America and the World

Daniel Pipes reviews Samuel P. Huntington's Who Are We: The Challenges to America's National Identity and gives this framework of different ideologies look at the world.

Along the way, Mr.Huntington observes that Americans can choose among three broad visions for their country in relation to the outside world.

Cosmopolitan: America "welcomes the world, its ideas, its goods, and, most importantly, its people." In this vision, the country strives to become multiethnic, multiracial, and multicultural. The United Nations and other international organizations increasingly influence American life. Diversity is an end in itself; national identity declines in importance. In brief, the world reshapes America.

Imperial: America reshapes the world. This impulse is fueled by a belief in "the supremacy of American power and the universality of American values." America's unique military, economic, and cultural might bestows on it the responsibility to confront evil and to order the world. Other peoples are assumed basically to share the same values as Americans; Americans should help them attain those values. America is less a nation than "the dominant component of a supranational empire."

National: "America is different" and its people recognize and accept what distinguishes them from others. That difference results in large part from the country's religious commitment and its Anglo-Protestant culture. The nationalist outlook preserves and enhances those qualities that have defined America from its inception. As for people who are not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, they "become Americans by adopting its Anglo-Protestant culture and political values."

Mr. Huntington sums up this triad of choices: "America becomes the world. The world becomes America. America remains America."

The left tends to the cosmopolitan vision; the right divides among imperialists and nationalists. Personally, I have wavered between the latter two, sometimes wanting the United States to export its humane political message and at other times fearful that such efforts, however desirable, will overextend the American reach and end in disaster.

Which brings us back to Iraq and the choices at hand.

Cosmopolitans reject the unilateralism of the Iraq campaign, despise the notion of guiding the Iraqis to "a free and peaceful" country, and deeply suspect the Bush administration's motives. They demonstrate on the streets and hurl invectives from television studios.

Imperialists are guiding American policy toward Iraq, where they see a unique opportunity not just to rehabilitate that country but to spread American ways through the Middle East.

And nationalists find themselves, as usual, somewhere in between. They sympathize with the imperial vision but worry about its practicalities and consequences. As patriots, they take pride in American accomplishments and hope U.S. influence will spread. But they have two worries: that the outside world is not ready to Americanize and Americans are unwilling to spend the blood and treasure to carry off an imperial mission.