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From Republic to Hegemon
 I
recently watched the old (I guess 1968 counts as old) British movie
The Charge of the Light Brigade, a bitterly satirical look back
at the British role in the Crimean War more than a century earlier, when
Wellington and Waterloo were still names to conjure
with.  The
film was probably meant to comment on the Vietnam war, like everything else in
1968.
A couple of days earlier I’d
had a message from a military officer who often writes me in friendly
disagreement. Given my views on the Iraq war, he asked me what I proposed
to do if certain unpleasant developments should occur overseas. What if, for
example, mainland China should attack Taiwan? Or if North Korea should use
nuclear weapons against Japan?
Tough questions, but let’s
back up a bit. I think we should give due praise to the Buchanan and Lincoln
administrations for keeping the United States out of the Crimean quagmire.
Not that they were under much pressure to intervene, what with events in
this country at the time; but credit where credit is due, I always say. Just
about any recent president would have jumped in with both feet.
Now we are at war in the Middle
East (again), and I am asked how I would respond to hypothetical, but by no
means impossible, crises in Asia. I have before me a tiny globe, which comes
in handy when I need to know about where Madagascar or Malaysia is, and it
reminds me that when the American Republic was founded, Americans were
much concerned about foreign entanglements on a small portion of the
earth: Europe, and chiefly three powers in western Europe, England, France,
and Spain.
None of these erstwhile
superpowers looms very large today, but the United States has since then
managed to keep itself busy abroad, all the way to the Far East. In 1898 war
with Spain took us to the Philippines, where we remained in charge until,
historically speaking, the other day. By 1941 we were openly at war with
Japan, though clandestine hostilities had already begun, with secret (and
illegal) funding from Franklin Roosevelt to Claire Chennault’s Flying
Tigers in China; naturally Roosevelt allowed the American public to blame the
war on Japanese perfidy. Later came Korea, then Vietnam, after that the
Balkans, and now we’re up to our necks in the Middle East.
![[Breaker quote for From Republic to Hegemon: Yesterday’s Democrats, today’s Republicans]](2005breakers/050719.gif) Quite
a change over
the years for a modest republic that once sought an amicable divorce from
Europe. By 1940 Roosevelt was stigmatizing the philosophy of the Founding
Fathers, and Ernest Hemingway was quoting John Donne’s homiletic
“No man is an island” as if it were a guiding principle of foreign
policy. Today, it seems, every man is a tripwire, demanding U.S. intervention.
It’s odd to recall that
President Bush, during the 2000 campaign, spoke sensibly about the
limitations of what government can achieve, both at home and abroad. He
expressed special scorn for the idea, chiefly associated with Democratic
foreign policy in those days, that American political habits can be
transplanted to other countries. The old European empires often held their
subject peoples in contempt, but this attitude, deplorable as it might be, also
saved them from trying to turn pygmies and aborigines into Englishmen and
Frenchmen.
So it’s disconcerting to find
Bush adopting “democracy” as the universal yardstick of
progress. But today’s Democrats are tomorrow’s Republicans,
and today’s Republicans are outdoing yesterday’s Democrats in
carrying on Roosevelt’s dual legacy of domestic and foreign
intervention.
Neoconservatives are touting
these old ideas as a new inspiration of their own, but there is no need to
dignify bad habits as a theory. Power tends to expand until something stops
it, and so far nothing has stopped the expansion of the U.S. Government
from modest republic to global hegemon. The dissenting individual
can’t do much about this except to try to keep his own head.
The U.S. Constitution might almost
as well be an officially classified document. Not much need for conspiracy
theories when nearly all the mischief is committed right out in the open, if
anybody cares to pay attention. Just read what the Founding Fathers said,
then watch what our politicians do, and you’ll get the general picture.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2005 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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