From the WSJ Opinion Archives
BOOKSHELF
Of Arms and Free Men
America: Just another imperial power?
Alexander Hamilton wasn't the only major American political figure to take part in a mortal duel. Two years after Aaron Burr killed Hamilton in Weehawken, N.J., Andrew Jackson stood 10 paces from a lawyer named Charles Dickinson after Dickinson had said something unflattering about Jackson's wife. The first shot struck Jackson in the shoulder, breaking two ribs before lodging close to his heart. Losing blood but still standing, Jackson took steady aim and shot Dickinson dead.
Jackson would live for another four decades with that bullet in his chest, personally taking part in some of America's bloodiest Indian wars, leading an unauthorized invasion of Spanish Florida and inspiring a generation of Americans seemingly hell-bent on expanding their empire from sea to shining sea. To Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, Jackson is the quintessential American political figure. He is also Exhibit A in their argument that America's story is one of war and empire-building, not freedom and democracy.
"Describing Jackson's character as democratic barely scratches its surface," they write in "The Dominion of War." "His was a brutish world in which freedom and violence were so inextricably intertwined that those who prospered did so . . . because they were tough enough to strike at potential enemies before they could land the first blow."
"The Dominion of War" is even more ambitious than the title suggests. Messrs. Anderson and Cayton aim at nothing less than a new grand narrative of American history. In the old one, America is unique in world history as a republic dedicated to individual freedom instead of imperial domination--John Winthrop's "city on a hill." In the new narrative, America is less exceptional, its history a series of wars fought to expand power just as nations have done since the dawn of time.
Thus, in the authors' view, George Washington's creation of the Continental Army in 1775 is more important than Jefferson's Declaration in 1776 (in fact, they don't even mention the Declaration of Independence in their discussion of the American founding). "A full year before Independence," Messrs. Anderson and Cayton write, "the army represented an American union that had never before existed, that as yet had no flag, no constitution, no name. The army in that sense embodied the revolution itself." Similarly, the greatest military triumph of the 18th century is not the Revolutionary War but the Seven Years' War, which ended in 1763 and established Britain as the dominant power in America. Here colonists spilled their blood fighting side-by-side with the Redcoats to protect and expand the British empire.
Messrs. Anderson and Cayton even see later protests against British taxation--like the Boston Tea Party--as a demand to enjoy the spoils of war. "Colonists who had come to think of themselves as participants in a grand imperial adventure," they write, saw efforts "to make them pay for troops in America as an effort to deprive them of all they had fought for."
Clearly "The Dominion of War" is meant to provoke, and it does, along the way vividly retelling neglected aspects of the American story. As an effort to create a new grand narrative, though, it fails. Those muskets and canons of the American colonists were used for more than just another land grab. They did indeed eventually found a legal order unlike any other, enshrining the liberties and freedoms that would also become a legacy of the republic's later "imperial" ventures. In other words, any narrative history of American that skips the Declaration of Independence is missing something essential.
"The Dominion of War" is not an anti-American diatribe, even if at times it reads that way. Despite the authors' attack on American exceptionalism, they depict George Washington as a different kind of revolutionary figure who inspired his weary and outgunned troops in a unique way. "They knew him as a man who shared their sufferings, fostered their welfare, and defended their honor as his own. And they knew, most of all, he did it in service not of a prince but of the principles they all shared."
The authors' obsession with war, however, produces a distorted view of American history. The U.S. is a country that resisted having a large standing army for much of its first century. As late as the 1850s, the U.S. Army consisted of no more than 16,000 troops. And the authors place far too much importance on the Mexican-American War because it neatly fits their thesis. The peace treaty, signed in 1848 while the U.S. Army occupied Mexico City, ceded the lands of California, New Mexico and Arizona to the U.S.
But using the Mexican-American War to make generalizations about the sweep of American history is a stretch. This was a war that deeply divided the U.S. precisely because it was seen by many as anathema to American principles. Abraham Lincoln, then a member of Congress, accused President Polk of invading Mexican territory to start an unnecessary and unconstitutional war. Ulysses S. Grant saw the Mexican-American War from the front lines as a junior officer and called it "one of the most unjust waged by a stronger against a weaker nation."
The authors portray the Spanish-American War (1898) as another imperial venture. But of course it was justified at the time as anti-imperialistic--an effort to end despotic Spanish rule of the Philippines and Cuba. The war's costs were steep and its benefits ambiguous at best. Even after the Spanish were defeated, more than 1,000 American troops would be killed battling an insurgency in the Philippines. "The American troops soon discovered that no matter how many they killed, how many towns they destroyed, or how much territory they took, they could not suppress the insurgency." It would be nearly a half-century, it is true, before the Philippines would gain full independence, but it was never a colony in the traditional imperial sense.
In World War II, the justification was clearer and the results more decisive, as Messrs. Anderson and Cayton readily concede. "The Americans had not come to conquer like Romans sowing the fields of Carthage with salt; their policy was successful, and, by the standards of most victorious empires in world history, benevolent." They add: "Imperialism in the service of liberty was no vice."
The authors wisely avoid making a snap judgment about where the Iraq war fits into their narrative. History will judge whether the results in Iraq are more like World War II, serving both liberty and American interests, or like the Spanish-American War, serving neither.
Mr. Karl is a senior foreign affairs correspondent for ABC News.
