Word: riencourt
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These tocsins resound in French Journalist Amaury de Riencourt's recent The American Empire, which envisions an Americanization of the world comparable to what Rome achieved when the Mediterranean bordered the known universe. Leaders of government and multinational business are the coming Caesars. U.S. foreign policy, however well intentioned, is an imperial thrust at Europe, Asia and Africa. "Roman citizenship," De Riencourt explains, "was eventually granted to all men dwelling within the borders of the empire. Today, as the unacknowledged American empire strives to find its shape and its limits, the same ecumenical dream is beginning to haunt...
...Riencourt has one resounding theme: "The major development of our time is the gradual and partly unconscious establishment of the American empire." It will appear to future historians, he dares to predict, as the end result of "everything that happened in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries...
Chosen Nation. What does it take to build an empire? Will to power? Greed? Not in De Riencourt's book. Historically, the true empire builder, he thinks, is motivated by "an idealistic longing," a faith in universal law, a passion for a "common culture." He is more in the spirit of a missionary than of Genghis Khan. De Riencourt quotes Senator Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana speaking half a century ago: "God has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has marked the American people as his chosen nation to finally...
...Riencourt takes that outdated boast with deadly seriousness. Something deep in the character of the Puritan (an "iron-hard, practical, sober fanatic dedicated to hard work") ideally equips Americans to play 20th century Romans. When Puritan qualities are combined with the "innate and relentless expansionism" of the frontiersman, it becomes clear that "it was just not in [Americans'] dynamic temper to become the peaceful Swiss of the Western Hemisphere." Yet Americans, De Riencourt insists, have been "fundamentally reluctant" imperialists. They have not really played the game of colonialism, which he defines as an ephemeral grab for pseudo empire...
Meanwhile, those "unconscious" imperialists, the American Presidents, were exercising the appropriate "Caesarian powers," including the right to initiate wars without asking Congress. As a result, believes De Riencourt, "the United States has gradually become a garrison state." Counting "Pentagon satellite military establishments" in Europe, Latin America and the Far East, De Riencourt reckons that the U.S. has the biggest army, by "relative size," since Rome...