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April 6, 2005
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BOOK DETAILS
TITLE: America's Inadvertent Empire

AUTHOR: William E. Odom and Robert Dujarric

INFO: Yale University Press, 2004, 285 pp., 30.00

 
 
Wednesday, April 6, 2005

America's liberal empire

Alan Bock
Sr. editorial writer
The Orange County Register
abock@ocregister.com

When I read this book a few months ago it was mainly for the information in it and to get an idea of how someone who had become a valued source on military and foreign affairs issues - retired Lt. Gen William E. Odom, who headed the National Security Agency in the 1980s and has taught at Georgetown and Yale - saw the big picture.

Thumbing through it for this review, I was more impressed than ever at the amount of knowledge and striking insights Gen. Odom and his co-author, a Council on Foreign Relations Hitachi fellow, have crammed into it. The book is a multidisciplinary tour de force, incorporating and integrating considerable recent scholarship in history, military studies, economics, sociology and political science in service of a thesis that should get most readers to look at their country in a new light.

Briefly, the thesis is this: The United States is not just the sole superpower and an economic dynamo (without which the superpower status would disappear quickly). By responding to crises and opportunities rather than by design it has evolved into a new kind of empire, a complex and mostly voluntary (as opposed to colonial-oriented) empire that "comprises 17 percent of the world's population but controls about70 percent of the gross world product. Because nearly all of the developed countries are included, the network's share of science, technology, and corporate resources is closer to 90 percent of the world's total."

The key to understanding this phenomenon is that this is what the authors call a liberal empire (liberal "in [the] original European definition of limited state power and the primacy of individual rights" or alternatively "the proposition that individuals have rights, which no state can justly abridge.")

Because it consists of countries that have experienced a liberal constitutional revolution - a rarity in the world - in which the state is a third-party enforcer of uniform rules rather than the tool of private interests, is bound by its own laws, and generally (though not absolutely) respects private property rights, it attracts adherents without conquest and has a chance to last a good long time.

The main thing that could derail this hegemony (which the authors see as largely beneficial) is for American leaders to misunderstand that it is liberal principles that give it its unique power, especially the ability to maintain economic growth.

A key distinction the authors insist on is liberalism vs. democracy. Liberalism, embodied in the Declaration as an insistence on inalienable rights, is the key American accomplishment. The founders valued it over democracy and even feared the "tyranny of the majority" democracy could bring.

Today, when most Americans speak of democracy they probably mean liberal democracy - a regime with the rule of law that mostly respects individual rights - but the term and the understanding are disappearing from popular usage.

George W. Bush doesn't seem to understand that the important feature of constitutional societies is the rule of law - which takes generations to establish and might not happen in many countries - rather than regular elections, which are often the prelude to arbitrary power.

Most of thebook consists of explaining why U.S dominance has developed - going beyond the obvious likemilitary prowess and technology to include demographic trends, economic performance, university excellence, science leadership, and media and mass culture gaps - and why it is likely to persist. They believe the "realist" scenario - other powers combining to provide a countervailing force to balance American power - is unlikely because it makes more sense to play ball with America (even while complaining, chafing and occasionally influencing the behemoth) than to oppose it.

If U.S. leaders don't understand the importance of liberty to their dominance and start acting like empires of old - see Iraq - however, they could undermine American power from within. I don't buy everything in the book - but it is compelling and conceptually pathbreaking thinking.

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