond, filling every vacuum and extending the American 'presence' 0ato the farthest reaches of the earth. And, as with the great empires of the 0apast, as the power grows, it is becoming an end in itself, separated except by 0aritual incantation from its initial motives, governed, it would seem, by its own 0amystique, power without philosophy or purpose. That describes what we have 0aalmost become..."

    Is there a single word - with the possible exception 0aof "almost" at the end of the paragraph - that fails to apply to the country's 0asituation today? Or consider this passage from Fulbright's The Arrogance of 0aPower with the Iraq venture in mind:

    "Traditional rulers, institutions, and ways of life 0ahave crumbled under the fatal impact of American wealth and power but they have 0anot been replaced by new institutions and new ways of life, nor has their 0abreakdown ushered in an era of democracy and development."

    Recalling these and other passages from Fulbright and 0aother critics of the Vietnam era, one is again tempted to wonder why we should 0abother to say once more what has already been said so well so many times before. 0aPerhaps we should just quote rather than repeat - cite, not write.

    Of course, people like to point out that Iraq is not 0aVietnam. They are right insofar as those two countries are concerned. For 0ainstance, today's anarchic Iraq, a formerly unified country now on or over the 0aedge of civil war, is wholly different from yesterday's resolute Vietnam, 0adivided into north and south but implacably bent on unity and independence from 0aforeign rule. And of course the two eras could scarcely be more different. Most 0aimportant, the collapse of the Soviet Union has effectuated a full-scale 0arevolution in the international order. The number of the world's superpowers has 0abeen cut back from two to one, China has become an economic powerhouse, market 0aeconomics have spread across the planet, the industrial age has been pushed 0aaside by the information age, global warming has commenced and rock music has 0abeen replaced by rap. Yet in the face of all this, American policies have shown 0aan astonishing sameness, and this is what is disturbing. In our world of racing 0achange, only the pathologies of American power seem to remain constant. Why?

    The Pitiful Helpless Giant

    Perhaps a clue can be found in the famous speech that 0aSenator Joseph McCarthy gave in Wheeling, West Virginia, in February 1950. This 0awas the occasion on which he announced his specious list of Communists in the 0aState Department, launching what soon was called McCarthyism. He also shared 0asome thoughts on America's place in the world.

    The allied victory in World War II had occurred only 0afive years before. No nation approached the United States in wealth, power or 0aglobal influence. Yet McCarthy's words were a dirge for lost American greatness. 0aHe said, "At war's end we were physically the strongest nation on earth and, at 0aleast potentially, the most powerful intellectually and morally. Ours could have 0abeen the honor of being a beacon in the desert of destruction, a shining living 0aproof that civilization was not yet ready to destroy itself. Unfortunately, we 0ahave failed miserably and tragically to arise to the opportunity." On the 0acontrary, McCarthy strikingly added, "we find ourselves in a position of 0aimpotency."

    By what actions had the United States thrown away 0agreatness? McCarthy blamed not mighty forces without but traitors within, to 0awhom he assigned an almost magical power to sap the strength of the country. 0aAmerica's putative decline occurred "not because our only powerful potential 0aenemy has sent men to invade our shores, but rather because of the traitorous 0aactions of those who have been treated so well by this nation." And, he raved on 0ain a later speech, "we believe that men high in this Government are concerting 0ato deliver us to disaster. This must be the product of a great conspiracy, a 0aconspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the 0ahistory of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally 0aexposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all 0ahonest men."

    McCarthy seemed to look at the United States through 0aa kind of double lens. At one moment the nation was a colossus, all-powerful, 0awithout peer or rival; at the next moment a midget, cringing in panic, delivered 0aover to its enemies, "impotent." Like the genie in Aladdin's bottle, the United 0aStates seemed to be a kind of magical being, first filling the sky, able to 0agrant any wish, but a second later stoppered and helpless in its container. 0aWhich it was to be depended not on any enemy, all of whom could easily be laid 0alow if only America so chose, but on Americans at home, who prevented this 0aunleashing of might. If Americans cowered, it supposedly was mainly before other 0aAmericans. Get them out of the way, and the United States could rule the globe. 0aThe right-wing intellectual James Burnham named the destination to which this 0akind of thinking led. "The reality," he wrote, "is that the only alternative to 0athe communist World Empire is an American Empire, which will be, if not 0aliterally worldwide in formal boundaries, capable of exercising decisive world 0acontrol."

