History seminar

SYMPOSIUM: AMERICA IN THE WORLD

The Paradox of American Global Power

R. Kroes

Published online: 20 August 2014 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Abstract This paper will address these two questions:

1 Can the US be meaningfully seen as an empire in the ways it has behaved since entering the world stage as a central player after World War II?

2 If it is an empire, how has this affected the quality of its democratic life and institutions? One central hypothesis connects both explorations. It can be formulated as follows: if there is a logic to the life of empires that onemight call the imperial imperative—a logic according to which the pursuit of hegemonic control to the far periphery of empire calls for ever greater concentration of power at the center—the US too will show the effects of this logic. In spite of its creed of democracy and republicanism the US, acting as an empire, cannot escape this imperial imperative. An obvious test case is offered by the two recent presidencies of GeorgeW. Bush and of Barack Hussein Obama. Although the latter present- ed himself as the anti-Bush, opposing all transgressions of constitutional constraints that his predecessor had stood for, and promising to take America back to its first republican principles, the imperial imperative, according to our hy- pothesis, would prevent Obama from pursuing such a course.

Keywords Empire . Imperialism . Democracy .

Republicanism . Imperial imperative . Unitary executive .

War on terrorism . Imperial presidency .Military-industrial complex

America’s power and presence in the world is still unrivaled. One connection between its power and presence is through a worldwide system of military bases, whose number is about a thousand. It is a system of high interconnectivity, involving cutting-edge communications technology. Pin-point military actions take place by remote control from half-way around the globe by people sitting at consoles at nodal points in the

communication web. This configuration of power andmilitary hardware conjures up an image of empire of worldwide reach. As such the United States faces the central concern of every empire before it: the control of sources of unrest and restive- ness within the limits of its imperial reach. In other words, it is subject to what we might call the imperial imperative. Empire is as empire does.

How does this square with the long-established view, among Americans as well as among those peoples at the receiving end of America’s imperial sway, of America as a benevolent power, a guardian of democracy and political freedoms? What, if anything, has changed in America’s international presence? Is it a matter of perception only, of people waking up to the reality of the exercise of power, or have America’s foreign policy elites fallen prey to the dictates of imperial leadership?

This paper will address these two questions. Can the US be meaningfully seen as an empire in the ways it has behaved since entering the world stage as a central player after World War II? Secondly, if it is an empire, how has this affected the quality of its democratic life and institutions? One central hypothesis connects both explorations. It can be formulated as follows: if there is a logic to the life of empires that onemight call the imperial imperative—a logic according to which the pursuit of hegemonic control to the far periphery of empire calls for ever greater concentration of power at the center—the US too will show the effects of this logic. In spite of its creed of democracy and republicanism the US, acting as an empire, cannot escape this imperial imperative. An obvious test case is offered by the two recent presidencies of George W. Bush and of Barack Hussein Obama. Although the latter presented himself as the anti-Bush, opposing all transgressions of consti- tutional constraints that his predecessor had stood for, and promising to take America back to its first republican princi- ples, the imperial imperative, according to our hypothesis, would prevent Obama from pursuing such a course.

The following, then, consists of two parts. A discussion of whether the US in the course of the “American Century” can be understood as an empire is followed by a discussion of how democracy and republicanism have fared under the last two presidents.

R. Kroes (*) P.O. Box 19268, 1000 GG Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

Soc (2014) 51:492–502 DOI 10.1007/s12115-014-9815-9

America: An Empire Among Empires?

The word empire is richly suggestive. It calls forth in our minds images of a vast geographic expanse, coinciding with a reach of political and military control extending from one clear center to far-flung frontiers, usually contested. If these are the geo- political associations we tend to connect with the word, it has different connotations as well. As any good dictionary will remind us, it is possible to “hold empire,” as in the expression “to hold empire over the minds of men.” This then is to do with the psychological, or cultural, dimension of empire.

When the topic is America, and the question to be answered is whether the United States, can be seen as an empire, the challenge is to place the country generically as an empire among empires, while at the same time acknowledging the specifics of the case. After all, America is a late joiner, an imperial upstart. It came to its imperial position under conditions radically different than previous empires had known. Much as it found inspiration in its early days as a republic in the history of Rome and Athens, once it consolidated its existence as a continental state it saw itself carried forward by the great modernizing transformations of the time: in industrial production, in communication, in technological know-how, and in political democracy. In the language of the day Americans saw themselves engaged in the pursuit of their manifest destiny, and, tellingly, of the westward course of empire. It was their way of placing themselves in teleological traditions dating back toVirgil andBishopBerkeley, yet at the same time they invented novel ways of pursuing ancient dreams. They could act in a world, from the late 19th century on, that went through the early stages of globalization, making for a geo-political theater of shrinking distances and increasing connectivity and interdependence. All these trends would pick up speed during what would become known as “the American century.” And for a reason. America, as a relatively new actor on the world stage, came to be seen as the center of modernity, a new center of gravity toward which the political compasses across the globe came to point. In the course of the 20th century it evolved into the hub of networks in global communication, in finance, in production and innovation, in military technology, and in the techniques of mass entertain- ment. In the pursuit of manifest destiny, the US availed itself of all these transformations,more successfully than any rival. Thus, as it emerged triumphantly from the Second World War, it quickly consolidated its hegemonic sway by brilliantly inter- weaving the various strands of imperial reach, benefiting from the many feedback loops that modernity provided. It could turn itself into the irresistible empire, as Victoria de Grazia felicitous- ly calls it,1 by mercurially morphing from one tempting model of modernity into another. Thus, as the obvious military

hegemon in post-World War II days, it could use its power to give guidance to the political and economic restructuring of Europe through the Marshall Plan, facilitating trade and recon- struction through economic assistance. It also used its power to pry open European markets for America’s mass cultural prod- ucts, foremost among them fromHollywood. Film in particular was not just a commodity subject to the logic of free trade, but also a tool of cultural diplomacy, exposing European publics to the seductive power of America’s dream worlds, of fantasies of the good life as conceived by Americans. Thus America proved expert at turning the hard power of its dominance, military and economic, into the soft power of holding empire over the minds of men, shaping their cultural appetites and dreams in ways that have led observers to speak of Americanization.

