Rediscovering the oh so obvious: the "empire" is us

For many years I have studied the expansionist hungers of America....and become convinced that it is a deep, sustained dynamic even when the men who lead it seem mature, civilized.

I believe my early 1960's Oberlin College education hid this, glossed over it. For in the "Cold War" were we not a democracy at war with the Soviet empire?

I learned of American expansion on my own, as a correspondent in the field and as a private scholar well outside of the establishment.

Long before the century turned -- and my 1960's University of California professor Chalmers Johnson discovered the obvious in his own "mavericky" way.

Going all the way back I felt a certain spiritual kinship with George Kennan, the moody, introspective diplomat and Soviet expert who functioned partly as a journalist.

A listener and a thinker, he gained wisdom from chatting even with "whores" on Berlin's streets when a diplomat there in the 1930's. After World War II he helped devise a strategy to "contain" the Soviet Union.

Then at some point he saw the military expansion so strong in postwar America -- and with his 1950's proposal for American Soviet military "disengagement" -- climbed off the train. For shelter in the embodiment of established, non frontier America, Princeton University.




Ah yes, the fist was often gloved, when the nation was weak or there was no need to show it.

But when challenged, the vengeful, expanding warrior came out. More than once there was "war without mercy."

And then the answer was often swift and violent -- as with Japan and Germany, as in Vietnam, as today in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Reagan drove the train all the way into the station in his bid to destroy the Soviet "evil empire."

He supported savage proxy wars in Central America and Afghanistan to "bleed" the Soviet Union.

For Reagan was a child of the heartland, even in his movies at peace amidst the savagery of American expansion and Indian resistance on the the frontier.

Deep in the American psyche has been a constant refrain.

To destroy those "evil empires" -- and be instead the white shining empire on the hill.

Moderation sometimes, but so often that dream born in religious zealotry, driven by financial greed, fueled by a sense of superiority, sometimes restrained by checks and balances. Often opposed by intellectuals and religious idealists.

How convenient to see Andrew Jackson and the Cherokee as an exception, the Mexican War as an aberration, the Spanish American War as an isolated product of "yellow journalists."

But a genius of America is that it is a democracy which can go all out when the need arises, to kill, to quickly move into the field vast amounts of men and weapons, open new overseas bases, to call the shots, to rebuild the world in its own image, even, God forbid, to torture.

Democracies can be expansionist.

Nothing wrong with that. Go for it, if you can.

Do not be surprised if it does not last forever. "Blows back" to bite.

Still, what emerges in its place might not be completely bad.