² There is, of course, a substantial historical scholarly literature addressing US imperialism before 1900, a topic beyond the scope of this essay. For valuable accounts see Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right, New York, Hill and Wang, 1995; Horne, Gerald, ‘Race from Power: U.S. Foreign Policy and the General Crisis of “White Supremacy” ’, Diplomatic History, 23 (1999), pp. 437–61;CrossRefGoogle ScholarJames H. Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans, Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press, 2002; Anthony J. C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1999; Andrew Bacevich (ed.), The Imperial Tense, Chicago, Ivan R. Dee, 2003; and William A. Williams, The Roots of the Modern American Empire, New York, Vintage Books, 1970.

³ There are some ideological and political differences amongst those employing the concept of ‘empire’ to describe US policy at present, determined by whether writers favour or oppose an American imperial role. For a valuable engagement with the literature in these terms see Cox, Michael, ‘Empire by Denial? Debating US Power’, Security Dialogue, 35 (2004), pp. 228–36;CrossRefGoogle Scholarand also Andrew Hurrell, ‘Power and the International System’, Security Dialogue, 35 (2004), pp. 254–7; and also G. John Ikenberry, ‘Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American Order’, Foreign Affairs, 83: 2 (March/April 2004), pp. 154–62; and Campbell Craig, ‘American Realism versus American Imperialism’, World Politics, 57 (October 2004), pp. 143–71.

⁴ David Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003.Google Scholar

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⁶ Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 243; and see Christopher Sanders, America's Overseas Garrisons: The Leasehold Empire, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000; Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, New York, TimeWarner, 2002; and Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire, London, Verso, 2003.Google Scholar

⁷ Johnson, Blowback, p. 7.Google Scholar

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⁹ Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2003, pp. xiii, xix.Google Scholar

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¹¹ Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, London, Penguin, 2003.Google Scholar

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¹³ Kristol, Irving, ‘The Emerging American Imperium’, Wall Street Journal, 18 August 1997.Google Scholar

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¹⁵ Gary Gerstle, American Crucible, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2001; and Stephanson, Manifest Destiny.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Willard B. Gatewood, Black Americans and the White Man's Burden 1998–1903, Urbana, IL, University of Illinois Press, 1975.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Stuart Creighton Miller, Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines 1899–1903, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1982; and see Rubin Francis Weston, Racism in U.S. Imperialism, Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1972.Google Scholar

¹⁸ This is not to disregard the secular and quasi-religious conception of exceptionalism presumed or developed by some analysts of US foreign policy, in which anti-imperial rhetoric can veer toward a form of salvation: Berns, Making Patriots. Google Scholar

¹⁹ See James Davison Hunter and Joshua Yates, ‘In the Vanguard of Globalization: The World of American Globalizers’, in Peter L. Berger and Samuel P. Huntington (eds), Many Globalizations, New York, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 8–33; Harvey B. Feigenbaum, ‘The Production of Culture in the Postimperialist Era’, in David Becker and Richard Sklar (eds), Postimperialism in World Politics, Westport, CT, Praeger, 1999; King, Desmond, ‘Americans in the Dark? Recent Hollywood Representations of the Nation's History’, Government and Opposition, 38: 2 (2003), pp. 163–80;CrossRefGoogle ScholarRichard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993; Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through 20th-Century Europe, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2005; and Donald Sassoon, ‘From Buddenbrooks to Babbitt?’, New Left Review, 36 (2005), pp. 141–8.

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²¹ Michael W. Doyle, Empires, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1986, p. 12. This is the best modern social science work on empire; of course the subjects of imperialism and of empires have received extensive attention by activists and intellectuals since the nineteenth century including such important works as those contributed by Lenin and J. A. Hobson.Google Scholar

²² Doyle, Empires, pp. 19, 30.Google Scholar

²³ Prestowitz, Rogue Nation, p. 25.Google Scholar

²⁴ Doyle, Empires, p. 30.Google Scholar

²⁵ Ibid., p. 45.Google Scholar

²⁶ Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and its Rivals from the Sixteenth Century to the Present, London, Pimlico, 2002, pp. xi–xii, xiv.Google Scholar

²⁷ Ibid., pp. 72, 73.Google Scholar

²⁸ This argument is one of several about the nature of US nationhood developed in Desmond King, The Liberty of Strangers: Making the American Nation, New York, Oxford University Press, 2004, to which the reader is referred for further detail.Google Scholar

²⁹ One response to this point might be that imperialism is equally expressed in the dominance of non-colonial states, and indeed encourage under the Monroe Doctrine. But this is still distinct from possessing and directly controlling colonial states.Google Scholar

³⁰ William Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay 1941–1945: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977. See also Phillip Darby, Three Faces of Imperialism: British and American Approaches to Asia and Africa 1870–1970, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1987.Google Scholar

³¹ Its website is: . The Bureau is under Assistant Secretary Lorne Craner, previously president of the International Republican Institute, a lobby for democracy promotion and building.Google Scholar

