The Policy of Rome

When the Roman Empire finally fell apart, it was not from a lack of military power; but rather from internal corruption, moral decay, rampant injustice, and the never-ending costs of trying to control the world. Our own government seems to have made its strategic choice for the post-Cold War era. The United States has chosen the policy of Rome.

A 46-page document from the highest levels of the Defense Department lays out an unmistakable strategy for maintaining a one-superpower world. It is a plan explicitly designed to prevent all would-be rivals--both enemies and allies--from challenging American predominance anywhere on Earth. The clearly stated objective is "to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests." Total and global American hegemony is the clearly named goal.

Such a strategy will necessarily require a capacity to project U.S. military power into every region of the world, and the Pentagon paper is a bold rationale for continued high levels of military spending. The end of the Cold War notwithstanding, the Pentagon still wants to define national security by spending trillions of dollars on the military. Once again, taking care of business at home will have to wait. Educating our kids, making health care affordable, putting people back to work, and dealing with cities that have become war zones will continue to take a back seat to George Bush's determination to provide "leadership" in the modern world. But the argument between Pat Buchanan's "America First" campaign and George Bush's "globalism" misses the point. Domination abroad and disintegration at home is hardly offering leadership on any front.

Most important, states the document, is "the sense that the world order is ultimately backed by the United States" and "the United States should be postured to act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated' (emphasis added). The New York Times obtained the Pentagon paper before it was scheduled to be released by Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and reported, "With its focus on this concept of benevolent domination by one power, the Pentagon document articulates the clearest rejection to date of collective internationalism."

Since the New York Times story, White House officials have tried to back away from the criticism the document has sparked. But neither Cheney, Gen. Colin Powell, nor President Bush has refuted any of its substance or direction. Indeed, the one-superpower-world assumption was the basic framework of Cheney's and Powell's exhaustive testimony to Congress in January.

I watched a whole day of that testimony on C-Span and was sobered by their visual presentation. The graphic backdrop for all the figures and discussion of projected U.S. "force levels" was a huge map of the world. Every region was targeted and the message was clear. The projection of U.S. military power would know no territorial boundaries in the wake of our "victories" in the Gulf and the Cold War to which the defense secretary and joint chiefs chair kept referring. In their view, it was clear that the whole world was "ours" to protect, dominate, and control.

THE ALTERNATIVE vision of collective or mutual security does not depend on the whims of petty despots, as Pax Americana proponent and columnist Charles Krauthammer has suggested. Rather, it requires the recognition that one nation's security cannot be gained at the expense of others, and especially not by dominating others. In fact, our real security depends on the felt security of friends and foes alike, along with the internal strength and character of our own nation. The world simply can no longer afford endless, costly, and destructive arms races, and the bloody military slaughters where young soldiers, innocent civilians, and our endangered environment always suffer far more than the political rulers who start them.

The end of the Cold War provides us a new opportunity to move beyond old and futile solutions to our inevitable conflicts. But there is nothing new in the Pentagon's proposed "new order." A world dominated by a succession of superpowers is the oldest of strategies. Without the arguments provided by the former Soviet threat, there is no longer any convincing rationale for the global predominance of American power.

As with Rome, there will always be the "barbarians" such as Saddam Hussein on the frontiers; but their violence doesn't justify the systemic violence of the established world order, especially for the masses of people who are on the bottom of it. For them, continued American domination is less than good news.

A genuine commitment to democracy will require a new commitment to global justice, a new pluralism of power, and a new international partnership to resolve our conflicts and keep the peace. Pax Americana seems designed to prevent all that from happening.

If the vocation of American power is becoming more clear, perhaps the vocation of American religious communities should too. It is not hard to determine which strategy--superpower domination or mutual security--is genuinely derived from our own religious and biblical traditions.

If Rome knew what it stood for, so did the early church. The conflict between Christ and Caesar ultimately helped undermine the power of Rome. As Rome's policy became more brutal and clear, so did the early church's fidelity to an entirely alternative vision. Maybe the Pentagon's new clarity could help us to regain our own.

Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners.