American Umpire by Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman (Harvard University Press, £25.95)
The United States has had a complicated relationship with imperialism. It was born in a fight among empires and defined its politics and its ideals against one. Like all states with global ambitions, the US has dabbled with formal empire, explicitly so after the Spanish-American War of 1898, when it annexed Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. Yet it has also pushed for peoples’ rights to self-determination, acquired territory, military bases, and trading rights through negotiation rather than explicit imposition, and spread the gospel of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” less with gunboats than missionaries and financiers, Coca-Cola and Stratocasters.
If the United States is an empire, it is undoubtedly a strange one. But that complicated idea has been embraced by historians across the political spectrum. In the 1960s, as European empires retreated and America sank into quagmire in South East Asia, mostly left-wing historians led by William Appleman Williams attacked American foreign policy by labelling it imperial. They showed how the United States had always been an empire at heart, explaining how the Founding Fathers had seen expansion as a way of mitigating party politics and guaranteeing economic growth. By acting upon this imperial ideology, Americans fulfilled the Fathers’ ambitions, but only by negating the Fathers’ humanitarian and anti-colonial ideals.
Historians moved on from the economic specifics of Williams’s work as protest against the Vietnam War died down, but his critique of an American empire remained potent. When George W Bush invaded Iraq, talk of empire came to dominate American politics as it had not since 1898. (“We’re an empire now,” one Bush aide memorably declared.) Historians on the left and in the centre decried another instance of immoral American imperialism, led by historian and army veteran Andrew Bacevich; those on the right, chiefly Niall Ferguson and the neoconservative coterie, applauded the empire that the left attacked.
Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman’s ambitious but flawed new book, American Umpire, questions this consensus. She thinks that historians have unjustly damaged America’s global image by labelling it an empire. “The ivory tower overlooks the street,” she writes, and academics have denied their patriotic duty by going beyond reasonable criticism of their nation’s politics. “Heads have literally rolled” because of how American historians have portrayed their country: Cobbs Hoffman draws a straight line from historians to the revolutionaries and terrorists who have “kidnapped, disappeared, tortured, shot and even decapitated” Americans, partly because they “believe all Americans to be part of a malignant imperialist plot.”
Few historians are arrogant enough to believe they have that kind of power, and many more would argue that they are not writing fiction, but narrating facts. What people choose to do with histories they may or may not have read is their responsibility, not the historian’s. (Academics did not invent the imperial view of American history: surely decades of communist propaganda had more global influence than history books.) But instead of tales of CIA coups, nuclear power and imperial arrogance, Cobbs Hoffman wants historians to tell a story in which democratic capitalism and the armed strength of American ideals built a world order more just than any in history. So in his Tragedy of American Diplomacy, William Appleman Williams “viewed world history through the wrong end of the telescope.” Cobbs Hoffman insists that the American century “has been far more triumphant than tragic.”
American Umpire is certainly innovative, but its arguments do not stack up. Cobbs Hoffman is particularly fine at showing how the United States has contributed to the global cooperation that culminated in the United Nations. Building on new scholarship but leaving it largely unacknowledged, she brilliantly shows how seriously we ought to take not only international peace organisations, but also how states submitted themselves to arbitration and even outlawed war (at the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899-1907 and in the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 respectively). The United States led these efforts, as well as those to reduce trade barriers and the develop international law. That leadership has distinguished the United States for the better.
The book’s pun of an argument, however, is broader: the United States is not an empire but an “umpire.” In foreign policy, America has “periodically brought action to a halt, exacted a penalty, and then tried to get out of the way.” The rules it has enforced, Cobbs Hoffman argues, were not imposed on the rest of the world by the US, nor the product of a contagious ideology of progress and modernity. They were instead created collectively, between the seventeenth century and the founding of the United Nations. Although it has no formal duty to do so, the United States has often enforced those rules and norms, and has therefore provoked criticism. Umpires, after all, are unpopular, and by definition they cannot win.
For Cobbs Hoffman, Americans took on this responsibility because their domestic experience taught that an institution sometimes has to step in to keep order. Just as Williams traced empire back to the Founders, so with Cobbs Hoffman and “umpire.” In the early republic, she argues, the federal government was seen as an “umpire” between the states, an “impartial higher authority” with “the power to resolve disputes between contending parties.” This idea then filtered down through the history of the United States at home and abroad. Americans knew the difference between domestic and foreign affairs, but after 1941 they expanded their domestic idea of a neutral, “umperial” sovereign worldwide, accepting “a role that seemed not only necessary but also heroic.”
Almost every page of American Umpire is provocative. Least convincing is Cobbs Hoffman’s dismissal of American actions that contradict her main thesis: they were mistakes, or they prove that the United States committed its bad deeds in a more honourable way than any other nation. Everyone else was “flagging” the world in the nineteenth century, she argues, so we should not look too deeply into the United States’ march across the continent at the expense of Native Americans. America’s imperial moment in 1898 was “more like an adolescent identity crisis expressed in Euro-American cross-dressing than a determined campaign.” Why should an imperial urge matter in the long run if America gave its colonies and protectorates independence, democracy and a sense of law faster than other empires? As America was “supremely uninterested in creating a colony” in Iraq, “civility prevailed.” The ends seem to compensate for the means.
