Special Section: At War - No Surrender: The option to 'empire'.(Brief Article)

One thing that can safely be predicted in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks is a revival of the old "republic or empire" debate. Patrick Buchanan's 1999 essay "Is Cataclysmic Terror Ahead?" is being widely recirculated. Sample:

On the day after Pearl Harbor, ex-President Herbert Hoover sat down and wrote to friends: "You and I know that this continuous putting pins in rattlesnakes finally got this country bitten."

I confess to some sympathy for the Buchananite position, but I cannot share it. For one thing, it would be dishonest, at a personal level, for me to do so. If not for America's having been willing to send troops abroad to fight, I should not now be here writing this. If alive at all, I would be out working in the fields under some Gauleiter fur Ostmittelengland. To a lot of us raised in the rest of the world, having America as a remote, self-absorbed champion of theoretical liberty is all very well; but we rather like the interventionist thing, too. There are also strong practical reasons to favor American interventionism. Would the world have been a better, or a worse, place this past few decades if America had stood aloof from the world wars? Would America herself have been safer, more secure, more prosperous? It seems pretty plain to me-though certainly arguable-that the answers are: "worse" and "no." I like Pat Buchanan, and a great deal of what he has to say, but I cannot be a Buchananite. Republic or empire? Empire, please.

I understand, of course, that Americans at large, even those who have never even heard of this debate, are schizophrenic about the matter. They cannot see why the affairs of Albania or Zimbabwe are any darned business of theirs, much less why they should send off their beloved children to be killed in such places. And yet at some level they understand that the "republic" option is, at bottom, a fantasy: that however much they might wish to leave the world alone, the world will not leave America alone. Public opinion supported the Vietnam war almost until it ended; it was the elites who turned against it, not ordinary Americans. Great wealth and great success generate great envy and great hatred. And America's high ideals, if clutched jealously to America's chest while those abroad who believe in them are hunted down and slaughtered without aid, will wither and die. The urge to give a helping hand to liberty will sooner or later prove irresistible to this cocky, fearless, liberty-loving nation.

My native Britain actually did practice empire, very successfully, but eventually decided that the trouble and expense were too great, ...