Interwoven as the forms of dominance are, interconnected as the ways may be in which America holds empire, in the following I propose to disentangle two dimensions, one cul- tural, to do with the process of Americanization, the other to do with the hard power involved in holding empire. Each part of my argument revolves around a central dilemma. In the case of America’s cultural empire, the dilemma is one of agency on the part of those subject to the process of Ameri- canization: what precisely is the freedom of choice when people style their lives after American models? This particular constellation of the ways in which America holds empire points up the specifically modern, if not post-modern, form of its hegemonic power. It suggests a voluntary subordination of those under the sway of this imperial reach that has led some observers to speak of empire by invitation, or empire by adoption. Yet this is only part of the story. Repeatedly, Amer- ica has had to rely on classic forms of hard power to retain imperial control, fighting wars and sending armies to the far corners of empire. These uses of hard power, I would argue, take us back to the consideration of the central dilemma explored in this essay, the dilemma that resides in the tenuous symbiosis between the hard power sustaining empire and the survival of democracy. This dilemma will engage us in the second part of the essay. First let us look more closely at American empire as resting on its uses of soft power.

Journalist Ron Suskind, who at the time worked for The New York Times, has this telling story about an exchange with a White House aide, possibly presidential advisor Karl Rove himself: the aide said that guys like me (i.e., journalists like Suskind) were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.”But “that’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study

1 Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).

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what we do.”2 This is a far cry indeed from a Jeffersonian “empire of liberty,” let alone an “empire of reason.”3 What Suskind was offered was a view of a post-modern, deconstruc- tionist world where the reality principle no longer set any meaningful constraints—a view not of an empire of reason, but of a realm where human volition, like Schopenhauer’s voluntarist view of the world as resulting from human will and conception was in command. “We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” This voluntarist, if not cavalier, attitude towards truth and reality may remind one of the famous line by the newspaperman in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “This is the West, Sir. When the legend becomes fact, we print the legend.”

The statement may strike us like the musings of a delusional mind, more likely to be encountered behind the walls of an asylum than inside the White House. They evoke an Alice in Wonderland world, where you can put a president, dressed in bomber jacket, on an aircraft carrier under a banner declaring “Mission Accomplished” and present this as a reality newly created. They are words conveying the megalomania that in the 1960s Senator J. William Fulbright had already diagnosed as the “arrogance of power.”4 But at the same time they are shrewd words, words of wisdom even. They point to what has driven imperial projects throughout history, in a quest for domain and dominance. Time and time again new realities have been created and space been opened up for hegemony to be established and an imperial writ to run. Not every attempt along such lines need end in parody, in an object lesson in human hubris. As a long line of studies of empire have shown, there is a curve—an arc—to the history of empires, a rise followed by decline, but their natural histories, their life cycles, constitute a substantive body of histor- ical reality, more than being the elusive chimeras conjured before our eyes by the illusionism of our post-modern culture of medi- ated spectacle. There are substantive realities calling for scholarly attention, although they may be hidden from view by their rendition as media spectacle. We may see this illustrated in the “shock and awe” media version of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, or of the television rendition of the first Gulf War as a high-tech spectacle. In response, French semiotician Jean Baudrillard felt induced to write on the alienating experience of watching history

unfold on the TV screen. He ironically titled his little book: The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.5

When Baudrillard chooses to focus on the illusionism and media manipulation attending the display of imperial power, when he highlights the reduction of a real war being waged to the entertainment value of a video war game, he reminds us of the reality principle in history, and of its real cost in human lives and human suffering. Yet at the same time he reminds us of what we might call the principle of virtual reality in our post-modern world, where mass audiences live by the very fictions conjured before their eyes. Virtual worlds and virtual realities are the permanent setting of many people’s contem- porary lives. An astute observer of this happening is German filmmaker WimWenders. Fascinated from an early age on by America and its culture, yet increasingly aware of the Amer- icanization of the culture of his homeland, he had a character in one of his films come up with this aphorism: “The Yanks have colonized our subconscious.”6 This one line beautifully captures a central dimension of the sway that America holds over people’s imaginations, inside and beyond its national borders. It is the power of what is commonly referred to as America’s cultural imperialism, yet a power that gainsays anything the word imperialism suggests. American cultural conquest works through the subconscious of its subjects, colonizing it almost by stealth, shaping people’s cultural ap- petites, tastes, yearnings and needs in an American vein simply by exposing them to its radiance and appeal.

Of course, all empires have used entertainment to keep the populace contented, famously through “bread and circuses,” as the Romans had it, but they were like nothing compared to present-day mass media of communication and entertainment. Mass culture has undergone a modernizing transformation, in all its stages from production, through its dissemination and advertising, to its eventual consumption. And American mass culture, from its early formation in the late 19th century to the present day, has always managed to corner the world market and expose a world audience to its impact.7

Studying this impact, scholars of Americanization have point- ed to the pleasure principle in the reception of American mass culture. In its many forms, American mass culture offered a free range for the imagination to roam, allowing people to consider alternative life styles and identities, suggesting a freedom to be your own agent in projecting your life. Yet, as critics of mass culture have pointed out all along, there was always the threat of

2 Suskind, Ron (2004-10-17). “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” The New York Times Magazine http://www.nytimes. com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html?ex=1255665600&en= 890a96189e162076&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland (Retrieved 2007-05- 22) 3 Words from a statement in an oration on July 4, 1787 by Joel Barlow at Hartford, Connecticut, in celebration of the anniversary of the proclama- tion of the Declaration of Independence: “The present is an age of philosophy, and America the empire of reason. Here, neither the pageant- ry of courts, nor the glooms of superstition, have dazzled or beclouded the mind. Our duty calls us to act worthy of the age and the country that gave us birth. Though inexperience may have betrayed us into errors—yet they have not been fatal: and our own discernment will point us to their proper remedy.” 4 http://www.h-net.org/~hst306/documents/fulbright.html

5 Jean Baudrillard, La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (Paris: Galilée, 1991) For the English edition:

Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) 6 WimWenders, Kings of the Road (Original title: Im Lauf der Zeit)Wim Wenders Production, 1976. 7 On the early formation of American mass culture, see R.W. Rydell and Rob Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869–1922 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

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enslavement, of mass culture offering nothing more than an opiate for the people. This line of critique has evolved from being a cheap form of vulgar Marxism into a rather subtle form of deconstructionism, in tune with the “linguistic turn” taken by the new American Studies.8 This recent trend has led many Americanists to revisit the very language they use and critically to examine the tacit assumptions underlying the concepts central to their understanding of America. As recent presidential ad- dresses to the American Studies Association (ASA) illustrate, this self-examination can go as far as to lead to a call for deleting the word America from American Studies, as a concept inher- ently indoctrinating and imperialist.9 Key words in traditional American Studies are seen as tools of indoctrination by stealth, inducing a world view subject to American agency and control. This is probably what Wenders had in mind when he spoke of America colonizing the Europeans’ sub-conscious. What the new American Studies approach pursues is to uncover the way this process works and to point to language as the Trojan horse smuggling in covert readings and meanings, presenting them as conventional and natural while subtly bending and subverting people’s views of the world.