    McCarthy's double vision of the United States must 0ahave resonated deeply, for it turned out to have remarkable staying power. 0aConsider, for example, the following statement by the super-hawkish columnist 0aCharles Krauthammer, penned fifty-one years later, in March 2001 (six months 0abefore September 11). Again we hear the King Kong-like chest-beating, even 0alouder than before. For the end of the cold war, Krauthammer wrote, had made the 0aUnited States "the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since 0aRome." And so, just as McCarthy claimed in 1950, "America is in a position to 0areshape norms, alter expectations and create new realities." But again there is 0aa problem. And it is the same one - the enemies within. Thus again comes the cry 0aof frustration, the anxiety that this utopia, to be had for the taking, will 0amelt away like a dream, that the genie will be stuffed back into its bottle. For 0athe "challenge to unipolarity is not from the outside but from the inside. The 0achoice is ours. To impiously paraphrase Benjamin Franklin: History has given you 0aan empire, if you will keep it." The remedy? "Unapologetic and implacable 0ademonstrations of will."

    We find expressions of the same double vision - a 0akind of anxiety-ridden triumphalism - again and again in iconic phrases uttered 0ain the half-century between McCarthy and Krauthammer. Walt Rostow, chair of the 0aState Department's Policy Planning Council, articulated a version of it in 1964, 0aon the verge of the Johnson administration's escalation of the Vietnam War, when 0ahe spoke in a memo to Secretary of State Dean Rusk of "the real margin of 0ainfluence... which flows from the simple fact that at this stage of history, we 0aare the greatest power in the world - if only we behave like it."

    Madeleine Albright, then UN ambassador, gave voice to 0aa similar frustration when she turned to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff 0aColin Powell and asked, "What's the point of having this superb military you are 0aalways talking about if we can't use it?" But it was Richard Nixon who gave the 0adouble vision its quintessential expression when, in 1970, at the pinnacle of 0aAmerica's involvement in Vietnam, he stated, "If, when the chips are down, the 0aworld's most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, 0ahelpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free 0anations and free institutions throughout the world."

    For Nixon, as for McCarthy and Krauthammer, the 0aprincipal danger was on the home front. As he said on another occasion, "It is 0anot our power but our will and character that is being tested tonight. The 0aquestion all Americans must ask and answer tonight is this: Does the richest and 0astrongest nation in the history of the world have the character to meet a direct 0achallenge by a group which rejects every effort to win a just peace?" And, even 0amore explicitly, "Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or 0ahumiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that."

    The question is how the United States could be a "giant" yet pitiful and helpless, the "richest and strongest" yet unable to have 0aits way, in possession of the most superb military force in history yet unable 0ato use it, the "greatest power the world had ever known" yet at the same time 0aparalyzed. Why, if the United States has had no peer in wealth and weaponry, has 0ait for more than a half-century been persistently, incurably complaining of 0aweakness, paralysis, even impotence?

    "Losing" Country X

    McCarthy, of course, presented the "loss" of China as 0aExhibit A in his display of the deeds of his gallery of traitors. For example, 0ain the Wheeling speech, he specifically mentioned John Service, of the State 0aDepartment's China desk, and charged that he "sent official reports back to the 0aState Department urging that we torpedo our ally Chiang Kai-shek and stating, in 0aeffect, that communism was the best hope of China." By such false accusations - 0aincluding the spurious allegation about the Communists in the State Department - 0adid McCarthy transpose the "lost" war in China to the domestic sphere, where the 0aphantom saboteurs of American global hegemony were supposedly at work. Soon, the 0aCommunist tactic of the purge was adopted by the American government, with the 0aresult that many of those most knowledgeable about Asia, such as Service, were 0adriven out of government.

    As has often been pointed out, whether the United 0aStates "lost China" depends on whether you think the United States ever had it. 0aThe question has lasting importance because the alleged loss of one country or 0aanother - China, Laos, Vietnam, Chile, Iran, Nicaragua, Iraq - became a 0aleitmotif of American politics, especially at election time. In each of these 0acases, the United States "possessed" the countries in question (and thus was in 0aa position to "lose" them) only insofar as it somehow laid claim to control the 0adestinies of peoples on a global basis, or, as Fulbright said, an imperial 0abasis. But if there is one clear lesson that the history of recent empires has 0ataught, it is that modern peoples have both the will and the capacity to reject 0aimperial rule and assert control over their own destinies. Less interested in 0athe contest between East and West than in running their own countries, they 0ayearned for self-determination, and they achieved it. The British and French 0aimperialists were forced to learn this lesson over the course of a century. The 0aSoviet Union took a little longer, and itself collapsed in the process. The 0aUnited States, determined in the period in question to act in an imperial 0afashion, has been the dunce in the class, and indeed under the current 0aadministration has put forward imperial claims that dwarf those of imperial 0aBritain at its height. It is only because, in country after country, the United 0aStates has attempted the impossible abroad that it has been led to blame people 0aat home for the failure.