Even if you accept this, omissions from American Umpire fatally weaken its bold central argument. For instance, the federal government might have started out life as an umpire between states rather than a sovereign over them, but the Civil War, Reconstruction, the New Deal, legal developments, party politics and the militarisation of American society have all exponentially increased the power of Washington, DC over the state capitals. Likewise, a sense of hard power escapes American Umpire’s analysis of foreign affairs. The United States is obeyed less because it represents universal global values, as Cobbs Hoffman argues, but because of its incredible military strength.
The book’s biggest problem is the way it compares the domestic and international realms as if they were the same. The key difference is that there is no sovereign in diplomacy: international law is breakable. Nobody is formally in charge, and order is kept only by agreement and force. For that reason, the United States cannot be seen as a neutral arbiter. It has the ability to shape and break the rules, to pick and choose what aspects of international law or consensus it adheres to or enforces on behalf of the community. International politics has no umpires, only players strong and charismatic enough to impose their idea of what the rules of the game should look like.
What is the future for America abroad, as the country’s finances unravel? The real surprise is that Cobbs Hoffman is so uncomfortable with the United States playing the triumphant world role it seems destined, in her telling, to uphold. Time and again she suggests it is unfair that the world has expected the United States to act as umpire, while Americans have failed to consolidate progress and liberty at home. They have made sacrifices—crumbling roads, creaking infrastructure—to referee the world, she argues, and the world simply is not grateful enough. So despite her scholarly disagreement with William Appleman Williams, Cobbs Hoffman comes to much the same conclusion, a half century later. The United States must pass the buck—to Europeans, to Brits, to principles of collective security through the United Nations. “The consequences might be horrific, or they might be benign,” she writes. “Yet they will never materialise if the United States numbly continues to shoulder the load that no one else wants.”
This is a frightening misreading of history and international politics. The world has been safest when its hegemonic powers have acknowledged their responsibility to the international system and have committed to upholding it. The United States might not need so many air bases or nuclear weapons, but it must find a way to reconcile its short-term troubles with everybody’s long-term needs. If there is no referee and the strongest player goes off injured, the result is anarchy.
Follow David Allen on Twitter @fafnerthekite
The United States has had a complicated relationship with imperialism. It was born in a fight among empires and defined its politics and its ideals against one. Like all states with global ambitions, the US has dabbled with formal empire, explicitly so after the Spanish-American War of 1898, when it annexed Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. Yet it has also pushed for peoples’ rights to self-determination, acquired territory, military bases, and trading rights through negotiation rather than explicit imposition, and spread the gospel of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” less with gunboats than missionaries and financiers, Coca-Cola and Stratocasters.
If the United States is an empire, it is undoubtedly a strange one. But that complicated idea has been embraced by historians across the political spectrum. In the 1960s, as European empires retreated and America sank into quagmire in South East Asia, mostly left-wing historians led by William Appleman Williams attacked American foreign policy by labelling it imperial. They showed how the United States had always been an empire at heart, explaining how the Founding Fathers had seen expansion as a way of mitigating party politics and guaranteeing economic growth. By acting upon this imperial ideology, Americans fulfilled the Fathers’ ambitions, but only by negating the Fathers’ humanitarian and anti-colonial ideals.
Historians moved on from the economic specifics of Williams’s work as protest against the Vietnam War died down, but his critique of an American empire remained potent. When George W Bush invaded Iraq, talk of empire came to dominate American politics as it had not since 1898. (“We’re an empire now,” one Bush aide memorably declared.) Historians on the left and in the centre decried another instance of immoral American imperialism, led by historian and army veteran Andrew Bacevich; those on the right, chiefly Niall Ferguson and the neoconservative coterie, applauded the empire that the left attacked.
Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman’s ambitious but flawed new book, American Umpire, questions this consensus. She thinks that historians have unjustly damaged America’s global image by labelling it an empire. “The ivory tower overlooks the street,” she writes, and academics have denied their patriotic duty by going beyond reasonable criticism of their nation’s politics. “Heads have literally rolled” because of how American historians have portrayed their country: Cobbs Hoffman draws a straight line from historians to the revolutionaries and terrorists who have “kidnapped, disappeared, tortured, shot and even decapitated” Americans, partly because they “believe all Americans to be part of a malignant imperialist plot.”
