It is rather the repeatedly failed bid for imperial sway that has corrupted. It was not triumph but loss -- of China, of the atomic monopoly, among other developments -- that precipitated the McCarthyite assault on liberty at home. It was persistent failure in the Vietnam War, already a decade old and deeply unpopular, that led an embattled, isolated, nearly demented Richard Nixon to draw up his enemies list, illegally spy on his domestic opposition, obstruct justice when his misdeeds became known, ramble drunkenly in the Oval Office about using nuclear weapons and ultimately mount an assault on the entire constitutional system of checks and balances. And it is today an unpopular President Bush, unable either to win the Iraq War or to extricate himself from it, who has launched his absolutist assault on the Constitution.

Power corrupts, says the old saw. But is power the right word to use in the face of so much failure? The sometimes suggested alternate -- that weakness corrupts -- seems equally appropriate. In a manner of speaking perhaps both saws are true, for in terms of military might the United States is unrivaled, yet in terms of capacity to get things done with that might, it so often proves weak -- even, at times, impotent, as McCarthy said. The pattern is not the old Roman one in which military conquest breeds arrogance and arrogance stokes ambition, which leads to usurpation at home. Rather, in the case of the United States, misunderstanding of its historical moment leads to misbegotten wars; misbegotten wars lead to military disaster; military disaster leads to domestic strife and scapegoating; domestic strife and scapegoating lead to usurpation, which triggers a constitutional crisis. Crises born of strength and success are different from crises born of failure. Fulbright warned of the corruption of imperial ambition and the arrogance of power. But we need also to speak of the corruption of imperial failure, the arrogance of anxiety.

What the true greatness -- or true power -- of the United States is or can be for the world in our time is an absorbing question in pressing need of an answer. Our very conceptions of greatness and power -- military, economic, political, moral -- would need searching reconsideration. Those true powers -- especially the economic -- also have an "imperial" aspect, but that is another debate. An advantage of that debate is that it would be about things that are real. Jettisoning the mirage of military domination of the globe that has addled so many American brains for more than half a century and also shunning the panic-stricken fears of impotence that have accompanied the inevitable frustration of these delusions, the debate would take realistic stock of the nation's very considerable yet limited resources and ask what is being done with them, for good or ill, and what should be done. Perhaps it will still be possible to shoehorn the United States into a stretched definition of "empire," but it would look nothing like Britain or Rome. Or perhaps, as I believe, a United States rededicated to its constitutional traditions and embarked on a cooperative course with other nations would find that it possesses untapped reserves of political power, though it will take time for American prestige to recover from Bush's squandering of it.

Restoring Illusion

Until very recently those authentic questions went substantially unexplored outside scholarly journals, and the country instead busied itself repairing the imperial illusions so rudely dashed by the Vietnam War. Suppressing the lessons of the Chinese Revolution had been easy, since the United States had not fought in China. Getting over the lessons of Vietnam took longer. Many segments of American society, none more than the military, had learned them deeply and vowed "never again." (The poignancy of the generals' recent outspoken statement against the conduct of the war in Iraq lies precisely in the officers' chagrin that they did indeed let it happen again.)

The lessons were formulated in military terms in the so-called Powell doctrine, requiring that before military action proceeded there must be a clear military -- not political -- objective, that there must be a commitment to the use of overwhelming force and that there must be an "exit strategy." Nevertheless, in other quarters the lessons were named a "Vietnam syndrome," an illness, and other explanations were brought forward. The lessons of Vietnam were not so much forgotten as vigorously suppressed, in the name of restoring the reputation of America's military power. Ronald Reagan said of the Vietnam military, "They came home without a victory not because they were defeated but because they were denied a chance to win." After the first Gulf War, President Bush crowed, "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!" The country was getting ready for the second Iraq War, which violated every tenet of the Powell doctrine.

A parallel evolution was occurring in the constitutional domain. The lesson most of the country learned from Watergate and the forced resignation of Richard Nixon was that the imperial presidency had grown too strong. (In general, our imperial-minded Presidents have had much more success rolling back freedom at home than extending it abroad.) Dick Cheney, who had served as Chief of Staff for President Gerald Ford, drew an opposite lesson -- that the powers others called imperial were in fact the proper ones for the presidency and had been eviscerated by the opposition to Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. As he has put it, "Watergate and a lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam, both during the 1970s, served, I think, to erode the authority…the President needs to be effective, especially in the national security area." Taking the Nixon presidency as a model rather than a cautionary tale, he sees new usurpation as restoration. In doing so, he brings an old theme back in new guise -- that American weakness in the world is caused by domestic opponents at home. In his view domestic subversion -- this time of executive authority, not misguided imperial ambition -- is the country's problem.

Can this pattern be broken? Voices are already being heard advising that the opposition to the Iraq War and the failed vision it embodies should, with the next election in mind, now embrace a generalized new readiness to use force. But that way lies only a new chapter in the sorry history of the pitiful, helpless giant. The needed lesson is exactly the opposite -- to learn or relearn, or perhaps we must say re-relearn, the lessons regarding the limitations on the use of force that have been taught and then rejected so many times in recent decades. Only then will we be able to stop repeating ourselves and, giving up dreams of imperial grandeur, start saying and doing something new.

Jonathan Schell is The Nation Institute's Harold Willens Peace Fellow. He is the author of The Unconquerable World, among many other books.

Copyright 2005 Jonathan Schell

This article will appear in the August 14/21 issue of The Nation Magazine.

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