    Fortunately, American involvement in China in the 0a1940s was restricted to aid and advice, and virtually no fighting between 0aAmericans and Mao's forces occurred. Now that the price of the military 0aintervention in Vietnam - a much smaller country - is known, we can only shudder 0ato imagine what intervention in China would have cost. Perhaps one of the few 0apositive things that can be said about the Vietnam disaster is that if the 0aUnited States was determined to fight a counterinsurgency war, it was better to 0ado it in Vietnam than in China. But even without intervention, the price of 0aChina's defection from the American camp was high. The causes of McCarthyism 0awere manifold, but in a very real sense, what the country got instead of war 0awith Mao was the "war" at home that was McCarthyism.

    The true causes of the Nationalist government's fall - its own incompetence and corruption, leading to wholesale loss of legitimacy 0ain the eyes of its own people - were expunged from consciousness, and the lurid 0afantasy of State Department traitors and conspirators was concocted in their 0aplace. Then the delusion that Chiang could return from what then was called the 0aisland of Formosa (the Portuguese name for Taiwan) to retake the mainland was 0afostered by the China lobby. Delusion ran wild. Myths were created to take the 0aplace of unfaceable truths. The internal conspiracy to destroy the United 0aStates, said McCarthy, was supposedly headed by, of all people, Truman's 0aSecretary of State, Gen. George Marshall. "It was Marshall, with Acheson and 0aVincent eagerly assisting," he said, "who created the China policy which, 0adestroying China, robbed us of a great and friendly ally, a buffer against the 0aSoviet imperialism with which we are now at war." And he added for good measure, "We have declined so precipitously in relation to the Soviet Union in the last 0asix years. How much swifter may be our fall into disaster with Marshall at the 0ahelm?"

    Impotent Omnipotence

    Another event, scarcely more than a month before Mao 0adeclared the existence of the People's Republic of China, also fueled McCarthy's 0atheme of thrown-away greatness. On August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union tested its 0afirst atomic bomb - Joe-1, named after Joseph Stalin. At once, in an experience 0astrangely parallel to the loss of China from America's sphere of interest, 0aintoxicating dreams of atomic monopoly and the lasting military superiority that 0awas thought to go with it shriveled up. Not superiority but stalemate was 0asuddenly the outlook - not dominance but the stasis of the "balance of 0aterror."

    The outlines of the new limitations soon took shape 0ain the long, wearying, poorly understood and publicly disliked Korean War, in 0awhich America's atomic arsenal, whose use was considered but rejected, was no 0ahelp. The theme of thwarted American greatness was sounded again, when Gen. 0aDouglas MacArthur, who proposed using atomic weapons in Korea, announced, "There 0acan be no substitute for victory," and was fired by Truman for insubordination. 0aMeanwhile, a connection with the enemy within was discovered when Soviet spying 0aon the Manhattan Project came to light. Scientists had long known that there 0acould be no "secret" of the bomb-that the relevant science was irretrievably 0aavailable to all-and that the Soviet Union would be able to build one. The 0aSoviet timetable had indeed been speeded up by the spying, but now it seemed to 0aMcCarthy and others that the domestic traitors were the prime agents of the 0asudden, apparent reversal of American fortune. (Truman sought to compensate for 0athe loss of the atomic monopoly with his prompt decision to build the 0aH-bomb.)

    The full implications of the ensuing nuclear standoff 0asank in slowly. As the Soviet Union gradually built up its arsenal, American 0astrategic thinkers and policy-makers awakened to some unpleasant discoveries 0aabout nuclear arms. The bomb, too, had a distinctly genie-like quality of 0alooking formidable at one instant but useless the next. Even in the days of 0aAmerican nuclear monopoly, between 1945 and the first Soviet explosion of 1949, 0anuclear weapons had proved a disappointing military instrument. Stalin had 0asimply declared that nuclear weapons were for scaring people with "weak nerves," 0aand acted accordingly. And once the monopoly was broken, no use of nuclear 0aweapons could be planned without facing the prospect of retaliation.

