One phrase leaps out of Paul Gottfried’s review of Walter McDougall’s Promised Land, Crusader State (January), and that is the strange idea than an American empire encompassing Latin America, the Philippines, and points beyond arose “without much popular opposition.” Contrary to McDougall and Gottfried, the anti-interventionist tradition started with the Founders of this nation, who abhorred the empire-builders of Europe and explicitly warned against the temptation to imitate them. McDougall is naturally forced to recognize this —he acknowledges the “mugwumps” of the Anti-Imperialist League, but dismisses them as “bizarre”—yet manages to get around it by transmuting “isolationism” and “American exceptionalism” into “unilateralism”—the idea that we need not consult with anyone while we ravage our perceived enemies and pursue loosely defined “national interests.” This is a far cry from the principled policy of the Founders.

Secondly, Gottfried ignores the contradiction in McDougall’s book: while claiming to oppose “global meliorism” (i.e., empire-building under the rubric of international do-goodism), McDougall endorses every war the United States was ever dragged into, including both world wars. He also loves NATO and all the other entangling alliances that are the tripwires of future wars.

The hidden assumption behind the idea that “the United States was never really ‘isolationist’ in its relations with the rest of the world” is that there is no distinction between the American government and the American people: this is naturally a vital difference to a libertarian such as myself, but one easily overlooked by commentators concerned solely with elites and power politics. McDougall writes in the Machiavellian mode: his book is meant as advice to princes, not as a populist manifesto.

With NATO extension (which McDougall also endorses), the United States is about to commit itself to the defense of the Balkans as irrevocably as it is committed to the defense of Akron, Ohio—and Paul Gottfried is worried that we might go to war over “a universal right to homoerotic self-fulfillment.” This fear is misplaced at a time when NATO extension means that the United States is about to extend its “defense” perimeter to the Polish-Ukrainian border.

“Unilateralism” and invocations of “national self-interest” do not disguise the same old Anglophilic dreams of empire. American nationalists such as Gottfried, who are likely to be taken in by this sirens’ song, would do well to remember that the real enemy, the federal Leviathan, is right here at home.

        —Justin Raimondo
San Francisco, CA

Dr. Gottfried Replies:

Justin Raimondo conjectures that the author of Promised Land, Crusader State believes that the American government was justified in entering every major struggle into which it plunged. This too was my reading of McDougall’s qualified criticism of the style though not substance of American interventionism. While McDougall does not openly endorse an expansion of NATO, he probably takes this position as well. And while I do not “ignore” this “contradiction,” Raimondo is on target when he notes that McDougall’s opposition to “global meliorism” seems less than sincere.

But McDougall is correct to find continuity between American continental expansion and the later American empire. America’s development as a continental power involved intricate dealings and military encounters with foreign states. Indeed, by the mid-19th century, a large bloc of Southern planters and Democratic politicians favored territorial expansion into Latin America. (As late as 1860, the Breckenridge and Douglas Democratic presidential platforms called for the immediate annexation of Cuba.) A noteworthy difference between earlier and later American expansion, however, has been the more powerful coalition of forces that now drives American globalism: e.g., a national media network, multinational corporations, and a steadily expanding managerial state. Nonetheless, it is naive to believe that an American empire is a totally modern notion restricted to the welfare-warfare state.

Raimondo also is mistaken when he assumes that it is only the American government but never “the American people” which fancies foreign entanglements. Most wars that the United States has entered enjoyed a high degree of popular support by the time overt hostilities began. By 1941, most Americans were outraged by the aggressions of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, though less by Soviet tyranny which was less critically depicted in the national press. Raimondo may also object to Anglophilia, but it has been a widespread American sentiment based on language, law, literature, biological ancestry, and religious heritage.

Finally, it is not at all clear that my fear of a crusade on behalf of some bizarre right is “misplaced.” For decades American Presidents have struck postures as global defenders of civil and human rights. Our leaders keep telling us that what they consider as rights have universal validity and that Americans have a moral duty to uphold them. In recent months President Clinton has discovered a new federal duty to wipe out white racism and homophobia, and he has proposed, beside a renewed dedication to quotas, the use of our schools to teach sensitive behavior. Why is it inconceivable that this fevered crusade should lead to global missions to spread specific “rights”? Just as the Clinton administration claimed to be enforcing “a universal right to democracy” when it invaded Haiti, it or a succeeding administration might also put pressure on states to recognize the dignity of homosexual relations or a right to feminine self-realization.

Raimondo’s appeal to the “people” against their masters has a fine populist pedigree but no longer corresponds to reality. As far as I can tell, most people harbor no significant gripes against “the real enemy,” as long as entitlements are delivered and foreign entanglements ended quickly, without conscripted armies.