# Cumings, Bruce, "Is America an Imperial Power?," Current History (November 2003). 1.12-15

Imperialisms, Ancient and Modern, Cumings, Bruce, "Is America an Imperial Power?," Current History (November 2003)., Lines 1.12-1.15. Latin.

Canonical: https://interlinea.aeterna-institute.org/library/latin/imperialisms-ancient-and-modern/cumings-bruce-is-america-an-imperial-power-current-history-november-2003/1.12

This term best captures the US role in the world, understood as a consensual leadership in which the United States ranks first among equals, and where the ultimate goal is the growth and flourishing of a unified world economy. For four decades, however, American leaders achieved only a second-best world. The Soviet Union and the militarized and exclusively held empire that it created in postwar Eastern Europe were self-sufficient and well defended; the Soviet leaders could say nyet any time they wanted, and they did so all the time in the 1940s and 1950s. That reality essentially created the two-bloc, polarized cold war world from 1947 to1991.
But the world also experienced a completely unanticipated history in the violent period of decolonization that lasted for three decades, until the Portuguese empire finally collapsed in 1975, The world witnessed bloody and disastrous wars in Korea and Vietnam, the ongoing reorientation of revolutionary China, and the ultimate collapse of the Soviet empire and Soviet Union—all experiences that would have flabbergasted a statesman seeking to chart the postwar order in 1945. Never could the Achesons and Stimsons have imagined the fierce energy of aroused colonial peoples in the 1940s, for whom classical imperialism and a recent feudal past were hated realities and the promises of liberal modernism, an utter chimera. Nor could the theory of totalitarianism that long ruled the minds of American planners conceive of the possibility that courageous people in myriad civil-society groups (beginning with Poland's Solidarity) would bring down Eastern European communism from within.
THE HEGEMON COMETH
The internationalist presuppositions molded into the bones of Acheson, Henry Stimson, Robert Lovett, and many others by the experience of the 1930s explain how our world order came into being. Kennan, the anonymous "Mr. X" author of an influential Foreign Affairs article that proposed containment of communism, is often considered the behind-the-scenes architect of the postwar global order. But Acheson was the true "Mr. X" of his time—and of ours. The globalized world materialized in its full glory after the end of the cold war, and was the anticipated fulfillment, if by a tortuous path, of the plans, hopes, and dreams of American and Western internationalists. They learned the searing lessons of the Great Depression and the world war that it spawned. They took guidance from an imperial British model of hegemonic leadership—minus the colonies—to become the power of last resort. Like England but in a much more egalitarian manner, the United States also filled out its national and material interests with the classic ideas of liberalism: liberty, democracy, freedom of speech, civil rights, civil society. Honored in the breach by the racially segregated America of the first two decades after World War II, these ideas nonetheless had revolutionary implications for much of the rest of the world.

---

Imperialisms, Ancient and Modern, Cumings, Bruce, "Is America an Imperial Power?," Current History (November 2003).. Text: The Latin Library (thelatinlibrary.com), used with permission. Changes: HTML markup removed and the text divided into reading sections by Interlinea.
License: Used with permission (https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/about.html). Source: http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/imperialism/readings/cumings.html.