Why Is It So Hard to Imagine the End of American Empire?
Americans’ muted reaction to the quarter-century anniversary of 9/11 reveals a waning zeal for the American imperial project. We tolerate it only because we believe it can’t end. But it can.
The global war on terror discredited itself so thoroughly that hardly anyone will defend it. Nonetheless, American empire survived — not because Americans believe in it but because we struggle to imagine an alternative. (Samuel Corum / Getty Images)
The September 11, 2001, attacks on New York City and Washington, DC, as the saying goes, “changed everything.” After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the global American empire, created in the 1940s to combat communism, was left without a raison d’être. While foreign policymakers spent the 1990s searching for one, the best they could come up with — use the military power of the United States to stop humanitarian abuses abroad — was quixotic at best, catastrophic at worst. For a time, the empire lost its juice.
The attacks changed all that. After 9/11, the United States identified a new global mission: fight “jihadist terrorism” wherever it might be found. We all know how that turned out. The United States lurched from disaster to disaster, killing and deracinating millions of people abroad. And at home, the so-called global war on terror (GWOT) engendered police militarization, polarization, and cynicism.
Today few Americans deny that we live in an empire. But why has there been so little opposition to it?
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