MSNBC Panel Debate On ‘American Empire’ Descends Into Screaming Match
On MSNBC’s Live on Tuesday, a panel discussion about President Barack Obama’s foreign policy and some of the criticisms that Mitt Romney has leveled against the current administration’s handling of foreign affairs quickly devolved into a yelling match over the nature of American global hegemony. In that discussion, Georgetown University Professor Michael Eric Dyson’s exasperated attempts to defend President Obama’s record from within the liberal prism which equates the exercise of American military power abroad to the undue imposition of Washington’s will on sovereign peoples exposed how deeply the President’s foreign policy has painted them into a rhetorical corner.
In a discussion about Mitt Romney’s address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars conference on Tuesday, former Newt Gingrich advisor Rick Tyler outlined what is the most elemental case against Obama’s stewardship of foreign affairs.
We need not so much to be liked in the world as we need to be predictable in the world. What is it the Americans stand for? What is it we’ll do? I don’t buy this whole notion of American imperialism or dominance – we’re dominant because we’re the largest economic force in the world. We’re 4 percent of the world’s people and we produce one third of the world’s wealth. And that enables us to protect our borders and shores with a volunteer army with American men and women and we have the greatest technology in the world. That’s all bought and paid for by our system.
That’s all true, but I would add one other element to Tyler’s critique of the White House’s approach to foreign policy. He mentioned that American largess allows us to protect our shores, but it also allows us to protect the shores and borders of other nations. America is the guarantor of the global status quo. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, America’s preeminence has allowed Washington to underwrite a global peace that is enforced by the notion that there is no challenging the U.S. militarily. All that this condition entails, from reduced military spending by aggressive powers to the lack of any credible threat of great power conflict, results from the knowledge that American hard power can come to bear in any conflict around the globe at any time. Without that dominant force in the world, history has shown that dangerously unstable, multi-polar systems arise which inevitably lead to great power conflict.
But this relatively uncontroversial notion advanced by Tyler could not be left unchallenged by Dyson. “Uncritical celebration of America does not equal pride in America,” said Dyson. “Your denial of any fact of American dominance and empire and the way in which – I cannot give you a history lesson here in a few seconds. You’ve got to read some books, brother, and come prepared to understand what the American global impact has been.”
But condescension quickly gave way to a play for pity as Dyson explained that he, and President Obama, view the world through the prism of victimhood that comes from growing up as an African-American in the United States.
“As a person of color in America who has been a victim of the conception of American empire and exceptionalism, it’s interesting that you now ask somebody like a Barack Obama who understands the virtue, the beauty and the efficacy of America,” said Dyson.
Somewhere in that word salad was the tired, faux-radical notion that American exceptionalism is something only America’s white majority can take pride in. Tyler’s response was priceless and pitch-perfect: “You’re a victim,” he asked incredulously. “You’re on TV.”
Intentionally conflating American hegemony and the enforcement of that unparalleled global dominance with exploitive empire is a standard trope that pervades academia – particularly in the study of global politics and foreign affairs. It is based not so much on historical evidence but in Rawlsian concepts of social justice. Aside from being deficient of fact, this line of thinking also cheapens the experience of those peoples who were true imperial subjects throughout history. And not just those who lived under the thumb of nations with the word “empire” in their official tile, like Japan and Great Britain, but in the many nations that practiced unrepresentative governance over distant peoples. History is littered with sad examples of this kind of exploitation – the United States is not among them.
But Dyson was not totally off course in this interview. Earlier in the interview, he made a spot-on observation that many conservatives would not disagree with. “We’re mistaking American empire with American power and the just exercise of power in deference to the global community of which America is a part,” said Dyson.
Bingo. This is a statement that could have come from the mouth of any neo-conservative in defense of an interventionist foreign policy and democratic peace theory. But what Dyson intended to do was to make the dubious distinction between what he views as just (President Obama’s interventionism abroad) and what he sees as imperial (President Bush’s interventionism abroad).
Democratic supporters of President Barack Obama are twisting themselves in knots attempting to suggest that President Barack Obama’s foreign policy has been notably better than that of President George W. Bush’s. It is not, but his supporters need it to be — the promise Obama represented in 2008 to his supporters and the sea change he would usher in as the new manager of America’s foreign affairs demands he succeed. If Obama fails, he could take the progressive world view with him. Professor Dyson’s flailing response to Romney’s foreign policy speech today is reflective of the left’s predicament.
Watch the debate below via MSNBC:
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This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
