Piracy and Empire

The current "war against piracy," which is spilling into Kenyan and U.S. courthouses after months of simmering off the coast of Somalia, is only the latest in a long series of U.S. actions against non-state actors in the service of empire. The "Global War on Terror," which the Obama administration recently replaced with the vaguer term "overseas contingency operations," justified a large-scale increase in military spending, two major interventions, and explicit calls for the United States to maintain its unparalleled power. With the world's maritime chokepoints at risk, pirates are emerging as the latest non-state threat: the terrorists of the seas.

This isn't, however, a new story. Two hundred years ago, the Barbary pirates spurred the first major military expenditures in post-revolutionary U.S. history and raised the profile of the U.S. Marine Corps. After the September 11 attacks, conservatives used forced comparisons between those pirates and al-Qaeda as a justification for invading Afghanistan and launching a global war against terrorism.

Pirates were present at the creation of the U.S. empire. Have they returned for the empire's finale? Neoliberals and neoconservatives have different answers to this question.

Reluctant Warrior Myth

According to a pleasant, liberal, exceptionalist myth, the United States has always upheld democracy overseas and abjured military first-strikes. George Washington, who set an example by resigning his military commission to become the country's first civilian president, recommended neutrality for the new country's foreign policy. As a theme picked up by Jefferson in his warning against "entangling alliances," the neutrality of the founding fathers inspired a century's worth of subsequent isolationists. In the 20th century, America entered the two world wars only when provoked (Lusitania, Pearl Harbor), and fought the Vietnam and Korean wars not for territorial gain or imperial ambition but to defend the entire Free World from a spreading Red stain.

The recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq can be repackaged to fit into this inoffensive narrative. We went to war against the Taliban only after being attacked on September 11. We then targeted Saddam Hussein because of his links to terrorism (initially), the threat of his weapons of mass destruction (subsequently), and his genuinely atrocious human rights record (finally). In all three cases, we were reluctant warriors and fought on behalf of others, for altruistic reasons of general security or Iraqi democracy. In the larger Global War on Terror, according to the Bush doctrine, the United States fights terrorists abroad so that we don't have to fight them on home soil. "Preventive" war, though it might seem rash and aggressive, is in fact prudent and defensive. As reluctant warriors, Americans are all ultimately George Washington's children.

This is a nice fairy tale to tell children at bedtime or the UN at wartime. But more conservative backers of the Global War on Terror, uncomfortable with the view of the United States as peaceable except when roused, constructed a counter-narrative to serve their own purposes. To justify a quite illiberal agenda — adopting massive military spending increases, suspending international laws such as the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention against Torture, committing widespread violations of civil liberties at home — the neoconservatives preferred a narrative with more testosterone. They haven't been ashamed to use the word "empire." Their counter-narrative has traced the interventionist history of the United States from the beginnings of the American empire in the late 19th century through the construction of the "American century" during the Cold War. This unabashed embrace of empire supplies the critical element — thymos or the desire and striving for recognition — that Francis Fukuyama mourned the passing of with the end of history. Those nostalgic for the age of empire acknowledge that the world is tending toward a huge, uniform market democracy. But various anti-democratic and anti-capitalist forces are still out there — communist holdovers like Cuba, authoritarian powers like China, dictatorial leaders like Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, and Myanmar's junta — and the enablers of "Old Europe" lack the guts to stand up to all this tyranny. Only American courage and firepower can restore thymos to its pride of place in the unfolding of world history.