Evil Empire 95Slaughter’s words, of “the idea that is America.” Slaughter, with Ikenberry,
can consider bad behavior only briefly and only in the service of insisting
that what matters most is not what the United States actually does with
its power but what it intends to do. Yes, “imperialism, slavery, and racism
have marred Western history,” Ikenberry and Deudney argue, but what
matters is that liberalism “has always been at the forefront of efforts—both
peaceful and militant—to reform and end these practices.” Indeed, even
those public intellectuals such as Niall Ferguson and Michael Ignatieff
who, after September 11, called for the United States to embrace its status
as an imperial power, framed their arguments in deflective, liberal terms.
By contrast, because realists project the security dilemma retroactively into
history (while also simultaneously excising imperialism) they can only see
the U.S. destabilization of Third World economies, assassinations, and
secret bombings as tragic necessities (great powers, claims Mearsheimer,
“have little choice but to pursue power and to seek to dominate the other
states in the system”) or as the result of liberals’ ill-advised desire to force
“our” values on other nations. Both of these deflective strategies reinforce the
illusion that we live, in Nikhil Pal Singh’s words, in an “American-centered,
racially inclusive world, one organized around formally equal and indepen-
dent nation states” where some states just happen to have more power than
others, and where the alternative—Russian or Chinese hegemony—is too
frightening even to contemplate.
That deflection would play such an outsized role in supporting the
ideological edifice of international relations today is hardly surprising.
Turn-of-the-century British liberals who supported their empire also
drew upon a variety of different deflective strategies to reconcile the
violence and illiberalism of British imperial expansion with the stated
liberal goals of the Empire. Such deflection made it impossible for these
thinkers—many of whom would go on to work as some of the first
international relations scholars in Britain and help found The Royal