In this fascinating and timely study of democracy and empire, Jeanne Morefield offers a comparative study of early twentieth-century Britain and early twenty-first-century United States. She argues persuasively that a strategy of “deflection” was resorted to by elites in both countries to address the contradictions between domestic values and foreign practices. Deflection attempts to draw public attention at home and abroad away from embarrassing and otherwise unacceptable acts by insisting on the “liberal” character and, therefore, benign intentions of the empire. Morefield sees an upsurge in this kind of apologia in Britain in the decade before World War I and during World War I and its aftermath, and in the United States since the end of the Cold War and more dramatically, since 9/11. She interprets this discourse as a response to growing perceptions of imperial decline in both countries.

Morefield documents her thesis with telling statements from many prominent British and American intellectuals and politicians and describes the thought and trajectories of six of them in considerable detail. In Britain, they are Oxford classicist and international relations commentator Alfred Zimmern; members of the Round Table, notably Lionel Curtis and Philip Kerr; and South African general and British war cabinet member Jan Smuts. In the United States, we see empire through the eyes of three neoconservatives: historians Donald Kagan and Niall Ferguson—the latter an Englishmen who works in America—and writer and politician Michael Ignatieff, who is Canadian born, British educated, and former head of the Canadian Liberal Party. It is both an odd and appropriate choice of figures. It is odd because the majority of these figures are immigrants or foreigners, or son of immigrants in the case of Zimmern. It is fitting in that the author’s subjects describe “empires” as upholding and spreading universal values and open to people who assimilate them.

Morefield attributes the deflection strategy to liberals, as they suffer most from the dissonance of empire. By emphasizing the liberal character of their state and its world mission, liberal imperialists can “have their cake and eat it too.” Their country “is compelled to act imperially to save the world from imperialism, and yet is never responsible for having created the conditions that require it to save the world in the first place because it was always, even when it was not, just being who it was” (p. 3).

Morefield is definitely on to something important here. Her strategy of deflection was resorted to by supporters of British and American imperialism in similar ways, and she marshals evidence that it was generally for similar reasons. In the United States, deflection strategy is not limited to neoconservatives or members and supporters of the second Bush administration. Barack Obama and his coterie of advisors speak in the same voice. They routinely resort to “who we are” language that stresses the benign nature of Americans and their selfless commitment to make the world a better place in order to discourage critical reflection about military intervention, torture of civilians and captured combatants, collateral damage arising from the use of drones, and other policies seemingly at odds with these values.

The author offers a detailed and nuanced reading of the figures to whom she devotes chapters. She attempts to identify their values, the ways they developed or changed in response to events, and, above all, their take on empire. The most interesting of the readings may be of Zimmern, who made Athens his template for empire and imagined the British Empire as its worthy successor. The most tedious—through no fault of the author—is of Donald Kagan, whose views are simple, crude, and certain. The most poignant is of Michael Ignatieff, whose turn to tragedy is ironic, as his own hubris, as it did for Athens, led him farther and farther away from the values in which he claims to be anchored.

This is a fine book and notable contribution to the growing field of intellectual history of empire. For many readers, two concerns will nevertheless spring to mind. The first is Morefield’s characterization of the United States as an empire. Second is the extent to which the three defenders of American empire she writes about are representative of American liberals, or even qualify as liberals.

Morefield defines an empire as “a state that engages in direct or indirect rule over dependent or colonial territories” (p. 4). Drawing on Michael Doyle, she characterizes imperialism as the “process or policy of establishing or maintaining an empire” (p. 4).^{Footnote 1} Imperialism and empire promote hierarchy, discipline, dispossession, extraction, and exploitation (p. 4). To be sure, Britain was an unabashed empire for centuries, and politicians and intellectuals across the spectrum used the term to describe those territories that flew the Union Jack and were painted pink on maps and globes. The United States acquired colonial holdings in the late nineteenth century, but politicians and intellectuals were never comfortable in calling themselves an empire and more so after World War II when the Philippines was recognized as independent in 1946. Efforts by neoconservatives like Kagan, Ferguson and Ignatieff to use the term after the end of the Cold War to describe America’s role in the world met considerable resistance and showed little traction. This opposition, I believe, was primarily due to the odium that now surrounds empire. It is an enterprise associated by most Americans with racism, exploitation, and violent imposition of rule over those who want to be self-governing.

