![]() Only those whose grasp of public affairs remains at the level of junior-high-school civics believe that the international power wielded by the United States and the Soviet Union since 1945 hasn’t constituted a kind of empire, and with Muscovy wheezing and whimpering its way toward disintegration, the end game has left the United States the only player on the board. Imperialism is the systematic domination of one or several countries by another, and although empire historically involves all the splendiferous trappings of formality and ceremony, it doesn’t really need them. ![]() His Majesty the Emir Jabir al-Ahmad al-Jabir Al Sabah. It wasn’t Saddam Hussein, let alone that merry old soul. It’s true that American conquistadors didn’t plant Old Glory on the shore or hang the sheiks and emirs from the nearest kumquat bush, but nobody out there could have had any illusion as to who was really in charge. For all of President Bush’s invocation of the “international rule of law” and the “New World Order” in cranking up Western war machines for the crusade against Iraq last winter, the war was no sooner concluded than American and European diplomats, corporate satraps, global welfare workers, and assorted do-gooders descended onto the deserts of the Middle East to bring the locals up to snuff. Indeed, the rationale for imperialism is no longer the callow snobbery of Eton and Sandhurst, Social Darwinist rumblings, or Rudyard Kipling’s “white man’s burden,” but the very same progressivist slogans that provide the lyrics for what is supposed to be the imperial recessional. Yet, despite Western genuflections to self-determination and global democracy, empire, like Che and Elvis, lives. “Imperialism,” the budding proconsul wrote, “is learning how to get along with one’s social inferiors.” In the Edwardian twilight of the British Empire, that answer might have sufficed to win a scholarship to Balliol, but these days the lad would be lucky not to wind up in jail for a hate crime. Lewis Namier liked to tell the story of an English schoolboy who was asked to define “imperialism” on an examination paper.
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