Freedom-idealism and the U.S. National Security Strategy
James Skillen Wednesday, 1 September 2004
[America] conspicuously lacks the voracious appetite for territorial expansion overseas that characterized the empires of the West European seaboard. It prefers the idea that foreigners will Americanize themselves without the need for formal rule.
— Niall Ferguson
America is a peculiar sort of empire, and lately it is an empire peculiarly obsessed with security. Its preoccupation with self-preservation is related not only to the fact that it is a state, like other states, with an obligation to protect its own citizens from terrorism and other threats. The U.S. is also, in its own eyes, the exceptional state, with a world-historical mission. American national identity continues to be animated by the belief that the goal of history is democracy and freedom for every people—and that America is the model. This is why Americans rarely interpret security in terms limited to simple national self-interest (much less imperial self-interest). Instead, security interests are legitimated in unabashedly idealistic (and self-flattering) terms: in order for the goal of freedom and democracy to be reached by all peoples, America must remain unassailable as both exemplar and vanguard.
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