NEW YORK -- One thing that has receded from public debate as a consequence of the disaster that is America's war against Iraq is talk of the United States as an empire. During the onrush to the invasion and for some time afterward, one popular comparison was with the Roman Empire. Another, of course, was with the British Empire, though with the latter it was cautionary.
"Nineteenth-century Britain had much less military power than the U.S. today, but it had much more ability to get things done within its empire than the U.S. in today's world," wrote Stanley Hoffman in "The Foreign Policy the U.S. Needs" in The New York Review of Books (Aug. 10).
For one thing, Britain had cadres of the educated willing to be sent to far-flung colonial outposts and endure the inevitable local hazards for years on end. Today young, educated Americans are willing to do anything similar only for money and for short periods of time.