    During the 1950s Dwight Eisenhower tried to squeeze 0awhat benefit he could out of the United States' lingering numerical nuclear 0asuperiority with his "massive retaliation" policy, but its prescription of 0athreatening nuclear annihilation to gain advantage in far-flung local struggles 0awas never quite believable, perhaps even by its practitioners. By the late 1950s 0aa new generation of strategists was awakening to the full dimensions of a 0acentral paradox of the nuclear age: Possession of nuclear arsenals did not 0aempower but rather paralyzed their owners. Henry Kissinger remarked, "The more 0apowerful the weapons, the greater the reluctance to use them," and fretted about "how our power can give impetus to our policy rather than paralyze it."

    Here at the core of the riddle of American power in 0athe nuclear age was the very image of the pitiful, helpless giant, a figure 0agrown weak through the very excess of his strength. But the source of this 0aweakness, which was very real, had nothing to do with any domestic cowards, not 0ato speak of traitors, or any political event; it lay in the revolutionary 0aconsequences for all military power of the invention of nuclear arms, even 0aif-with a hint of defensiveness, perhaps-the United States now called itself a "superpower." (The H-bomb was first called "the super.") Here was a barrier to 0athe application of force that no cultivation of "will" could change or 0aovercome.

    But the policy-makers did not accept the verdict of 0aparalysis without a struggle. Within the precincts of high strategy, the "nuclear priesthood" mounted a sustained, complex intellectual insurrection 0aagainst this distasteful reality of the nuclear age. Even in the face of the 0aundoubted reality that if the arsenals were used, "mutual assured destruction" 0awould result, they looked for room to maneuver. One line of attack was the "counterforce" strategy of targeting the nuclear forces rather than the society 0aof the foe. The hope was to preserve the possibility of some kind of victory, or 0aat least of relative military advantage, from the general ruin of nuclear war. 0aAnother line of attack was advocacy of "limited war," championed by Kissinger 0aand others. The strategists reasoned that although "general war" might be 0aunwinnable, limited war, of the kind just then brewing in Vietnam, could be 0afought and won. Perhaps not all war between nuclear adversaries had been 0aparalyzed. Thus, the impotent omnipotence of the nuclear stalemate became one 0amore paradoxical argument, in addition to those drummed into the public mind by 0aMcCarthy and his heirs, in favor of American engagement in counterinsurgency 0astruggles. And this time the United States, unprotected by the prudence of a 0aGeorge Marshall, did go to war.

    The results are the ones we know. American military 0amight was no more profitable when used against rebellious local populations in 0alimited wars than it was in general, nuclear wars. This time, the lessons were 0alearned, and for a while they stuck: Peoples, even of small countries, are 0apowerful within their own borders; they have the means to resist foreign 0aoccupation successfully; military force will not lead them to change their 0aminds; the issues are therefore essentially political, and in this contest, 0aforeign invaders are fatally disadvantaged from the outset; if they are not 0awilling to stay forever, they lose.

    The Decline of Power

    By the late 1970s adverse experience sufficient to 0ailluminate the utterly novel historical situation of the United States in the 0alate twentieth century was in hand. Undoubtedly, it had the biggest heap of 0aweapons of any country. Without question, they were the most varied, 0asophisticated and effective in the world at their job of killing people and 0ablowing things up. The question was what the United States could accomplish with 0athis capacity.

    Certainly, if a conventional foe lacking nuclear arms 0aarrayed itself in battle against the United States, it could be handily 0adefeated. That was the mistake that Saddam Hussein made in 1990 when he sent his 0aarmy out into the Kuwaiti desert, where it was pulverized from the air. But few 0awars in fact conformed to this conventional pattern any longer. Of far greater 0aimportance was what happened to two kinds of war that had historically been the 0amost important - wars of imperial conquest and general, great-power wars, such 0aas the First and Second World Wars. During the twentieth century the first kind 0ahad become hopeless "quagmires," owing to the aroused will of local peoples 0aeverywhere who, collectively, had put an end to the age of imperialism. The 0asecond were made unfightable and unwinnable by the nuclear revolution. It was 0athese two limitations on the usefulness of military force, one acting at the 0abase of the international system, the other at its apex, that delimited the 0asuperiority of the superpower. (The paradox of impotent omnipotence was even 0amore pronounced for the other superpower, the Soviet Union, which actually 0adisappeared.)