It is an approach that in spite of its claims of novelty is reminiscent of good old-fashioned Marxist “Ideologie kritik,” bringing tacit ideological structures to light through critical analysis. From that more general perspective it appears that there are longer lines of self-reflexive critical writing in Amer- ican Studies, particularly so in American Studies varieties inspired by cultural studies sensibilities. Be that as it may, it is certainly the case that the serious study of American mass culture, as one of the tools allowing America to hold empire over the minds of others, needs the double focus. We need to understand why people outside America’s borders, as well as inside, willingly let themselves be drawn into a universe of American invention, doing so of their own free will. Using the other focus, we also need to understand what hiddenmessages they expose themselves to while enjoying the fun. That is the part where American agency comes into play, the agency of the sender rather than the receiver. And not only do Ameri- canists need to do this for our present day and age, they need to go back in time and trace the longer history of ideological manipulation (or of attempted mind control) exerted through the dissemination of American mass culture.

A good case in point is another presidential address to the ASA, Amy Kaplan’s 2003 discussion of “Violent Be- longings and the Question of Empire.”10 She notes that the

word empire has entered general discussion in the US on a scale not seen before. Instead of being an empire in denial, or an empire that does not dare speak its name, it is fashionable now, Kaplan says, to debate whether this is a new imperialism or business as usual, whether the United States should be properly called imperial or hegemonic, whether it is benevolent or self-interested, whether it should rely on hard power or soft power, whether this empire most closely resembles the British empire or the Roman, and whether it is in ascendency or decline.11 She goes on to make this important point: “I am not interested in joining these debates here but in discussing the language that frames them and how the word empire appears in a con- stellation of other words in the political lexicon, such as terrorism and homeland.”12 The denial and disavowal of empire, she goes on to argue, has long served as the ideological cornerstone of US imperialism and a key com- ponent of American exceptionalism. She describes her own approach as a method of exposure, one that reveals the repressed violence embedded in cultural productions or that recovers stories of violent oppression absent from prior master historical narratives.

These words precisely describe the program for a new American Studies as it has evolved in recent years, a program that aims at unveiling the techniques that mass- cultural productions avail themselves of in communicating imperial readings of the world, seen from an American vantage point. Much work in this vein, by Kaplan herself and many others, has looked at the ways in which early forms of American mass culture—the “yellow press,” World’s Fairs, Wild West shows, early film rushes of the storming of San Juan Hill (mostly studio re-enactments, by the way)—entertained the masses while at the same time communicating the exhilaration of imperial ventures and the psychological satisfactions of forming the top tier of hierarchies of race and civilization. Many of these readings were subliminal and unreflected, insinuating themselves into the “normal” ways of conceiving of the world.

Yet at the same time many of these readings were a conscious part of the cultural productions of the late 19th century, installed by cultural entrepreneurs who as a group represented the cultural elite of the time. They were en- gaged in establishing and sustaining the forms of cultural hegemony and cultural capital that Antonio Gramsci and later on Pierre Bourdieu have theorized. Earlier historical research has looked at the elite levels in society, at the circles in politics, journalism, and intellectual life that gave

8 A seminal publication blazing the trail for the new American Studies is Donald E. Pease, Jr., and RobynWiegman, eds., The Futures of American Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002) 9 Radway, Janice A., What’s in a Name? Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, 20 November 1998, American Quarterly (Volume 51, Number 1, March 1999) pp. 1–32. 10 AmyKaplan, “Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today,” American Quarterly (Vol. 56, 1, March 2004) pp. 1–18.

11 Among the works that Kaplan so astutely summarizes here, one stands out for its dispassionate positioning of America among its imperial predecessors: Charles S. Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendency and its Predecessors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). 12 Kaplan (2004), p. 2.

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articulate support to America’s imperialist stance.13 Such support could come from unexpected corners, including prom- inently the Progressives of the time. While being critical of big business at home for excessive profits and substandard wages, they saw nothing incongruous when they also supported Amer- ican investments abroad in the interest of expanded markets. The writer most convincingly articulating this spirit of the time was Herbert Croly in The Promise of American Life. As Croly argued, Theodore Roosevelt’s imperial ventures were an im- portant phase of the new religion of national reform, steps toward the fulfillment of the promise of American life. There were only a few dissenting progressives, such as Jane Addams; but most shared fully in cherishing middle-class aspirations, including the new sense of delight in the rise of the United States as a world power. There was a new, more modern and activist, sense of the national interest that appealed to Roose- velt. It was to inspire his Osawatomie address and lead to his break with the conservative Old Guard. Historical research in this vein allows us to explore the reigning views held by America’s elites as they were vying for cultural hegemony. It helps us to focus on the forms of public discourse used at the time to express such reigning views.

Yet, at the same time, at a more popular level these visions and enthusiasms would inform cultural productions intended for mass consumption. Cultural historians and Americanists of a more recent vintage are adding to our understanding of how such hegemonic views could end up holding empire over the minds of Americans first, and of foreign audiences later on following their exposure to America’s mass culture.

Democracy and the Imperial Imperative

On December 6, 2011, President Obama followed in Theodore Roosevelt’s footsteps and delivered a speech in Osawatomie, Kansas. “In 1910,” as he reminded his audience, “Teddy Roosevelt came here to Osawatomie and he laid out his vision for what he called a New Nationalism. ‘Our coun- try,’ he said, ‘means nothing unless it means the triumph of a real democracy … of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.’” Like Roosevelt before him, Obama had come wielding a big stick, holding forth against political gridlock in Washington politics, and the ideological strangle- hold of the “You’re on your own” economics of Republicans. The “raging debate over the best way to restore growth and prosperity, restore balance, restore fairness,”Obama argued, is

“the defining issue of our time.” Obama pointed to the grow- ing inequality and income disparity in American society: “Inequality also distorts our democracy. It gives an outsized voice to the few who can afford high-priced lobbyists and unlimited campaign contributions, and it runs the risk of selling out our democracy to the highest bidder. It leaves everyone else rightly suspicious that the system inWashington is rigged against them, [and] that our elected representatives aren’t looking out for the interests of most Americans.” Like Roosevelt before him, Obama spoke on behalf of a more inclusive view of democracy and the national interest.

