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117 Pol. Sci. Q. 1 (2002-2003)

handle is hein.journals/pclscceqry117 and id is 1 raw text is: The Post September 11 Debate Over Empire, Globalization, and Fragmentation WALTER LAFEBER Months before the September 11 attacks, a few observers, working almost entirely within the Washington, DC beltway, argued that the United States was an empire and its people the fortunate Chosen who were to spread an imperialism beneficial to all, apparently whether already stable and func- tioning parts of the world wanted it or not. Americans, these observers elabo- rated, were imperial not in the old sense of wanting to hold territory, but in their determination to expand globally American ideas based on capitalism and democracy-two concepts that actually have often been at cross-purposes throughout most of the post-1900 so-called American Century. The new impe- rialists rightly noted that earlier U.S. imperialism had been linked to American Progressivism and especially to the international, supposedly progressive ideals of Woodrow Wilson and the big-stick diplomacy of Theodore Roosevelt. The twenty-first-century imperialists, however, who defined themselves as Reagan conservatives, concluded that large political payoffs could bless their wing of Republicanism if they could sell the idea of an imperial foreign policy that com- bined American political and economic principles, unilateralism, a McDon- ald's-Disney culture, and-the necessary accompaniment-a military that ab- sorbed nearly as much of the gross national product as it did during the height of the cold war, when the GNP was considerably smaller.' Such military costs were nevertheless logical, given the ambition. 'Thomas E. Ricks, Empire or Not? A Ouiet Debate over U.S. Role, Washington Post, 21 August 2001; Kevin Baker, The Fear in Ideas: American Imperialism, Embraced, New York Times Maga- zine, 9 December 2001, 53. WALTER LAFEBERis a professor of government at Cornell University. He is the author of America, Russia, and the Cold War whose just-published 9th edition has a chapter explaining more fully the September 11 aftermath in U.S. foreign relations. Political Science Quarterly Volume 117 Number 1 2002

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