The Inherent Injustice of Empire

Defenders of empire need to keep things as abstract as possible in order to make their case seem reasonable.

Nigel Biggar writes a “Christian defense of the American empire” and it concludes with the same recycled hegemonist nonsense that you would expect:

The United States is not the only trustee of such values and institutions, but, thanks to the gifts of providence and its own achievements, it happens to be the most powerful global actor at this time. Its primary duty to its own people obliges it to sustain its power. But that duty implies a secondary one to promote the weal of other nations. For if it should surrender its dominant international power, other states, less humane and liberal, will pick it up. The U.S. has a vocation to shoulder the imperial burden, certainly for the sake of Americans, but for the sake of the rest of us as well.

“Rule Britannia, Britannia, rule the waves,” we still sing here in the United Kingdom, “Britons never, never shall be slaves.” We know, however, that the days of Britain’s wave-ruling have passed. So now our freedom, and that of many others, depends upon the will of Americans to sustain their nation’s imperial dominance. Let it not be said that Christians in the United States undermined that will and contributed to a world in which we all fall under Beijing’s yoke.

There is a lot wrong with Biggar’s essay, but one of my biggest problems with it is how it seeks to guilt Christians and all other Americans into accepting U.S. “imperial dominance” as obligatory service for the whole world. Bearing an imperial burden is not something that the U.S. does for the good of the world, and much of rest of the world wishes that the U.S. had never taken up that burden. But the imperial burden is also harmful to America, because, as John Quincy Adams told us more than two centuries ago, America’s “glory is not dominion, but liberty.”

There have been many attempts over the centuries to sanitize and sanctify empire by investing it with some higher purpose. In every case, it is an exercise in assuaging the consciences of people that should know better that empire is tolerable and even admirable. It seeks to console the empire’s supporters that they are doing the right and necessary thing when they have good reasons to suspect that they are doing the opposite. In fact, it aims to deaden their consciences and encourage them to prize power over truth.

When confronted with the injustice and destruction that empire always involves, the defenders of empire will resort to the usual dodges: our empire is different from and better than every other empire, and if not for our empire the world will fall into chaos or darkness or the rule of some other empire. Even if this empire is relatively better than previous ones, that still doesn’t justify it, and the latter point is almost always self-flattering propaganda to make the current empire’s wrongdoing seem less obnoxious. The religious defenders of empire seek to justify something that is inherently unjust, and in so doing they inevitably make a mockery of the faith that they want to use to baptize the empire.

Defenders of empire need to keep things as abstract as possible in order to make their case seem reasonable, but at their cores empires reserve the right to attack and kill members of other nations to aggrandize themselves. No such right exists. The threat to use coercion and violence to impose the empire’s will is always present, and states that resist are subjected to harsh punishments, whether in the form of economic warfare or direct military action. They may dress this up in the language of “maintaining order” or mission civilisatrice or whatever, but in the end it is a claim of superiority over other nations and entitlement to break any rules that get in the way.

Defenders of empire also naturally love euphemisms, because it allows them to refer to massive crimes as if they were just the unfortunate results of excessive enthusiasm. Thus Biggar refers to the Iraq war as “overoptimistic” with no other modifiers, as if the chief problem with a war of criminal aggression was that its architects underestimated the difficulty of committing the crime. You will find no reference in the essay to any of the crimes of our empire, whether in Iraq or Vietnam or the Philippines or anywhere else, because once you begin to detail what acting like an empire means in practice it becomes impossible to take seriously all the guff about duty and providential missions. “Well, you see, we had a duty to the world, and that’s why hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had to die.” Once the terrible costs of this arrogance and presumption are laid bare, no one can honestly claim that this or any other empire benefits the world.