On another Rooseveltian theme, though, the theme of empire and the way it affects democracy, Obama was strange- ly silent—and not only in Osawatomie. It is a theme that had divided Rooseveltian Progressives against themselves, with minority voices like Jane Addams’s warning of imperialism’s baneful impact on democracy at home. It is a theme that on similar grounds Obama might have seen as equally a defining issue of our time.

At the top of his rhetorical mastery, in speeches concerning racism as a divisive force in American society, or the use of military power in foreign policy, Obama finds his place in America’s great tradition of the statesman as public orator and master of rhetoric. In that role he explains, renders account, and invites the public to reflect. Obama is keenly aware of this long line of history, using it to place himself squarely in an American political tradition.

Repeatedly Obama takes his cue from inspiring predecessors. Taking this inspirational role Obama not only addresses his fellow Americans, inciting them to political participation. He also speaks to the world, rekindling an enthusiasm for American leadership after the damage done to it during eight long years of the Bush presidency. When still a candidate vying for the pres- idency, Obama gave a speech in Berlin, on 24 July, 2008, before a crowd of thousands whose lost hopes for America Obama seemed to restore and personify.14 In fine rhetorical balance he brought together a reference to the Berlin Wall with Lincoln’s metaphor of the house divided. It put the audience in mind of Kennedy’s famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech delivered dur- ing his visit to West Berlin in the days of the Cold War. Obama wanted to present himself as the embodiment of anAmericawith which Europeans could once again feel affiliated: “The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand.” Thus in a city not long before divided by a wall—“divided against itself”- Lincoln’s words assumed a poignant resonance, and called forth an association with his “half slave, half free.” When words like these come from the mouths of Americans, the danger is always of an implied missionary zeal, of interventionist intentions even, particularly today after the cynical misuse of similar language to justify the military adventurism of the Bush

13 A classic piece is by William E. Leuchtenburg, “Progressivism and Imperialism: The Progressive Movement and American Foreign Policy, 1898–1916,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 39, No. 3 (December 1952), pp. 483–504.

14 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/24/obama-in-berlin-video- of_n_114771.html

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administration. Obama is toomuch like Lincoln in his awareness of the tragic tension between politics and ethics, between ideal- ism and realism.When confronting such hard choices he is rather a man of steel, not the weed that waves with the tides. He does not hesitate to speak his mind onmatters of great concern to him, whether it is bankers and their obscene remunerations, or the failing security apparatus in America. The homeland security bureaucracy was in for a hiding, when Obama publicly argued that it is incapable of connecting the dots on a map of imminent threats and simply reproduces the intelligence failures of pre-9/ 11 days. Bush has never been willing to own up to such failures. His response had been simply to pile on new bureaucratic layers, compounding the problem.15

When acceding to the presidency in early 2009, Barack Obama appeared as the anti-Bush that many during the cam- paign had come to see in him.When he took the oath of office, swearing to defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States, it seemed like the first step in rolling back the relentless encroachment upon the restraints of executive power set by the Constitution and by international law as endorsed by the United States. Obama had all the right credentials for this role. As a senator he had voted against the war in Iraq as an illegal war of aggression. As a candidate he promised to close Guantanamo Bay’s detention center, which in the eyes of the world had come to symbolize the illegitimacy of the ways in which America, under President Bush, had chosen to wage its global war on terrorism. Obama appeared like the man who would bring to light the dark and secret world, beyond the reach of law and legal protections, which America had ven- tured upon, a world of illegal surveillance of its own citizenry, a world of secret renditions of terrorist suspects, and of torture and hi-tech retaliatory assassination. He appeared to bring a promise of ending all this and to return to a presidency under the law, rather than above it. In words from his inaugural address: “My administration is committed to creating an un- precedented level of openness in government.”

If hopes were pinned so high on the Obama presidency, how would this square with the trends in American presiden- tial leadership that come under such names as the unitary executive, or the imperial presidency? The trend was seen by many observers, in the United States and Europe, as a continued erosion of America’s democratic and constitutional order, a continued power grab by the American president who as chief executive officer in charge of the national interest felt

unduly hampered by established constitutional constraints, such as the institutional checks-and-balances or the constitu- tional protection of civil rights and civil liberties. Ever more intrusive in the fabric of social relations in the name of anti- terrorist surveillance, ever more scornful of institutional countervailing powers, the Bush presidency subverted the Constitution, although held by oath to protect it. This can be seen as only the latest, most daring, version of what Arthur Schlesinger in The Imperial Presidency had held out as a warning to Americans.16

In fact this suspicion of slow democratic erosion goes back farther, to such World War I American pacifists as Jane Addams, who reminded Americans of the connection between a warfare state and dictatorship. Precisely Bush’s war on terrorism, a war without an exit option, allowed him to venture ever further on the way to the unitary executive. Thus he rewrote legislation, duly enacted by Congress, with signing statements giving him leeway not to implement laws as enacted. Thus he could create dark zones beyond the reach of American law, such as most ignomin- iously at Guantanamo Bay. Glaring examples abound. When President Bush signed a new law, sponsored by Senator John McCain, restricting the use of torture when interrogating de- tainees, he also issued a Presidential signing statement. That statement asserted that his power as Commander-in-Chief gives him the authority to bypass the very law he had just signed. This news came fast on the heels of Bush’s admission that, since 2002, he had repeatedly authorized the National Security Agency to conduct electronic surveillance without a warrant, in flagrant violation of applicable federal law.And before that, Bush declared he had the unilateral authority to ignore the Geneva Conventions and indefinitely to detain without due process both immigrants and citizens as enemy combatants. The pattern behind all these blatant encroachments on the law and the Constitution led to pointed revisits, in the later years of the Bush Administration, of the phrase “unitary executive” as almost a code word for a doctrine favoring unfettered Presidential power.17

Many of the worries and concerns in Europe about this imperial drift in American politics fed directly into Europe’s feelings of anti-Americanism. Hopes were that Obama, taking his oratorical cues from Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Mar- tin Luther King, might indeed take America back to its first high principles (which as Machiavelli reminds us is the central recipe for preserving a republic). This would require a more direct, and intellectually articulate, communication with his American and world audience. Yet, given the pressure on him to exert his leadership as a President who called the war in Afghanistan a

15 http://www.scribd.com/doc/4107132/Barack-Obama-on-Homeland- Security This is an electoral campaign document, summarizing Obama’s views of the Homeland Security counterterrorism apparatus and strategy. It contains telling policy projects that today, in the eyes of critics, seem to be honored in the breach. Among the promises made we find the following: “Obama also would restore habeas corpus so that those who pose a danger are swiftly tried and brought to justice and those who do not have sufficient due process to ensure that we are not wrongfully denying them their liberty.”

