http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1016Book Review: The Empire Has No Clothes
The Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed
By Ivan Eland
The Independent Institute, 294 pages, 2004
Reviewed by Robert C. Cheeks
President Bush’s Inaugural Address presents a bold approach to foreign policy that many pundits are calling Wilsonian, referring to President Woodrow Wilson’s utopian dream of ending war and bringing peace on a global scale. But a recent book by Dr. Ivan Eland, The Empire Has No Clothes, reminds us of the price of Wilsonian idealism.
Eland accurately points out that President Wilson’s successful effort to draw the United States into World War I, which was supposed to be “the war to end all wars,” had the deleterious effect of destroying the established European order, and resulted in the rise of both Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin. The Twentieth century’s butcher’s bill, because of Wilson’s “progressivism,” would be over 150 million dead.
And now, given the linkage between the massacre of 9/11 (as well as a twenty years of Islamic terrorist’s attacks on the “West”), the Iraq incursion, and the so-called “War on Terror,” the future remains nebulous. Bush’s vision may prove prophetic, or may be a disaster. But we know this: any policy that advocates foreign interventionism is a violation of the first principles of our republic.
The author’s historical overview touches on the failed empires of Greece, Rome, Germany, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and Japan. He goes to great length in explaining the cost to citizens, in lives, wealth, and liberty, that results when government devolves from a federated republic, to a social democracy, to an imperialist power.
Eland’s book outlines this “devolution” of the United States. Our founding was predicated on the concept of a federated republic. Political power was purposefully diffused because the founders understood the intrinsic “nature of man,” i.e. they feared those who would “consolidate” power in the national government. The Constitution they provided very specifically defines the general government, details its enumerated powers, and with the addition of that delightful codicil, The Bill of Rights, leaves the bulk of power (not to mention sovereignty) in the hands of the states and the people. But the election of Abraham Lincoln, with his proclivity to usurp undelegated power, and the ensuing war that silenced the last of the “conservative” Americans, brought a sea change in American government that, in effect, laid the groundwork for not only an “imperial” presidency but also a social democracy.
By the end of the Nineteenth Century some corporate interests (railroads for example) were in collusion with the government at the expense of the taxpayers, and Progressives and liberals clamored for government regulation, adding the spurious allegation that certain corporations (Rockefeller and Carnegie) were engaged in “predatory pricing.” So government was enlisted to “help the little guy.” To say their efforts were a failure would be a bit of an understatement, but they did succeed in expanding the authority of the central government and its bureaucratic apparatus. And they established a precedent: the government would now oversee the welfare of the people.
The expansion of “social democracy” occurred simultaneously with rise to the imperial state. Lincoln set the ground work. President McKinley took us overseas with the Spanish/American War. Woodrow Wilson, ably supported by “liberal” Protestant clerics, intervened in Europe’s war in a vein effort to bring on a “New World Order.” Franklin Roosevelt expanded the power of the presidency and the federal bureaucracy, and is often accused of manipulating America’s entry in to World War Two.
But President Harry Truman was the first president to simply bypassed Congress and declared war on North Korea, although Congress didn’t seem to care all that much. I’m sure you’re familiar with the rest of our imperial history: Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Gulf I, Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, and now, Iraq. All of these military actions were ordered by the President of the United States without benefit of a Congressional declaration of war, in violation of the Constitution.
Dr. Eland spares neither the Democrats nor the Republicans, arguing that both parties, at least since the presidency of William McKinley, have engaged in the same virulent, nasty, heavy-handed, and addlepated foreign policy that has resulted in what revisionist historian, Harry Elmer Barnes, referred to as “perpetual war for perpetual peace.” Both parties have ignored the prescient warnings of the founders who spoke loudly against foreign interventions and entanglements, and the cost in lives and treasure have been enormous.
