Ever since the USA under George W Bush with his neo conservative acolytes embarked on a major misadventure in the Middle East, particularly Iraq, there has been a number of books explaining/justyfying this horrendous tranformation form a vibrant, if clumsy hegemon to a ruthless blood letting power in the near east. Niall Ferguson with his fashionable right of center political views is one historian who has written about this change in the basuic structure of USA after the collapse of the USSR. Is the USA really an Empire in denial or has it always been one, and only now showinf hard power instead of the soft power. A new book by the American historian< Robert Kagan addresses this issue in a forthright manner.
The basic thrust of Kagan's argument is that throughout the course of the last two centuries, ever since the war of Independence , USA has usurped Britain's position as the dominant Anglo-Saxon power. Surprisingly, while USA was replacing Great Britain as the power nation/power of the Western Hemisphere they never camr to blows, there by suggesting that Britain was in many ways a willing accomplice in the transformation of the US into a world empire. USA was created as a settler colony which fashioned into nationhood through wholesale ethnic extermination of the native or first inhabitants. This aspect of US history is generally ignored and should a historian raist it, he is made to feel extremely uncomfortable. Kagan demonstrates with great skill and acumen that USA right from its inception was an aggressive and expansionist power with an unsatiable appetite for territory and resources. The dispalcement and extermination of the native population has been recounted amongst others by the noted American historian, David Stannard.
I will quote a passage form Kagan's book:
This colonial America was characterised not by isolationism and utopianism
not by cities upon hills, and covenants with God, but with aggressive expansionism, and an
overarching ideology of civilisation that encouraged and justified both.
From the stand point of today, it is not difficult to see how the rhetoric of liberty and freedom has been appropriated by the like of Bush and the Bushmen to spread American hegemony all over the world. Kagan calls early America an expansionist"pressure cooker" in which every white male could fulfill his wildest fantasy, among others of becoming a Landowner.
The best part of Kagan's book is his discussion of the roots of the American Identity.The new nation was not in a position to use history and roots as the basis of identity formation. Hence the Enlightenment doctrines of political compact between the Governwed and the Rulers came to stand in for the nationa myth. The use of universal abstract political myths make the ideology fashined under two hundred years of history extremely threatening.