World Policy Journal
Volume XIX, No 3, Fall 2002

Toward Universal Empire:
The Dangerous Quest for Absolute Security
David C. Hendrickson ^*

 

Safe Harbor

When September 11 occurred, the event was so shocking as to convince American leaders that we had entered a new age, and indeed the broad outlines of the new American policy have been revolutionary. They involve, in detail and in gross, a rejection of previous standards and doctrines that have long defined American statecraft and diplomacy. The embrace of preventive war is one such transgression; the rejection of containment and deterrence another; the feigned regard but real contempt for multilateralism is a third. The president has enjoyed near unlimited scope for carving out the long-term response to September 11. So far as the future of American strategy is concerned, this is what he has done with it.

There is another way. Rather than in the repudiation of past precepts, it consists in the cultivation of those standards, doctrines, and principles that have accompanied America? rise to its present unparalleled position. Much as Americans found consolation for the terror in the bosom of their families and friends, and clung to them like a raft in a shipwreck, so must policy find in the past traditions of the United States the basis for a safe harbor. Especially in revolutionary times, it is a cardinal error to repudiate the past and to make a clean break from it, and all such attempts to do so in history are simply a catalog of disasters. As a token of the clean break, moral, legal, and institutional restraints often go under in times of war and revolutionary crisis, as they threaten to go under here. Only in retrospect do people come to understand that it is precisely in those times when such restraints are most needed.

 

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Endnotes

Note *: David C. Hendrickson is professor of political science at Colorado College and chair of the department. His latest book is Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding, which will be published by the University Press of Kansas in March 2003. Back.