The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 constituted a turning point for the United States with regard to its stature in the world. From that date, if not before, an influential neoconservative foreign policy group started to develop a coherent grand strategy for the United States now that it was understood to have emerged as the world’s only superpower. Planning for a full-scale transformation of the international order included the publication of a manifesto and the establishment of a website in 1997, Project for the New American Century (PNAC: Www. newamericancentury. org), through which it began to advocate aggressive intervention abroad, expressed as a doctrine of military might conjoined with moral leadership. Signatories included individuals who were to become key members of George W. Bush’s administration, such as Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld.21 At first New Right circles were careful to dismiss the idea that such a doctrine constituted a call to empire (and thus an invitation to critical comparisons with a Roman past associated with domestic tyranny, imperial overstretch, and ultimate collapse that use of the term ‘‘empire’’ might justify). Empire was construed as an outmoded ideological accusation routinely wielded during the twentieth century by the left. Even a few years later, Donald Kagan, Professor of Classics and History at Yale University and co-chairman of a report produced for the PNAC in 2000 on ‘‘Rebuilding America’s
Defenses,’’ published an article in the Atlantic Journal and Constitution (which was then posted up on the PNAC website), in which he declared that:
All comparisons between America’s current place in the world and anything legitimately called an empire in the past reveal ignorance and confusion about any reasonable meaning of the concept empire, especially the comparison with the Roman empire... The Romans acquired the greatest part of their empire by direct military conquest, subjected their people to Roman law, and imposed taxes and compulsory military service under Roman command. They deprived their subjects of freedom and autonomy... To compare the United States with any such empire is ludicrous.22
Despite Kagan’s comments, such reluctance to make comparison largely evaporated after September 11, 2001 and the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That day and its outcomes spurred more hawkish neoconservative intellectuals, political figures, and commentators to appropriate, even to revel in, both the concept of empire and historical comparison with ancient Rome. Now enthusiastic assertions about the second coming of the Roman Empire began to litter the prestigious print media, as well as being repeated and widely diffused in foreign policy journals, bulletins of think tanks, conferences, monographs, and across the Internet. For example, a comment to the New York Times in 2002 by the conservative columnist for the Washington Post Charles Krauthammer continues to this day to be endlessly recycled and analyzed both in print and on the web: ‘‘People are now coming out of the closet on the word ‘empire.’ ... The fact is no country has been as dominant culturally, economically, technologically and militarily in the history of the world since the Roman Empire.’’23 In order, however, to secure for the United States the grandeur and the glory of Roman Empire, rather than its loss of liberties, its cruelties, and its fall, there are evident rules attached to this feverish embrace of ancient Rome in establishment discourse: such views are not to be expressed in the most official contexts (that is, those closest to the president), and careful attempts must always be made to disassociate the acceptance of empire from distasteful suggestions of economic dominance, racism, or tyranny, and to picture this imperium instead as a uniquely beneficial, civilizing mission.24 As Michael Ignatieff, Professor of Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, noted: ‘‘the 21st century imperium is an invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, 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.’’25
But it was a rare commentator who would be so bold as to take up the dual historical parallel with Rome and claim a positive similarity between George W. Bush and Julius Caesar. Such a rhetorical strategy was especially dangerous and required careful expression, however tentatively undertaken or momentarily mentioned, for in the political history of the United States of America Caesar had commenced his career as the quintessential enemy, symbolic of British tyranny against which a whole nation of American Brutuses had so bravely fought in the War of Independence.26 Nonetheless, five months after the September 11 attacks, on February 2, 2002 (just after the president had delivered the State of the Union speech to Congress in which he notoriously attacked North Korea, Iraq, and Iran as an columnist for the Washington Post observed that:
‘axis of evil’’), another
George W. Bush delivered such a stunning State of the Union speech, during which he dazzled Congress with a mix of Julius Caesar and Billy Graham, that it left the opposition virtually speechless. Who is going to argue with the scourge of evil, the conqueror of Afghanistan? ... Richard Gephardt, House Democratic leader, was reduced, in his reply to the president, to complaining that Bush did not mention campaign reform. Can you imagine that Caesar, addressing the Senate, would be faced with the effrontery of a query about the state of Rome’s sewers?27
In her brief reference to Caesar, the journalist Mary McGrory appears to bestow on Bush by association the character of an eloquent orator, a high-minded statesman above trivial questions of domestic reform, a popular and resolute decision-maker, and, most importantly of all in the heated context of the War on Terrorism and the invasion of Afghanistan, a triumphant war-time commander-in-chief and conqueror. Any possible hint of dictatorship or cruelty is seemingly offset by the additional association of Bush with Christian fundamentalism. Only later in the article does it emerge more clearly that historical analogy may here have an ironic purpose, that McGrory is twisting the Roman metaphor back against those now deploying it so pretentiously, perhaps even perniciously, as a cloak to cover domestic (and foreign) wrong-doings. For she goes on to argue that the gravity and high-mindedness of the president’s oratory conveniently worked to render any questions about the Enron scandal vulgar. A commander-in-chief has no need to make mention of such matters: ‘‘when you are briefing the country on survival and revival, you have no time for such trifles.’’28
World History
