New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

MIRRLEES: American Soft Power 205
neoconservative doctrine were performed for the world: unilateral
military pre-emption, strategic regime change and state-building, the
attempted export of U.S.-made liberal capitalist democracy, and the
global promotion of America as a benevolent imperialist power.
Such unabashed imperialism, however, jeopardized America’s image
as an anti-imperialist force. While the Bush administration’s unilateral
foreign policy pleased neoconservative ideologes, 15 it was openly despised
and publicly challenged by much of the enlightened world. Considering
the global transformation of America’s image, Immanuel Wallerstein
stated: “Over the last 200 years, the United States acquired a considerable
amount of ideological credit. But these days, the United States is running
through its credit even faster than it ran through its gold surplus in the
1960s.” 16 Thomas Friedman, the globalization cheerleader and pro-
American imperialist even sadly admitted: “I have never known a time in
my life when America and its president were more hated around the
world than today.” 17
The swelling global anti-American sentiment signalled a crisis of
America’s world hegemony, or, its moral leadership. The U.S. empire’s
struggle for world hegemony involves a delicate balancing act of strategies
of coercion with those that attempt to organize consent. The U.S.
empire’s occupation of Iraq not only failed to spread democracy and
freedom throughout the Middle East, but also was undertaken without
sufficiently organizing global consent to this coercion. As a result, the
U.S. empire’s moral credibility was demolished. The propaganda of
weapons of mass destruction and the con of pre-emptive regime change
may have duped half of the U.S. population, but it did not fool the world.
Nor did the imperialism-lite of human rights discourse with its belated
attempt to organize global consent to a political leadership that had
already been identified as fraudulent.
Some neoconservatives recognized America’s global hegemonic crisis
in the years following the invasion of Iraq. Robert Kagan argued that the
United States, for the first time since World War Two, had suffered a crisis
of international legitimacy. 18 Some explanations were provided. Joshua
Muravchik, for example, argued that anti-Americanism was on the rise
because the U.S. state had disarmed the ideological weapons it used to
fight the Cold War: “U.S.I[nformation].A[gency]. funding was slashed
repeatedly as conservative isolationists and budget hawks teamed up with
liberal relativists averse to American propaganda.” 19 For Muravchik, a