    Very possibly, the United States, with all its 0aresources, would have been the sort of globe-straddling empire that Joseph 0aMcCarthy wanted it to be had it risen to pre-eminence in an earlier age. It was 0athe peculiar trajectory of the United States, born in opposition to empire, to 0awind up making its own bid for empire only after the age of imperialism was 0aover. Though it's hard to shed a tear, you might say that there was a certain 0aunfairness in America's timing. All the ingredients of past empires were there - 0athe wealth, the weapons, the power, hard and soft. Only the century was wrong. 0aThe United States was not, could not be, and cannot now be a new Rome, much less 0agreater than Rome, because it cannot do what Rome did. It cannot, in a 0apost-imperial age, conquer other countries and lastingly absorb them into a 0agreat empire; it cannot, in the nuclear age, not even today, fight and win wars 0aagainst its chief global rivals, who still, after all, possess nuclear 0aarsenals.

    Even tiny, piteous, brutalized, famine-ridden North 0aKorea, more a cult than a country, can deter the United States with its puny 0aputative arsenal. The United States, to be sure, is a great power by any 0ameasure, surely the world's greatest, yet that power is hemmed in by obstacles 0apeculiar to our era. The mistake has been not so much to think that the power of 0athe United States is greater than it is as to fail to realize that power itself, 0awhether wielded by the United States or anyone else - if conceived in terms of 0amilitary force - has been in decline. By imagining otherwise, the United States 0ahas become the fool of force - and the fool of history.

    In this larger context the repeated constitutional 0acrises of the last half-century assume an altered aspect. The conventional 0aunderstanding is that an excess of power abroad brings abuses at home. The 0aclassic citation is Rome, whose imperial forces, led by Julius Caesar, returning 0afrom foreign conquest, crossed the river Rubicon into the homeland and put an 0aend to the republic. (Thus both the proponents of American empire and its 0adetractors can cite Rome.) But that has not been the American story. Rome and 0awould-be Rome are not the same. Empire and the fantasy of empire are not the 0asame.

    It is rather the repeatedly failed bid for imperial 0asway that has corrupted. It was not triumph but loss - of China, of the atomic 0amonopoly, among other developments - that precipitated the McCarthyite assault 0aon liberty at home. It was persistent failure in the Vietnam War, already a 0adecade old and deeply unpopular, that led an embattled, isolated, nearly 0ademented Richard Nixon to draw up his enemies list, illegally spy on his 0adomestic opposition, obstruct justice when his misdeeds became known, ramble 0adrunkenly in the Oval Office about using nuclear weapons and ultimately mount an 0aassault on the entire constitutional system of checks and balances. And it is 0atoday an unpopular President Bush, unable either to win the Iraq War or to 0aextricate himself from it, who has launched his absolutist assault on the 0aConstitution.

    Power corrupts, says the old saw. But is power the 0aright word to use in the face of so much failure? The sometimes suggested 0aalternate - that weakness corrupts - seems equally appropriate. In a manner of 0aspeaking perhaps both saws are true, for in terms of military might the United 0aStates is unrivaled, yet in terms of capacity to get things done with that 0amight, it so often proves weak - even, at times, impotent, as McCarthy said. The 0apattern is not the old Roman one in which military conquest breeds arrogance and 0aarrogance stokes ambition, which leads to usurpation at home. Rather, in the 0acase of the United States, misunderstanding of its historical moment leads to 0amisbegotten wars; misbegotten wars lead to military disaster; military disaster 0aleads to domestic strife and scapegoating; domestic strife and scapegoating lead 0ato usurpation, which triggers a constitutional crisis. Crises born of strength 0aand success are different from crises born of failure. Fulbright warned of the 0acorruption of imperial ambition and the arrogance of power. But we need also to 0aspeak of the corruption of imperial failure, the arrogance of anxiety.

    What the true greatness - or true power - of the 0aUnited States is or can be for the world in our time is an absorbing question in 0apressing need of an answer. Our very conceptions of greatness and power - 0amilitary, economic, political, moral - would need searching reconsideration. 0aThose true powers - especially the economic - also have an "imperial" aspect, 0abut that is another debate. An advantage of that debate is that it would be 0aabout things that are real. Jettisoning the mirage of military domination of the 0aglobe that has addled so many American brains for more than half a century and 0aalso shunning the panic-stricken fears of impotence that have accompanied the 0ainevitable frustration of these delusions, the debate would take realistic stock 0aof the nation's very considerable yet limited resources and ask what is being 0adone with them, for good or ill, and what should be done. Perhaps it will still 0abe possible to shoehorn the United States into a stretched definition of "empire," but it would look nothing like Britain or Rome. Or perhaps, as I 0abelieve, a United States rededicated to its constitutional traditions and 0aembarked on a cooperative course with other nations would find that it possesses 0auntapped reserves of political power, though it