We are the new empire—get used to it. This is the message being promulgated by a number of conservatives, led by William Kristol’s Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a Washington think-tank dedicated to enhancing America’s “military, diplomatic, and moral leadership” around the world.

That is, as the world’s only remaining superpower we should accept our responsibilities.

“I think Americans have become used to running the world and would be very reluctant to give it up,” insists Tom Donnelly, PNAC’s deputy executive director, who makes the boldest case for an active, expansionist, engaged American foreign policy. Donnelly refers longingly to the strategies and tactics of the old British Empire, policing the Raj and maintaining its “Pax Britannica”—but the American empire he envisions holds no territorial ambitions.

“The fundamental difference between American and other, past empires is that we don’t issue writs in Washington that we expect others to follow,” Donnelly maintains. Rather, our new, manifest destiny is to disseminate our values.

“We have seen the spread of liberty in our own country as our power spreads, as well as around the world,” he points out. “The history of the twentieth century is how, as we have grown more powerful, we have extended rights to women, to racial minorities, to everyone.”

What’s more, with our military deployed from Korea to the Balkans, Haiti to the Persian Gulf, we are already maintaining a de facto “Pax Americana.” It only remains for us to understand the costs involved, and the sooner the better.

So far, for PNAC, this has meant mostly constant lobbying for the Pentagon “to adapt its operations, its forces…[and] its budgets to the new reality.” The new imperialists would like to see military spending increased by at least $50 to $100 billion per year, and would strongly suggest more than doubling the defense budget. They want an armed forces that can confront China over Taiwan, throw up a missile defense, remove Saddam Hussein from power, fight two conventional wars at the same time, and effectively hunt down terrorists, drug lords, and guerrillas.

Far from deterring us from such a global reach, the events of September 11 have only made the need for an American imperialism all the more urgent.

“We had better get used to seeing ourselves as others see us,” says Donnelly. “It doesn’t matter if we don’t consider ourselves an empire. Others see us as impinging on their lives, their space, their way of life. If we are going to protect our enduring interests, in the Middle East and elsewhere, then we have to do something about it.”

Just what this will entail in Afghanistan may bring many Americans up short. What Donnelly envisions, once the war is over, is a “longer-term agenda,” dedicated to “bringing central Asia into the modern world.” This would include building “some sort of state structure in Afghanistan,” economic and infrastructure development, “oil pipelines through Pakistan,” the establishment of “a long-term, strategic relationship with India”—and a peace-keeping force featuring American troops.

“Afghanistan was used as a home by terrorists not because there was something in the water, but because it was a mess,” Donnelly points out. He does not underestimate how difficult or costly our further engagement in central Asia could be, but is certain that “an ounce of military prevention, a pinch of economic development, certainly beats the cost of the World Trade Center being attacked.”

It also brings Donnelly and PNAC smack up against what are likely to be their most intractable opponents—fellow conservatives. Our most ambitious, imperialist projects have traditionally been undertaken during some of the more progressive eras in American history. Most remaining liberals have retreated to a sort of neo-isolationism, though, and as a consequence the debate is taking place almost solely on the right. As such, it promises to expose deep fissures in the national, conservative movement.

Prior to September 11, after all, the sort of commitment Donnelly is talking about was dismissed by the Bush administration as “nation-building.” Even now, with the war unfinished and Osama bin Laden still at large, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has suggested that a quick U.S. withdrawal would be best, even if it left behind a balkanized Afghanistan divided between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban. Other conservatives, such as Professor Andrew Bacevich, accept the premise that a new Pax Americana is inevitable only with reluctance, worrying that without such an immense global commitment, we would “have a much better chance of keeping faith with the intentions and hopes of the Founders” and that “we’ll end up paying a higher cost, morally and materially, than we currently can imagine.”

Donnelly brushes aside all such objections. To leave Afghanistan “a festering wound” would be only to invite more terrorist attacks in the future. The Founding Fathers “believed in a government with checks and bal ances, but they believed that its ideals were universally applicable. Autocrats are automatically threatened by them.” In this spirit, PNAC has raised a seemingly irresistible conservative escutcheon. Kristol and Robert Kagan promise that the new imperialism will make the Republican party “once again the party of Reagan; a party that stands for that ‘distinctly American internationalism’ that we believe a majority of Americans embrace.” But it remains unclear how more than doubling the national defense budget can ever be reconciled with, say, the Bush administration’s proposed tax cuts. The whole idea of empire must find itself at loggerheads with a conservative dogma that insists upon small government and private enterprise even when it comes to airport security. The old British Empire, for instance, did not try to man its security system—the Royal Navy—by outsourcing to a Swedish personnel company. How does one police the Raj with a marketplace?

Donnelly rejects any notion that the U.S.—and its wealthy allies—cannot afford what he sees as their inevitable global commitments. He points to the relative ease with which NATO has been able to pacify the Balkans—so far—despite reservations from the likes of James Baker, who famously cautioned George H.W. Bush that “we don’t have a dog in that fight.”

“We’re going to be in central Asia for a long time,” Donnelly claims—sounding as stalwart and even cheery as any Kipling hero. “When you’re a global superpower, you’ve got a dog in every fight.”

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