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Review
| The Empire Has No Clothes: US Foreign Policy Exposed, by Ivan Eland. Oakland, CA: The Independent Institute, 2004. 304 pages. $24.95, paper.
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| A popular children's fairy tale speaks of an emperor conned by a man claiming to be a tailor making the most magnificent clothes. The man described his garments as beautiful and unique yet, quite importantly, also invisible. Wanting to believe his words, the emperor wore the "clothes." The only person with the courage to expose the con and tell the emperor that he had no clothes was a child. Ivan Eland poignantly takes on the role of the fairy-tale child in his recent work, The Empire Has No Clothes: US Foreign Policy Exposed. While Eland never directly refers to the story itself, he cleverly alludes to it in his title and builds his argument around the conceptualization of exposing the imperialism of U. S. foreign policy. His message: the United States is an empire. It is time for her people to realize that and to put an end to imperialism. If Americans do not do so, this empire will implode and destroy itself, as history has shown with all other empires throughout the centuries. Eland's thesis provides a unique lens through which U. S. foreign policy in viewed. His argument is convincing, backed by numerous historical examples, and grounded in relevant scholarship. |
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Eland places the early development of the U. S. empire at the beginning of the twentieth century. His first chapter is devoted to demonstrating the idea of empire as constructed in U. S. foreign policy from the pivotal event of the Spanish American war in 1898 to the current global U. S. imperialistic tendencies and actions. In the second chapter, he fleshes out the idea of empire as put forth by other scholars and place his conceptualization within this wider context. Eland purports to show that the United States qualifies under the narrow definition of empire because of territorial expansion yet also because of a broader quest fir political dominion (21–3). In examining these issues, he moves horizontally in time with appropriate, contemporary examples and comparisons as well as vertically through history from ancient to current times. For his twenty-first century audience Eland addresses conservatives, liberals, and the American public at large in separate chapters,. He reminds conservatives that an empire does not serve their needs because war, a primary aim of empire building, is a principle objective of big government (256). Liberals must be cautious about the intentions of the U. S. empire because of an imbalance of judicial powers (171). To the American public, Eland issues this warning: "The American empire is undermining the American republic" (194). |
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Eland's work would be an appropriate and excellent text for undergraduate and graduate courses in several disciplines—American History, International Politics, Militarism, and Peace Studies. The introductory and concluding chapters are first-rate summaries of the historical threads that Eland elucidates, their connections to the contemporary foreign-policy context of the United States, and the author's arguments. As such, these two chapters are a fine lecture source and guide for class discussion for all three levels (advanced honors classes in high school, undergraduate, and graduate). |
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Select tables in chapters Two and Three as well as detailed endnotes aid in illustrating Eland's assertions. The provision of an eight-page index is also helpful for the reader. I, however, do not recommend this work as a full text for an advanced honors course in high school due to Eland's tendency to assume a significant amount of familiarity with a variety of international situations. Time and time again, he leaves concepts and contexts undefined. Fortunately, the general idea can be discerned from the context and thus is appropriate to be utilized more fully beyond the high school level. Two additional pieces, though, would have strengthened the author's work. First, while Eland's sources are recorded in the endnotes, the provision of a bibliography would have made it easier to peruse and use the cited materials. Furthermore, the presence of material from additional female scholars would have provided a more well-grounded and comprehensive rendering of this topic (only about 10% of Eland's sources are from women). Despite these limitations, this work is prophetic and prescriptive. Eland's message is loud and clear: if we want to avoid the destruction of past empires, we must make changes in contemporary U. S. foreign policy. As Senator Henry Clay so aptly declared in 1852: ".we should keep our own lamp burning brightly on this western shore, as a light to all nations, [rather than] hazard its utter extinction amidst the ruins of fallen or falling republics in Europe." |
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| New Foundations Nonviolence Center, Denver, Colorado |
Tisa M. Anders |
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