16 Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Imperial Presidency (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1973). 17 Jennifer van Bergen, “The Unitary Executive: Is the Doctrine Behind the Bush Presidency Consistent with a Democratic State?” http://writ. news.findlaw.com/commentary/20060109_bergen.html

Jennifer van Bergen, The Twilight of Democracy: The Bush Plan for America (Monroe, ME.: Common Courage Press, 2004).

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“war of necessity,” temptations were great to cut constitutional corners in the manner of his predecessor. Obama may find it hard to give up gains in executive power as they have accrued to the presidency over the preceding years. Yet in a democratic spirit, upholding the constitution, while scaling back some of the legal enormities of the Bush administration, he must be held to develop ways of forceful leadership that Americans and non- Americans alike will see as convincing and legitimate.

At present, though, things do not bode well. In fact, many signs point rather in the direction of continuity with Bush’s practices. Thus, in the crucial civil rights area of the treatment of detainees held in the context of the war on terror, the Obama administration took steps and invented arguments tomaintain the power to imprison terrorism suspects for extended periods with- out judicial oversight most recently a year ago in the National Defense Authorization Act. The man who as presidential candi- date had still spoken of the false choice between fighting terror- ism and respecting habeas corpus, and had rejected the Bush administration’s attempt at creating a black hole at Guantanamo, now did exactly that by moving detainees to Bagram airbase, beyond the reach of constitutional protections.18 In the same vein, the man who as presidential candidate reminded his audi- ence that, as a former constitutional law professor, he would, unlike Bush, actually respect the Constitution, acted in contra- vention of the 1973 War Powers Resolution adopted by Con- gress when he authorized USmilitary intervention in Libya.19 In the tortured language of Orwellian newspeak, Obama denied the Libyan intervention was a war at all. Hence, the War Powers Resolution did not apply.20 Ironically, Obama thus cast aside a congressional resolution whose intention it had been to restore the balance between the powers of congress and the presidency after years of the balance tilting toward the executive.

As a further point, rather than the government itself living up to its promise of “unprecedented openness,”we see a resurgence of leakers of secret government policies—of “whistleblowers”— reminiscent of the days of the leaked Pentagon Papers. The culmination point so far is the flood of Wikileaks foreign policy documents. TheObama administration’s responsewas vindictive

and very much in the manner of an insulted sovereign. In the manner of a unitary executive, without due process, it held an alleged leaker of documents, Bradley Manning, in solitary con- finement, and stepped into the field of economic transactions, blocking credit card payments to Wikileaks, in addition to pressuring foreign governments in its search for the main culprit, Julian Assange.21

Even before the Wikileaks furor, though, the New York Review of Books, over the names of left-wing luminaries, including Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame, published a paid page-long call “To end the complicity of silence,” reminding the readers that “Crimes are Crimes No Matter Who Does Them.” Side by side are two portraits of Bush Jr. and Obama linked by this caption: “Crimes under Bush are crimes under Obama and must be resisted by anyone who claims a shred of conscience.”22 High on the list of government abominations is the freedom it takes in composing lists of suspects of terrorism, including U.S. citizens, selected for as- sassination. The text goes on to indict the Obama administration for expanding the use of drone attacks and for arguing that the US has the authority under international law to use extrajudicial killing in sovereign countries with which it is not at war. Such acts have now been consecrated into “standard operating pro- cedure” by Obama, who claims, as did Bush, executive privi- lege and state secrecy in times of war as he defines it. Like Bush, Obama uses pliant legal counselors where he can find them, in the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department or the Department of Justice—i.e. from within the Executive bureaucracy—to produce legal memoranda waiving legal re- straints on the executive in the defense of the national interest.

Like the phrase “unitary executive,” the words “executive privilege” suggest constitutional law doctrines justifying the lee- way that presidents grant themselves in their unilateral choice of means in defense of the national interest. On previous occasions, as in the Truman Steel Seizure Case or the Nixon Administra- tion’s refusal to make public the Oval Office secret tapes, the claim of executive privilege was tested by the Supreme Court and found wanting.23 The Obama administration has not yet come up to a similar test. Not surprisingly the president has seen his policies of secrecy given the blessing of conservative commenta- tors. In an op-ed piece in theWall Street Journal, entitled “Barack Obama: Defender of State Secrets,” Gabriel Schoenfeld, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, asserted that “secrecy today is one of the most critical tools of national defense. Leaks of counterter- rorism secrets to the press, and disclosure of counterterrorism

18 Glenn Greenwald, “Obama Wins the Right to Detain People with no Habeas Review,” (23 may, 2010) http://www.informationclearinghouse. info/article25517.htm 19 This is a point raised by Robert Naiman (“An Open Letter to Liberal Supporters of the Libya War”—http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert- naiman/an-open-letter-to-liberal_b_841505.html), in his response to Juan Cole’s “An Open letter to the Left on Libya,” which is generally supportive of the war (http://www.juancole.com/2011/03/an-open-letter- to-the-left-on-libya.html) Naiman uses strong language and speaks of a power grab by the executive. 20 To get to this linguistic stretch, President Obama had had to overrule the lawyers in the Justice and Defense Departments and turn to more pliant ones in theWhite House and State Department. Bruce Ackerman, a professor of law and political science at Yale, said in the New York Times that this could open the way for “even more blatant acts of presidential war-making in the decades ahead.” (“Legal Acrobatics, Illegal War,” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/21/opinion/21Ackerman.html)

21 Following a sustained public outcry, culminating in a public letter over the signature of over 250 top legal scholars, including Laurence Tribe, a Harvard professor who taught Obama constitutional law, and published in the New York Review of Books (May 12–25, 2011, Vol. LVIII, 5, p.62), Bradley Manning was transferred to a more normal detention regime. 22 New York Review of Books, (May 27, 2010) p. 17. 23 Maeva Marcus, Truman and the Steel Seizure Case: The Limits of Presidential Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).