³² Reprinted in Thomas H. Etzold and John Lewis Gaddis (eds), Containment: Documents in American Policy and Strategy 1945–1950, New York, Columbia University Press, 1978.Google Scholar

³³ Niall Ferguson, ‘The Empire that Dares not Speak its Name’, Sunday Times, 13 April 2003; Ferguson, Colossus; Richard N. Haas, The Reluctant Sheriff: The US After the Cold War, Washington, DC, Council on Foreign Affairs, 1997; and Berns, Making Patriots.Google Scholar

³⁴ The National Security Strategy of the United States, Washington, DC, White House, 2002.Google Scholar

³⁵ Ibid.Google Scholar

³⁶ For two accounts of the thinking and argument behind Bush foreign policy see Robert Kagan, Paradise and Power, London, Atlantic Books, 2003; and Lawrence F. Kaplan and William Kristol, The War over Iraq, San Francisco, Encounter Books, 2003.Google Scholar

³⁷ ‘The Divided West’, parts 1, 2 and 3, Financial Times, 26, 28 and 29 May 2003.Google Scholar

³⁸ Jimmy Carter, ‘The Troubling New Face of America’, Washington Post, 5 September 2002.Google Scholar

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⁴⁰ Tony Smith, America's Mission, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1994.Google Scholar

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⁴² A case could perhaps be made that the kinds of values promoted by the modernization school of social science, especially political science and economics, in the 1950s and 1960s constituted an imperial approach but it was one limited to a relatively small group within US elite universities and did not undertake the cross-generational training so pivotal to the British edifice of empire.Google Scholar

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⁵² For a more critical view see Michael Hunt, Ideology and US Foreign Policy, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1987.Google Scholar

⁵³ For an influential approach to imperial extension see Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500–2000, London, Unwin Hyman, 1988.Google Scholar

⁵⁴ Bacevich, American Empire.Google Scholar

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⁵⁶ An amendment dividing the amount half and half between loans and grants passed in the Senate despite intense efforts by the White House to make Republicans support Bush's proposal: of nine Republican senators called to a meeting with President Bush on the eve of the vote, eight voted against the reconstruction sum and supported the plan to make it partly a loan. But the initial request passed in the House by 298–121 votes (30 October 2003) and the loan provision was eliminated in the House–Senate negotiations.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ Sanders, America's Overseas Garrisons.Google Scholar

⁵⁸ ‘Chain of Command: Can Torture in Iraq be Linked to the White House?’, Financial Times, 17 June 2004.Google Scholar

⁵⁹ Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993; Paul Hollander, Anti-Americanism, New York, Oxford University Press, 1992; and Richard Pells, Not Like Us, New York, Basic Books, 1997.Google Scholar

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⁶¹ The 9/11 Commission Report, Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, New York, W.W, Norton, 2004.Google Scholar

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⁶³ As explicated in King, The Liberty of Strangers; and see Rogers M. Smith, Stories of Peoplehood, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2003.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ David A. Hollinger, ‘The Historian's Use of the United States and Vice Versa’, in Thomas Bender (ed.), Rethinking American History in a Global Age, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002, pp. 381–95.Google Scholar

⁶⁵ Smith, America's Mission.Google Scholar

⁶⁶ Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights; and Philip Klinkner with Rogers M. Smith, The Unsteady March, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999.Google Scholar

⁶⁷ Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2001; and Kirsten Sellars, The Rise and Rise of Human Rights, Stroud: Sutton, 2002.Google Scholar

⁶⁸ For instance, in the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 or the more recently established International Criminal Court. A more parochial example is noteworthy too: in August 2002 an Anne Frank and Human Rights memorial was opened in Boise, Idaho, funded by 44 Idaho schools to ‘make human rights integral to the education of students’, New York Times, 18 August 2002.Google Scholar

⁶⁹ Crawford, Neta C., ‘Just War and the U.S. Counterterror War’, Perspectives on Politics, 1 (2003), pp.5–25;CrossRefGoogle Scholarothers see continuity in US policy – Bacevich, American Empire.

⁷⁰ King, Liberty of Strangers; and Rogers M. Smith, Stories of Peoplehood, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2003.Google Scholar

⁷¹ Samuel Huntington, Who We Are: The Erosion and Renewal of American National Identity, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2004.Google Scholar

⁷² Arthur J. Schlesinger, ‘Eyeless in Iraq’, New York Review of Books, 23 October 2003.Google Scholar

⁷³ Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage in the Senate, 28 October 2003.Google Scholar

⁷⁴ Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power, New York, Public Affairs, 2004.Google Scholar

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⁷⁹ Porter, Absent-Minded Imperialists, p. 307.Google Scholar

⁸⁰ Little, American Orientalism.Google Scholar

⁸¹ Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact and Exoticism of Modern America, New York, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 190.Google Scholar