To contrast to the upbeat Paul Johnson article on empire that I linked to yesterday, here's an article by Josh Marshall contrasting Clinton's consensual form of empire with the Bush Administration's policies of naked primacy. It's a good piece, and I agree with a lot of it. It's worth reading through, but this quote captures the message pretty well.

The empire-makers of 2002 weakened America’s covert empire because, at a critical level, they didn’t understand how it worked. As Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay note in “America Unbound” (Brookings; $22.95), a new history of Bush’s foreign policy, Administration hawks believe that American global supremacy is possible not only because America is a uniquely just nation but because others around the globe see it as such. The current unipolar state of the world is the best evidence of this: because most countries see American power as being more benign than not, they acquiesce in it. But this acquiescence isn’t irreversible.

In ways that many hawks have been slow to realize, the demise of the Soviet Union has had a paradoxical effect on America’s role in the world. What has made the United States more powerful militarily has made it weaker politically. For half a century, American policymakers had been accustomed to habits of deference from democratic allies in Europe and Asia. Yet fear of the Soviets was responsible for much of that deference. That’s why, in the decade after the Cold War, the makers of our foreign policy recognized that America could best protect its supremacy by making sure that smaller countries felt, even in some small measure, that they had been “dealt in.” This was one function of those balky international organizations, and not the least important objective of international diplomacy.

Well, as far as that goes, I agree. But what Josh Marshall is missing is the moral dark side of the Clinton imperium: the need to whitewash, to compromise, to appease. Yes, it made us more powerful and more "respected," but at what price? Sanctions are a good illustration: they are easy, the victims are faraway and nameless, hard to capture with a camera. And yet they are real. How do you force those "balky international organizations" to face up to the hideous crimes of which they, blindfolded by their feel-good rhetoric, been the accomplices? You don't, as the run-up to the war in Iraq clearly showed. Leadership is needed, resolve, principle, the courage and the impudence to call evil by its right name.

The truth is, the Clintonian facade was already crumbling. The silent victims were becoming less silent; and one of those victims acquired a big megaphone on 9/11. The problem with 9/11 was not only that it showed America was vulnerable, but that bin Laden's cause (though not his method) was just. He had three grievances against the US: our occupation of (and complicity with) the regime in Saudi Arabia; our denial to the Palestinians of dignity and self-rule; and the sufferings we inflicted on the people of Iraq. On all counts, he was in the right, and Clinton's imperium of appeasement was in the wrong.

9/11 punctuated the Clinton imperium's dissolution. It didn't have to end it, though. It was the Bush administration's reaction which did that. I don't approve of everything the Bush administration has done since 9/11, by the way, and I approve even less of everything the Bush administration has said. Only in the past year has the Bush administration developed the vision which I so admire, and which I hope the world will come to understand and buy into.