Technological leadership and American soft power
John Krige · 2010
If we were to take President Bush’s man in the White House at face value, we could not but conclude that, as scholars and intellectuals, we are necessarily condemned to the margins of power, irrelevant irritants to the grand historical project of remaking the world in America’s image. Yet, as our anonymous speaker doubtless knows, empire has always had its critics who have given voice to those whom it oppressed, and its proponents who have served to enhance its respectability, and to legitimate its exploitative agenda. The claim that the USA is an empire is usually associated with left-wing historians such as William Appleman Williams and Walter LaFeber who, writing in the 1950s and 1960s, used it as a critical lens through which to view, first, America’s internal westward expansion in the name of Manifest Destiny, and then the urge to global expansion to conquer markets and to export the ideals of liberal democracy. Now, however, the tables are turned. In the shadow of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, unashamed talk of empire has, as the conservative Washington Post put it in 2002, suddenly become ‘hot intellectual property within Washington’s beltway’. Max Boot, a senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations confidently asserts that ‘Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets’.2 In 2003, as SadamHussein’s statue was toppled from its pedestal by American troops, the historian Niall Ferguson enthused that if ‘America has embarked on a new age of empire, it may turn out to be the most evanescent empire in all history’, proudly going on to write ‘Let me come clean. I am a fully paid-up member of the neoimperialist gang’.3