Few historians are arrogant enough to believe they have that kind of power, and many more would argue that they are not writing fiction, but narrating facts. What people choose to do with histories they may or may not have read is their responsibility, not the historian’s. (Academics did not invent the imperial view of American history: surely decades of communist propaganda had more global influence than history books.) But instead of tales of CIA coups, nuclear power and imperial arrogance, Cobbs Hoffman wants historians to tell a story in which democratic capitalism and the armed strength of American ideals built a world order more just than any in history. So in his Tragedy of American Diplomacy, William Appleman Williams “viewed world history through the wrong end of the telescope.” Cobbs Hoffman insists that the American century “has been far more triumphant than tragic.”
American Umpire is certainly innovative, but its arguments do not stack up. Cobbs Hoffman is particularly fine at showing how the United States has contributed to the global cooperation that culminated in the United Nations. Building on new scholarship but leaving it largely unacknowledged, she brilliantly shows how seriously we ought to take not only international peace organisations, but also how states submitted themselves to arbitration and even outlawed war (at the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899-1907 and in the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 respectively). The United States led these efforts, as well as those to reduce trade barriers and the develop international law. That leadership has distinguished the United States for the better.
The book’s pun of an argument, however, is broader: the United States is not an empire but an “umpire.” In foreign policy, America has “periodically brought action to a halt, exacted a penalty, and then tried to get out of the way.” The rules it has enforced, Cobbs Hoffman argues, were not imposed on the rest of the world by the US, nor the product of a contagious ideology of progress and modernity. They were instead created collectively, between the seventeenth century and the founding of the United Nations. Although it has no formal duty to do so, the United States has often enforced those rules and norms, and has therefore provoked criticism. Umpires, after all, are unpopular, and by definition they cannot win.
For Cobbs Hoffman, Americans took on this responsibility because their domestic experience taught that an institution sometimes has to step in to keep order. Just as Williams traced empire back to the Founders, so with Cobbs Hoffman and “umpire.” In the early republic, she argues, the federal government was seen as an “umpire” between the states, an “impartial higher authority” with “the power to resolve disputes between contending parties.” This idea then filtered down through the history of the United States at home and abroad. Americans knew the difference between domestic and foreign affairs, but after 1941 they expanded their domestic idea of a neutral, “umperial” sovereign worldwide, accepting “a role that seemed not only necessary but also heroic.”
Almost every page of American Umpire is provocative. Least convincing is Cobbs Hoffman’s dismissal of American actions that contradict her main thesis: they were mistakes, or they prove that the United States committed its bad deeds in a more honourable way than any other nation. Everyone else was “flagging” the world in the nineteenth century, she argues, so we should not look too deeply into the United States’ march across the continent at the expense of Native Americans. America’s imperial moment in 1898 was “more like an adolescent identity crisis expressed in Euro-American cross-dressing than a determined campaign.” Why should an imperial urge matter in the long run if America gave its colonies and protectorates independence, democracy and a sense of law faster than other empires? As America was “supremely uninterested in creating a colony” in Iraq, “civility prevailed.” The ends seem to compensate for the means.
Even if you accept this, omissions from American Umpire fatally weaken its bold central argument. For instance, the federal government might have started out life as an umpire between states rather than a sovereign over them, but the Civil War, Reconstruction, the New Deal, legal developments, party politics and the militarisation of American society have all exponentially increased the power of Washington, DC over the state capitals. Likewise, a sense of hard power escapes American Umpire’s analysis of foreign affairs. The United States is obeyed less because it represents universal global values, as Cobbs Hoffman argues, but because of its incredible military strength.
The book’s biggest problem is the way it compares the domestic and international realms as if they were the same. The key difference is that there is no sovereign in diplomacy: international law is breakable. Nobody is formally in charge, and order is kept only by agreement and force. For that reason, the United States cannot be seen as a neutral arbiter. It has the ability to shape and break the rules, to pick and choose what aspects of international law or consensus it adheres to or enforces on behalf of the community. International politics has no umpires, only players strong and charismatic enough to impose their idea of what the rules of the game should look like.
What is the future for America abroad, as the country’s finances unravel? The real surprise is that Cobbs Hoffman is so uncomfortable with the United States playing the triumphant world role it seems destined, in her telling, to uphold. Time and again she suggests it is unfair that the world has expected the United States to act as umpire, while Americans have failed to consolidate progress and liberty at home. They have made sacrifices—crumbling roads, creaking infrastructure—to referee the world, she argues, and the world simply is not grateful enough. So despite her scholarly disagreement with William Appleman Williams, Cobbs Hoffman comes to much the same conclusion, a half century later. The United States must pass the buck—to Europeans, to Brits, to principles of collective security through the United Nations. “The consequences might be horrific, or they might be benign,” she writes. “Yet they will never materialise if the United States numbly continues to shoulder the load that no one else wants.”
This is a frightening misreading of history and international politics. The world has been safest when its hegemonic powers have acknowledged their responsibility to the international system and have committed to upholding it. The United States might not need so many air bases or nuclear weapons, but it must find a way to reconcile its short-term troubles with everybody’s long-term needs. If there is no referee and the strongest player goes off injured, the result is anarchy.
Follow David Allen on Twitter @fafnerthekite