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techniques and procedures in courtrooms, can imperil the war effort. We are thus faced squarely with the abiding tension be- tween liberty and security.” What Schoenfeld calls the “carping civil-libertarian critics”may, as he admits, serve a useful purpose in guarding against government excesses. But Schoenfeld goes on to conclude: “The more voluble they become, the more apparent it also becomes that Mr. Obama is doing the right thing.”24

Judged by the company Obama attracts, we would be hard put to recognize in him what so many during the campaign had hopefully anticipated. As president he found himself in a role as commander-in-chief, fighting two ground wars and a more general one against the elusive enemy of global terrorism, without a clear exit strategy. They are wars he took over when entering office, and which he has pursued by means that make it hard to see a personal touch to distinguish him from his prede- cessor, let alone to recognize the signs of a transformational presidency. Yet those were the words that Colin Powell, a Republican, used in his quiet and eloquent television endorse- ment of Obama during the electoral campaign.25 There is irony today in referring back to this moment. Here we had a man who had given his name to a military doctrine, the Powell doctrine, reminding military planners never to enter a war without a clear exit strategy. A full two years later, President Obama is mired in wars without exit strategies, expanding programs of secret ac- tion in the Middle East, without any prospect of the endeavor holding the promise of a new beginning.26 But more than that, Obama seems mired in the insider ways of Washington while losing the rapport he hadwith the broad constituency that carried him to the presidency. If his march to the White House testified to the power of rhetoric, Obama has found no way yet, it seems, to use the presidency as a bully pulpit to engage and educate his public in the moral dilemmas of the exercise of power. In other word, he has not yet developed a rhetoric of power.

Such a demanding form of rhetorical discourse would, of course, call for more than Bush’s sound bite uttered with a smirk: “I am the decider,”27 or more generally the boastful language accompanying America’s position as “sole remain- ing superpower,” following the collapse of the Soviet Union. If there was a rhetoric of power discernable at all in those days, it was the language of arms speaking, of a Wilsonianism in boots, or of the “shock and awe” inspired by America’s arsenal of high-tech weapons. In contrast to this, a rhetoric of power, as I here envision it, would demand Obama once again to rise above himself, above the din of voices in Wash- ington circles and the media, and to address the ethical

dilemmas and quandaries of democratic leadership, to address the tension between secrecy and national security, and to become the democratic educator that Lincoln was before him. It would entail more than the rhetorical projection of power in the face of external threats confronting the nation, more than the construction of an enemy image and the de- monization of the enemy, as in President Ronald Reagan’s rhetoric of power, when he spoke of the Soviet Union as “the evil empire.”28 It would entail rendering a public account of the unintended consequences of the uses of power, as they range from open military confrontation, and its accompanying “collateral damage” of civilians killed by US fire, to secret programs of assassination, rendition and imprisonment.

These are all means of confrontation that may well result in swelling the ranks of enemy forces rather than quelling them. Using public speech to convey such a sense of irony, if not of the tragic quality of democratic leadership, is a tall order and does not necessarily go down well with the larger public. When President Jimmy Carter tried to wean Americans off the conventional rhetoric of the Cold War, speaking instead of the “inordinate fear of Communism,”29 it was taken as a sign of softness, if not weakness.

The problem confronting President Obama in this respect is that on a number of occasions he has, in public speeches, reached out toward the Muslim world, trying to take away its inordinate fear of America, and to contribute to mutual under- standing through diplomatic means and the power of public speech. Yet, neither in the Middle East nor among the Amer- ican public, has he managed to reconcile his guiding visions with the actual policies that he pursues or leaves in place.

Addressing the Chicago Council of Global Affairs on April 23d, 2007, when still a Democratic Senator and presidential hopeful, Barack Obama declared: “I still believe that America is the last, best hope of Earth. We just have to show the world why this is so. This President (i. e., George W. Bush) may occupy the White House, but for the last six years the position of leader of the free world has remained open. And it’s time to fill that role once more. The American moment has not passed. The American moment is here. And like generations before us, we will seize that moment, and begin the world anew.”30

Casting himself as a Promethean pretender to the role of leader of the free world, he could never hope to make a fresh start with a clean slate.While aiming at beginning the world anew, he had to confront a world as it was left to him, like a chess player taking over a game halfway through, confronting all the con- straints set before him. Entering the Washington corridors of power with a freshly won mandate must have felt like stepping

24 Gabriel Schoenfeld, “Barack Obama: Defender of State Secrets,”Wall Street Journal (September 30, 2010), p. 17. 25 Colin Powell’s words of praise and endorsement can still be heard on the Internet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_NMZv6Vfh8. It is an excerpt from NBC’s Meet the Press, October 19, 2008. 26 For a critical review of alternative policies, see Juan Cole, Engaging the Muslim World (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009). 27 “But I’m the decider, and I decide what is best”—spoken on the White House Lawn, April 18, 2006.

28 For the text of Reagan’s “Evil Empire Speech” see: http://www. nationalcenter.org/ReaganEvilEmpire1983.html 29 President Jimmy Carter, Commencement Speech given at Notre Dame University, June 1977: http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index. asp?document=727 30 http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/fpccga

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into an arena ring-fenced by entrenched interests, veto groups, and contending ideological views of the national interest and America’s place as a world power.

In 2011 it was fifty years since President Eisenhower left office and used the occasion to reflect on the ominous rise of what he called the military-industrial complex, commonly referred to later as the military-industrial-political complex. Eisenhower, at the height of the Cold War, warned against an American foreign policy set on a course of undue militariza- tion, while undermining America’s democratic ways.31 Iron- ically, it was only after the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union that such militarization proceeded apace. What had been gestating as a neo-conservative project, envisioning a 21st-century America whose military power would be unri- valled and pre-eminent, now became the accepted discourse, touted by right-wing politicians and media pundits alike.

Currently, the American defense budget approaches the combined defense budgets of all other nations, friends and foes combined. US defense outlays now consume roughly half of all federal discretionary dollars. The US now has about a thousand military bases all over the globe, with new construction of drone bases proceeding apace. It can project military power in ever new technological ways. Yet if this policy is to be more than a very expensive insurance policy, against what threat, what enemy, is it meant to offer protection?

