EMPIRE

American political institutions are not likely to survive the development of an American empire. This is essentially the warning of Henry Kissinger's final chapter in Does America Need a Foreign Policy?, and it is worth taking seriously. The argument has three elements, as I understand it.

First, empires create incentives for erstwhile allies to band together in opposition against the imperial power. This is partly national self-interest on the part of the would-be opponents. In the long term, then, imperial power creates the conditions for its own weakening on the international stage.

Second, empires suffer from a cognitive problem: they tend to interpret everything that happens at the periphery in the terms available at the center. As Kissinger puts it, foreign policy becomes driven by domestic interests, and this leads to bad foreign policy. (Think about this. One needs to be able to imagine -- to really imagine -- the aftermath of an invasion in order to plan well for war. Faults in planning had to do with an unwillingness to incur the domestic political costs of planning, fights between DOD and State, an ideological naivite about our being greeted as "liberators," and a partisan aversion to serious humanitarian thinking.)

Third, the erosion of foreign restraints on action causes an erosion of domestic restraints on action. It becomes hard to imagine citizen subjection to any law above the law of the stronger, or, its more morally appealing version, the law of harm to one's political enemies and help to one's political friends. And it becomes even harder to restrain one's political passions when they are directed against domestic political opponents. (Calls to nuke Fallujah are ringing in my ears right now, as is the constant barrage of vitriol aimed at "the left" and "leftists" that I struggle to read on a daily basis. If you come from the right, feel free to focus on attacks on "the right" as well. The phenomenon is much the same, although if you're measuring the volume and influence of such vitriol, I would bet that it is tilted against the left. Nothing serious hinges on that claim, though.)

The fact that the U.S. is not a traditional empire is irrelevant here. The question is whether or not the effects of empire are visible.

Collectively, we Americans have had this discussion before, when the U.S. was developing its first empire at the end of the nineteenth century. Then, much of the national discourse was cast in terms that we would find troubling today -- anglo-saxon superiority, the inferiority of darker races, the supposed incompatibility between catholicism and democracy. But one additional area of discussion was whether or not the Constitution "followed the flag," i.e., whether the constitution set limits on what Congress could do in administering the territories. Famously, in Downes v. Bidwell, Justice Harlan argued in dissent that it was dangerous to allow Congress to govern the territory of Puerto Rico in a way contrary to constitutional restraints on its conduct in dealing with states. The precise question had to do with a taxation scheme that Congress could not enact if Puerto Rico were treated as a state, but the general concern that Harlan is evident in the following passage:

This nation is under the control of a written constitution, the supreme law of the land and the only source of the powers which our government, or any branch or officer of it, may exert at any time or at any place. Monarchical and despotic governments, unrestrained by written constitutions, may do with newly acquired territories what this government may not do consistently with our fundamental law. To say otherwise is to concede that Congress may, by action taken outside of the Constitution, engraft upon our republican institutions a colonial system such as exists under monarchical governments. Surely such a result was never contemplated by the fathers of the Constitution. If that instrument had contained a word suggesting the possibility of a result of that character it would never have been adopted by the people of the United States. The idea that this country may acquire territories anywhere upon the earth, by conquest or treaty, and hold them as mere colonies or provinces,-the people inhabiting them to enjoy only such rights as Congress chooses to accord to them,-is wholly inconsistent with the spirit and genius, as well as with the words, of the Constitution. Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 244, 380 (Harlan, dissenting).

The problem for Harlan is that a lack of restraint in the territories will translate into a new form of government at home as well; the U.S. will go from being a country bound by law to being a country exercising imperial power. Lack of restraint abroad will lead to lack of restraint at home.

I don't think that we are at the point yet where our aggressive use of force abroad has engendered the internal weaknesses that lead to imperial downfall. I do think that the question is worth raising, however.