A favourite concept of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the theory echoes a singular conceit dating back to the American Revolution: the United States can intervene in the world while remaining a force for good. Since before 1776, Americans have pictured their society as a “city on a hill,” which must be preserved against outside contamination and from which Americans, armed with “self-evident” truths, must sally forth to save the rest of humanity. (Walter Russell Mead offers a frank description of American exceptionalism in his acclaimed history of US foreign policy, Special Providence: “The United States over its history has consistently summoned the will and the means to compel its enemies to yield to its demands. Attacks on civilian targets and the infliction of heavy casualties on enemy civilians have consistently played a vital part in American war strategies.”) The indispensable-nation theory was serviceable enough during the 1990s, before more robust ideas to justify American hegemony became necessary with the attacks on New York and Washington, in the new age of blood and iron.

And such ideas have appeared. Like an Imperial Starship, the Bush administration’s doctrine that the United States has the right to pre-emptive intervention anywhere against perceived threats now looms over the planet. While much ink has been spilled on Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and others favouring military solutions (and supposedly contemptuous of democracy), the Starship is equally surrounded and supported by a new liberal justification of American empire that plays the role in our world that Christian missionaries played in the days of the old imperialism. These missionary imperialists have performed a great service for the Bush administration, making its policies palatable to many who would not otherwise regard them as legitimate.

A luminary among those who support present and possibly future interventions by the United States and its allies is Michael Ignatieff, the Canadian director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and a potential successor to Paul Martin as Liberal party leader. In Empire Lite, Ignatieff writes, “It is at least ironic that liberal believers—someone like me, for example—can end up supporting the creation of a new humanitarian empire, a new form of colonial tutelage for the peoples of Kosovo, Bosnia and Afghanistan.” But before you are offended by the imperial label, he cautions, you should consider that “[i]t is an empire lite, hegemony without colonies, a global sphere of influence without the burden of direct administration and the risks of daily policing . . . . But that does not make it any less of an empire, that is, an attempt to permanently order the world of states and markets according to its national interests.” In a similar vein, Ignatieff wrote in the New York Times Magazine in January 2003, “We are no longer in the era of the United Fruit Company, when American corporations needed the Marines to secure their investments overseas. The 21st century imperium is a new invention in the annals of political science...a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known.” Without an empire, proclaim today’s imperial enthusiasts, there can be no peace, stability, and economic development.

Without empire, there would be no power to intervene where states have failed, to deal with human catastrophes, and to make possible states where market economies, democracy, and the rule of law can take root. The alternative to empire is chaos, and some liberal imperialists appear to have conceded the Republican point that the UN has either had its day in the sun or is too cumbersome for a just-in-time world.

Won over by the United States’ invasion of Iraq, such thinkers have been stirred to passion by the drive to remake the Middle East according to American values. What they find attractive about Bush is not his conservatism but his utopian liberalism. In Longitudes and Attitudes, prolific author and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes, “How the World of Order deals with the World of Disorder is the key question of the day.” And Friedman is clear that the forces of civilization, led by the United States, may have to strike at the sanctuaries of the barbarians to make the world safe.

The world is beset by the problems of failed states, Ignatieff equally asserts, citing as one principal cause the wreckage of the process of decolonization of earlier empires during the 1950s and 1960s. Faced with the barbarians, the imperial centre has no choice but to hit back, using force where necessary, not only to protect itself against attacks but also to occupy failed states so that they can be nurtured back to health. This process he calls nation-building. Thus, for Ignatieff, imperialism, for a time at least, is the essential handmaiden for the construction of nation-states in zones of barbarism.

“The case for empire is that it has become, in a place like Iraq, the last hope for democracy and stability alike,” Ignatieff wrote in his 2003 article, noting that critics “have not factored in what tyranny or chaos can do to vital American interests.” Overlooking the point that it might just be these interests (oil, geo-strategic positioning, etc.) that are driving the agenda, Ignatieff ‘s work has the feel of the belle époque about it. His is a civilizing mission, and the addition of such thinkers to the ranks of those who supported the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq has widened the political spectrum of those willing to endorse imperial wars, and, perhaps unwittingly, given credence to the religiosity of the new American mission. “America is the last nation left whose citizens don’t laugh out loud when their leader asks God to bless the country and further its mighty work of freedom,” he wrote in a June 2005 article, also in the New York Times Magazine. “It is the last country with a mission, a mandate and a dream, as old as its founders. All of this may be dangerous, even delusional, but it is also unavoidable. It is impossible to think of America without these properties of self-belief.”

There seems a paradox here. Following his own logic and historical analysis—which acknowledges both the wreckage left by earlier empires and that empires always produce resistance—it cannot be, for Ignatieff, that empire as such is necessary. If the goal is peace, security, and freedom, can’t this only be achieved through some form of political internationalism (albeit, like democracy itself, messy) where there is no direct imposition of values from one state to another? Given the existence of 725 official US military bases around the world and another 969 at home, it would appear that the American empire is not at all an “empire lite,” but rather one that relies on an overt and continuous demonstration of power both abroad and at home, and is now burdened by crippling debt and a populace unsure of its actions. Furthermore, if the United States is so essential to maintaining order in the world, is it not the world’s responsibility to ensure that it does not collapse? And for this level of co-operation, or two-way street, must not the United States invite the world in?

Just as the British Empire attenuated British democracy by sustaining aristocratic power long into the age of democracy, the American empire is threatening to American democracy. The appointment of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who provided the legal foundations for Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, shows how empire strikes back at the vitals of America itself. The potent interests—military, corporate, political—that gain their sway as a consequence of empire can easily become the enemies of democracy at home, and, as many have argued, the flouting of international law through the use of pre-emptive strikes will eventually lead to circumventions of domestic law and authority. The struggle for democracy and the rule of law takes place not only in failed states but in the imperial states themselves.

Nonetheless, the acclaimed Scottish historian Niall Ferguson goes much further than Ignatieff in presenting the case for empires, insisting, for instance, that the British Empire, despite its warts, was a boon for humankind and that the American empire—currently outspending the rest of the world on defence—is needed to play that role in the twenty-first century. With brutal honesty, Ferguson writes in Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, “What lessons can the United States draw from the British experience of empire? The obvious one is that the most successful economy in the world—as Britain was for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—can do a very great deal to impose its preferred values on less technologically advanced societies....No doubt it is true that, in theory, open international markets would have been preferable to imperialism; but in practice global free trade was not and is not naturally occurring. The British Empire enforced it.”