Here, I would argue, President Obama has his work cut out for him. Rather than letting himself be co-opted into this milita- rized view of the world and foreign policy, he should grasp the moment and start to educate the American people. At a time when deficits at all levels of government threaten America’s infrastructure, its education, health and welfare institutions, as well as its over-all prosperity, Obama should address these issues by publicly reflecting on the costs of the current national security state, its financial costs as well as its human and political costs. As one opinion poll after another makes clear, the American people is stunningly unaware of such things. Given the right- wing control over the terms of public discourse, here is a chal- lenge for the master of rhetoric that Obama has proven to be. Were he to take it up, it would be a new beginning indeed.

And yet, for a manwith Obama’s powers of speech there are strangemoments of silence, of speechlessness. Surely, as on the occasion of the January, 2011, point-blank fusillade in Tucson, where a deranged youngster wounded a Congresswoman among a number of others and killed six people, among whom a young girl, Obama finds thewords of consolation for grieving parents and a grieving nation. Rising above the toxic cesspool of what ranks as public debate and discourse in the US today, he grasps the moment to educate the nation in the ways of civility and civilized debate. Yet, when the child killed is not

American, but a Pakistani or Afghan victim of the American way of war, killed on Obama’s watch as commander-in-chief, he has not so far addressed the terrible moral dilemma that presents itself. Nor, more generally, does he speak to the central civil rights and human rights problems that his “targeted assas- sination” approach has opened up. Distant wars are being fought at the far-away limes of empire, passed over in silence, it may seem, by the American people. Yet, slowly but surely, the voice of a concerned public conscience is beginning to be heard, in the Blogosphere, and on the printed pages of America’s leading intellectual journals and newspapers.

On only a few occasions so far has the Obama administration taken up the challenge and come up with a public account of its policy of targeted assassinations. On March 5, 2012, Attorney General Eric Holder, in a speech at theNorthwesternUniversity’s Law School, essentially made the point that the US is a nation at war, facing “a nimble and determined enemy that cannot be underestimated.”32 Given such conditions of war, Holder contin- ued, “We must also recognize that there are instances where our government has the clear authority (…) to defend the Unites States through the appropriate and lawful use of lethal force.”By government Holder means the president, as the one person to decide what is appropriate and lawful, the one person who weighs the legalities of a case against the threat of imminent danger. Under such conditions considerations of due process are safe in the hands of the executive as sole protector of the national security. It may not be due process as commonly understood, yet people should rest assured that the president acts on mature consideration, following judicious process rather than formal due process. Under conditions of war, the populace should take the president’s word for it that justice has been done. National defense has thus become a matter of presidential say-so. If Holder’s argument points in any clear direction, it is toward a continuing “unitary executive,” relentlessly eroding a govern- ment of law, and under the law, as the United States has known and enjoyed it for most of its history as a republic.33

31 For an enlightening revisit of Eisenhower’s farewell speech, see Andrew J. Bacevich, “The Tyranny of Defense Inc.,” The Atlantic (Jan- uary/February 2011) Available online at http://www.theatlantic.com/ magazine/archive/2011/01/the-tyranny-of-defense-inc/8342/

32 http://www.justice.gov/iso/opa/ag/speeches/2012/ag-speech-1203051. html 33 In an interview on CNN, Wednesday, September 5, 2012, Obama himself briefly went into the criteria used in drone warfare. Obama told CNN that a terror suspect had to pass five tests before the administration would allow him to be taken out by a drone. “Drones are one tool that we use, and our criteria for using them is very tight and very strict,” the president said.

1 “It has to be a target that is authorized by our laws.” 2 “It has to be a threat that is serious and not speculative.” 3 “It has to be a situation in which we can’t capture the individual

before they move forward on some sort of operational plot against the United States.”

4 “We’ve got to make sure that in whatever operations we conduct, we are very careful about avoiding civilian casualties.”

5 “That while there is a legal justification for us to try and stop [American citizens] from carrying out plots … they are subject to the protections of the Constitution and due process.”

For a brief discussion of these points see: http://www.wired.com/ dangerroom/2012/09/obama-drone/

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A State of Exception?

Comparing the Bush Jr. and Obama presidencies, looking for contrasts yet disturbingly finding continuities may leave one clueless as to possible explanations. After all, when Obama first acceded to the presidency, he had drawn clear lines to distinguish his administration from the preceding one. He would close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, he would end the use of what euphemistically had become known as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” or, more realistically: torture, he would end the practice of so-called extra-ordinary rendition and the use of a secret international network of “black holes” where terror suspects disappeared into extra- legal limbo. In short he would end all those transgressions of the ways of constitutional government that had stained America’s image in the world and stoked the fires of anti- Americanism. He promised to take government back to trans- parency, the rule of law and the protections of citizenship rights as guaranteed by the Constitution. Yet he refused to take members of the previous administration to account, pre- ferring to “look forward rather than backwards,” as he put it. He preferred this to having it formally established in court when and where the previous administration had engaged in criminal behavior, breaking national and international law. In fact, his administration has fought the courts to block civil suits against torture perpetrators, claiming the privilege of state secrets.

This may have been dictated by political expedience. But was it also a political calculus when Obama early on called the war in Afghanistan a war of necessity, opting for an Iraq-like military surge before setting a deadline for the withdrawal of troops? Was it to protect his right flank, and fend off accusations of being soft on terrorism, when he stepped up the use of drones in the airspace of coun- tries, such as Pakistan, with which the United States was not formally at war, or when he engaged in drawing up lists of people, US citizens among them, to be killed without any form of due process or judicial oversight? Or do we need to look for another explanation when we wish to account for a disturbing range of counter- terrorism policies that are ever more secretive, without check or balance, ever more intrusive into the privacy of individual citizens or the sovereignty of independent states, and yes, in disturbing continuity with many of the policies of the preceding administration in its war against terrorism?

One way to account for the continuity would be to see both administrations in the context of post-9/11 history, both equally involved in a continuing confrontation with terrorism as a global threat. Both administrations used the war against terrorism as justifying their transgressions of peace-time legal constraints. Secret memos produced by legal counsel from within the executive, such as the

“torture memos” of the Bush years, or the memos justify- ing assassinations by drone in the first Obama adminis- tration, testify to this trend. In other words, they both claimed a state of exception to account for the way they curtailed citizens’ freedoms and rights. Both administra- tions, one might argue, thus acted as all governments do when engaged in war. Wartime constraints, then, may be seen as exerting a stronger pull than any high-minded promises of a return to the rule of law. If so, Obama’s policies may be seen as the hard-won lessons of realism, forced upon a man of different inclinations.