One can argue, as do neoconservatives and left-wing critics of U.S. foreign policy, that America has an informal empire, notably in Latin America. But why call it an empire? The Left does this to expose the nature of American political and commercial relationships with allegedly independent countries and emphasize the contradiction this poses between practices and professed values. For neocons, I believe, the appeal is just the reverse. By acknowledging America as an empire, they hope to justify and gain support for policies at odds with liberalism, like domestic surveillance, the indiscriminate use of force, indefinite imprisonment of politically undesirables without trial, and reliance on torture to extract what might be useful information. The three neocons featured in the book are thus different beasts from their three English imperial predecessors. Zimmern, Smuts, and many members of the Round Table were to varying degrees liberal. They recognized and were concerned with the contradictions between values and practices and sought to overcome this dissonance by deflection, but also imperial reform. There were differences among them, to be sure. Zimmern was the most concerned with violations of liberal norms because he was a true liberal who believed that the British Empire should reflect these values. The Round Table members and Smuts had more instrumental concerns. They wanted Britain to remain strong in a competitive world, and this, they believed, required meaningful self-governance for white settler colonies and camouflage to mask self-interested rule elsewhere.

The three defenders of American “empire” that Morefield features are hardly representatives of American liberal opinion. The author (pp. 4–5) is clear that she uses “liberal” only in the context of empire, and that all of the figures she studies believe that the British and American empires are based on the liberal principles of freedom, individualism, and universal equality. Kagan is a conservative ideologue and moved to the right in response to the social and political upheaval of the 1960s. He is not associated with any values or causes that could be called liberal in the twentieth-century understanding of the term. Ferguson is described by Morefield as a die-hard Thatcherite, that is, an opponent of state intervention in the economy and other kinds of collectivism. This makes him a nineteenth-century liberal at best. But it is not evident that Ferguson has any values beyond self-aggrandizement. Ignatieff was once a true liberal and disciple of Isaiah Berlin. He underwent a conversion for which the catalysts appear to have been in roughly equal measure the course of post–Cold War events and his career as a public intellectual and politician. While British defenders of empire were embarrassed by deviations, their neoconservative American (and Canadian) counterparts revel in it. Nor at the height of their influence did they regard America as a declining empire, but one that still had the potential, and now the opportunity, to remake the world.

I think it fair to say that there is a continuum in American opinion that is anchored on the left end by true liberals. Here, we find those few politicians and journalists, and many international relations scholars, who had the courage to speak out against intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, and subsequently, with much broader support, against Guantanamo, rendition, waterboarding, drones, and illegal or improper foreign and domestic surveillance. At the other end of the spectrum are the neocons, including the three described in this book, many politicians like John McCain, and journalists associated with conservative or right-wing publications and think tanks. There is nothing liberal about this crowd, with the possible exception of opposition to racism in the United States. In between are arrayed the vast majority of Americans, and arguably somewhere in the center most members of the Obama administration. This is, of course, a simplistic portrayal because there are libertarians like Rand Paul who oppose military intervention, and conservatives who worry about overextension and the use of the U.S. military for purposes for which it was not designed. They support cautious foreign policies for different reasons than do liberals.

Those in the center and close to it on either side are most likely to be liberals and also supporters of a would-be hegemonic, or at least activist, role in the world for the United States. They are the group, not the neocons, who most need some strategy for overcoming dissonance. Many engage in deflection, which as Morefield so nicely describes, has several interlocking features. The one that Simon Reich and I focus on in Good-Bye Hegemony! is the belief in America as “the essential nation,” in the words of former Secretary of State Madeline Albright. This flattering self-characterization is encouraged by American leaders and taken to heart by so much of the population.^{Footnote 2} Many other Americans with at least some liberal values prefer to engage in denial. They do their best to insulate themselves from reports of American atrocities and violations of human rights. Some distance themselves further by not voting.

It is important, and Morefield concurs, to examine these discourses in a broader historical context. Empires proclaiming liberal values, and even some, like Portugal and Spain, that did not, have always confronted cognitive dissonance arising from the contradictions between their proclaimed values and repressive practices. Thucydides has Pericles attempt to square this circle in his funeral oration, where he justifies empire on the basis of what Athens does for its “allies”^{Footnote 3} The Anglo-Normans did the same in the aftermath of their conquest of Ireland.^{Footnote 4} They portrayed the Irish as barbarians in need of a strong hand to civilize them. The clash between the Christian values of colonizers and their non-Christian treatment of subjects prompted the use of perceptual sleights of hand and the stereotypes they supported to dehumanize the colonized so that these values no long applied. Alternatively, the colonized were described as children who required tutelage and oversight until they reached maturity. The Portuguese, Spanish, British, French, and American empires made use of one or both strategies, as did Americans in their treatment at home of African Americans. This is the principal reason why the stereotype of diverse colonial peoples is so strikingly similar.^{Footnote 5}

What is new—to the extent that anything is new—is the even more pronounced contradictions between liberal democracy and empire and the inability to hide or ignore them in a world of television, Internet, and social media. We can reduce dissonance of this kind by ignoring, redefining, or changing behavior or by changing our beliefs. The last choice is the most dangerous in its consequences as it threatens to undermine democratic values and practices. This is why neoconservatism and its plea to reframe America as an empire and to relish in its imperial role constitutes the kind of threat that Zimmern, Smuts, and the Round Table did not.