Doing as the Romans Do

Alert students of the G.W. Bush era have long suspected that imperialist military adventurism and liberty-loving, rights-based, cream-puff republicanist rhetoric are not entirely incompatible. Actually, by now it is hard to imagine one without the other. But ’twas not ever thus. For decades, serious discussion of an “American empire” was restricted to Alfred Thayer Mahan, Gore Vidal and Denys Arcand: pro, anti and wistful. September 11 changed that as the neoconservatives, impatient with worldwide wussiness, embraced the idea of empire as a convenient way to be simultaneously brutal and benevolent. Thus Cheneyites and Chomskyites alike could revel in imperial analogies, and their bipartisan terminology has lately attracted countless starry-eyed Realists, who have been churning out “decline and fall” pieces at a fearsome rate since the financial crisis of 2008. It is hard to believe that the now-common phrase “American empire” just yesterday evoked the 1890s and/or Mr. Vidal’s...