But is this account really convincing? In spite of what in-house lawyers in the Bush and Obama administrations have argued, if the US is really engaged in war, what sort of war is it? For one thing, it is an undeclared war, and perhaps more importantly, it is war without end, without final surrender or meaningful victory. It is not like the American Civil War, or the two world wars the US was involved in. A better parallel would be the Cold War, which, like the war on terrorism, is more a metaphor than the real thing. Yet both the Cold War and the current continuing war against terrorism are warlike in their ef- fects on governments and populations. Under the threat of imminent attack, both governments and populations are ready to go into war mode, militarizing the entire tone of daily life and of government policy.34 In a state of con- tinuing alert and fear, populations are willing to see gov- ernment powers expand and social resources mobilized in defense of the nation. This is what gave rise to the institutions and instruments of what would become known as the surveillance state, or the national security state, or, more flippantly, the warfare state. They coa- lesced into the enduring structures of what we can no longer meaningfully call a state of exception. Many of the war-mode strategic and tactical responses that the Bush and Obama administrations have come up with are, on closer inspection, no more than elaborations on themes well established since early Cold War days. Those were the days when America first became aware of its position of hegemon in the world, a position which—as the Greek etymology of the word suggests—asked for leadership and dominance. Those were the days when American leadership first implied the projection of an imperial view of the world, giving a global cast to the emerging Cold War conflict.

Shaping its role America engaged in developing the pano- ply of tools it needed for deploying its power. Many were

34 Aaron B. O’Connell, “The PermanentMilitarization of America,”New York Times, Opinion pages, November 4, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/ 2012/11/05/opinion/the-permanent-militarization-of-america.html? pagewanted=all&_r=0

Tom Engelhardt, The United States of Fear (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011).

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visible and above board, like building up a war arsenal, developing new weapons, setting up military alliances. All this went to structure its empire, its power reach, and to define the perimeter of its area of hegemony.

Yet, drawing on lessons learnt during two real wars, World War I and World War II, in the manner of a new state of exception, the US morphed into invisible forms of gov- ernment. In their 1964 book, The Invisible Government, authors David Wise and Thomas B. Ross caused a shock from its very first paragraph: “There are two governments in the United States today. One is visible. The other invisible.” The authors continued: “The first is the government that citizens read about in their newspapers and children study about in their civics books. The second is the interlocking, hidden machinery that carries out the policies of the United States in the Cold War. This second, invisible government gathers intelligence, conducts espionage, and plans and executes secret operations all over the globe.”35 By 1964 the US Intelligence Community, or IC, had nine members, including the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the National Security Agency (NSA). AsWise and Ross portrayed it, the IC was already a labyrinthine set of secret outfits with growing power. It was capable of launching covert actions worldwide, with a “broad spectrum of do- mestic operations,” the ability to overthrow foreign govern- ments, if need be through political assassinations, and the capacity to plan operations without the knowledge of Con- gress or full presidential control. “No outsider is in a posi- tion to determine whether or not, in time, these activities might become an internal danger to a free society.”36 By 2012 the IC with 17 official outfits had almost doubled. The internal danger they jointly pose has grown incommensura- bly larger. With the latest technology of data gathering and data mining, massive flows of communication between individuals within the realm are now continually being stored and analyzed, without proper oversight, without means of legal recourse for individual citizens.

This invisible government has surrounded itself with a wall of secrecy, jealously and vindictively protected from whistleblowers through the revival of dormant anti- espionage legislation. The 1917 Espionage Act, duly enacted by Congress at a time of real war, during a real “state of exception,” and never used since, is now dusted off and has been used on several occasions by the Obama Administration. When the state of exception has become the “new normal,” civil oversight of government actions has become a distant dream. Exposing patent war crimes through channels such as Wikileaks has now become a crime itself.

All this is reminiscent of an earlier episode, in the post- Watergate years, when an emerging imperial presidency found its check and balance in a congress eager to regain its consti- tutional role. The Pentagon Papers case was thrown out of court for miscarriage of justice. Hearings by the Church Committee brought secrets of the “invisible government,” as it had been shaping up during the Cold War, to light. Con- gressional powers were restored, as in the War Powers Act. CIA ventures in the area of political assassination were stopped as being illegal, unwarranted by claims of war- connected states of exception.

The long history of the imperial presidency has resumed its irresistible course since. If assassinations as an instrument of covert foreign policy had been proscribed in the 1970’s, extra- judicial killing by the US government has now become rou- tine, an acceptable tool in the war against terrorism, a war with no end in sight. The state of exception proclaimed in connec- tion to that war, a connection emphasized in legal memos for the government and in the few public accounts given by government officials, has now come to define the “new nor- mal.” Exception has become the rule.37

The constant surveillance of human interactions within the reach of America’s empire, the deployment of military force through a network of interlinked bases, the walls of secrecy surrounding it all, form today’s invisible government.38 It is a government that in its own inner logic makes for one, undi- vided center of command and control. It is the inexorable logic that I earlier gave the name of the imperial imperative. It exerts its compelling force on whoever holds the office of president and commander-in-chief, the person in charge of both the visible and invisible government. Juggling both roles of elected chief-executive and guardian of national security un- der conditions of war, presidents have come to stretch the limits of states of exception to the point where the exception becomes the rule. If we still need a definition of American exceptionalism, this may be it.

Rob Kroes is professor emeritus and former chair of the American Studies program at the University of Amsterdam, where he taught until September 2006. He is Honorary Professor of American Studies at the University of Utrecht and is a past president of the European Association for American Studies (EAAS, 1992–1996). He is the founding editor of two series published in Amsterdam: Amsterdam Monographs in Ameri- can Studies and European Contributions to American Studies.

35 David Wise, and Thomas B. Ross, The Invisible Government (New York: Random House, 1964) p. 3 36 Wise and Ross, p. 219

37 Tom Junod, “The Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama,” Esquire (August, 2012) http://www.esquire.com/features/obama-lethal- presidency-0812 38 Chalmers H. Johnson, “America’s Empire of Bases,” (January 15, 2004) http://www.commondreams.org/viewso4/0115-08.htm

Chalmers H. Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Henry Holt, 2004).

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