Michael Ignatieff from the NYT writes on the American Empire:
The Greeks taught the Romans to call this failure hubris. It was also, in the 1990’s, a general failure of the historical imagination, an inability of the post-cold-war West to grasp that the emerging crisis of state order in so many overlapping zones of the world — from Egypt to Afghanistan — would eventually become a security threat at home. Radical Islam would never have succeeded in winning adherents if the Muslim countries that won independence from the European empires had been able to convert dreams of self-determination into the reality of competent, rule-abiding states. America has inherited this crisis of self-determination from the empires of the past. Its solution — to create democracy in Iraq, then hopefully roll out the same happy experiment throughout the Middle East — is both noble and dangerous: noble because, if successful, it will finally give these peoples the self-determination they vainly fought for against the empires of the past; dangerous because, if it fails, there will be nobody left to blame but the Americans.
All true, but I fail to see a lot of downsides. Disengagement from the world to a degree where Osama bin Laden wouldn’t target the US is utterly inconceivable. We’ll continue to trade, and to travel, and to interact with people around the world, and this will make us an existential threat to totalitarian fundamentalists who realize that they cannot stand to have their stagnant ideas compared to the market democracies of the pluralist West.
And, so, I think we need to steady ourselves for the coming tribulations of an American empire, even one that’s oxymoronically dedicated to the idea that everyone, everywhere deserves the freedom to make choices about how they live.
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