Eland’s two chapters Why Conservatives Should Be Against Empire, and Why Liberals Should Be Against Empire, are in-depth analysis of the philosophical foundations of these disparate ideologies and the application of their principles to the question of empire. The author takes delight in tweaking the nose of those liberals who remained hypocritically silent during President Clinton’s incursions in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Haiti, and the anti-empire conservatives who kept silent while the current President Bush invaded Iraq. Unfortunately, many Americans assume that the opposition to American interventionism is a “liberal” activity. Not so! An element of the “conservative” right has also engaged in opposition. Here I’m referring to the paleo-conservatives, who many argue are the last remaining conservatives in American politics.
Twenty-five years ago the paleocons almost won a seat in the halls of government but were denied when the Reagan Administration rejected the nomination of the brilliant Southern traditionalist, M.E. Bradford, as the Director of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In the ensuing fight they were crushed by the much better funded neocons and cast out of Washington. Later the paleocons and the Libertarians engaged in a messy, internecine, squabble and divorced.
Neocons moved into, and increasingly controled the Republican Party, while the paleocons retreated to the provinces to continue the fight, producing what many argue is the finest intellectual magazine in America, Chronicles. While paleocons look upon “liberals” with disdain, considering them uninformed, naďve, and misguided, they reserve their greatest antipathy for the despised neocons. For the neocons know the “truth” and have rejected it, opting instead for a virulent statist regime that seeks to create a “New World Order,” all of which violates the first principles of the republic. This cannot be forgiven, and the fight will not stop until the last paleocon has drawn his last breath. However, the opposition to the administration’s interventionist policies, be it left or right, have proved less then efficacious, and Dr. Eland tells us why.
Contemporary American interventionism may be the result of “public choice theory.” Eland writes that “the government itself can develop interests separate from its citizens. The government reflects the interests of powerful pressure groups and the interests of the bureaucracies and the bureaucrats in them.” Dr. Eland further explains, “Despite the risk of blowback attacks on Americans at home and abroad, the interests of the government, the foreign policy elite, and other pressure groups are furthered by an interventionist foreign policy to maintain the American empire.”
American interventionism is also the direct result of our federal legislature’s abnegation of constitutional responsibilities, namely its obligation to vote on the question of war. The author covers in detail this failure and the resulting rise of the “imperial” presidency in some detail, beginning with President Truman’s Korean “police action.”
Eland writes, “Conservatives should be against an American empire, because war is the primary cause of big government, including government encroachment in non-security related areas.” He provides a statistic that is singularly telling, “The United States is already overextended, accounting for almost 40 percent of the world’s military spending but possessing only little more than 30 percent of global GDP.” In effect, the American government has made the American taxpayer responsible for the military protection of Europe, Japan, and much of the globe.
Dr. Eland argues that the American interventionist foreign policy requires an imperial presidency that has resulted in a distortion of republican principles and weakened individual liberties. The same policy also underscores the inherent weaknesses in the “two-party” system: a political arrangement that has devolved into “one party,” at least in matters of foreign policy. America desperately needs a viable third, fourth, or even fifth party that will challenge the political power now held by the ‘Remocrats’ and ‘Depublicans.’ But the truth is our people have become politically ignorant and lazy, and it isn’t likely that the citizenry will return, any time soon, to republican principles.
Dr. Ivan Eland’s book, The Empire Has No Clothes, is an evocative and forceful argument for America to engage in a more restrained and farsighted foreign policy. Dr. Eland writes from a lifetime of foreign policy experience. He has worked as Investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budge Office, and was the Director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. He is now the Senior Fellow and Director, Center on Peace and Liberty, The Independent Institute.
Dr. Eland’s book offers his readers a dichotomy; we can either continue with an interventionist policy that has resulted in massive American casualties, the threat of “blowback” attacks punitive taxes, a decline of individual liberties, and the loss of the moral imperative or we can adhere to the doctrine of the founders and avoid foreign alliances and entanglements.
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Robert C. Cheeks has published in numerous conservative journals, including Human Events, The American Enterprise and America's Civil War. He is a self described paleocon, and hopes the readers of Intervention are as open to his ideas as he is of the ideas presented in Intervention. You may send Bob your comments to
robertcheeks@core.com Posted Sunday, February 13, 2005
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