I would first like to thank Ned Lebow for his generous review and insightful critique of my work. Our projects, as anyone who reads this exchange will no doubt recognize, are similar: Lebow, Simon Reich, and I are interested in challenging the notion of America as “the essential nation.” We do this from complementary perspectives, and our differences reflect, perhaps, our subdisciplinary inclinations regarding the relationship between language and power.

In his review, Lebow asks why it is important for my analysis to call the United States an empire, particularly in light of the neocons’ push to embrace the term. Accepting the neocon framing, he argues, would entail “changing our beliefs” about America’s democratic values and practices. However, as I argue in my book, American and British character narratives about both nations’ “democratic values and practices” were/are predicated on, and discursively bound to, practices of imperialism. In America, this has been true since before the founding of the Republic, and imperial practices have existed right alongside a collective denial of imperialism ever since. Citizens, scholars, and policymakers in both countries have long tried to square the circle between liberal democratic values and empire through elaborate strategies of deflection that entail historical retelling, careful forgetting, and disavowal. Given this deflective tradition, I maintain that the best way to oppose the neocons is not to fall back on narratives that insist that “we are not an empire and therefore refuse to let the neocons change our values.” Rather, challenging deflective American narratives about our exceptionalism might very well demand that we “change our beliefs” about who we think we are—and have been—in the context of empire.

In this sense, it is also important, I argue, to demonstrate the ways liberalism has been complicit with imperial politics, and this requires demonstrating how capacious liberalism is as an ideology. Lebow is not entirely correct when he maintains that the contemporary authors I scrutinize are not liberals. Michael Ignatieff, in his domestic policy in particular, is a tried and true liberal in a way that Lebow would recognize—supportive of welfare state policies, civil liberties, and so on. Donald Kagan calls many aspects of his politics “liberal,” and Niall Ferguson makes ample use of his support for civil liberties, freedom of speech, and human rights when he contrasts “the West” with “the Rest.” Likewise, while Alfred Zimmern might have been moderately agonized by the disconnect between British imperialism and liberalism, the Round Tablers and Jan Smuts certainly were not. If anything, Smuts was even more cynical in his crafty expansion of Anglo-imperialism (in the name of internationalism) than any contemporary neocon. In other words, the differences and similarities among these authors point not to the necessity of saving liberalism from the contemporary neocons but, again, to the need to call liberalism’s expansive and historic attachment to empire into question.

To clarify, I do not mean to imply here that challenging the myth of American exceptionalism means jettisoning the liberal democratic baby with the imperial bathwater. But it does require active reflection on those moments when American empire and American liberalism were/are not merely in tension but constitutive of each. From a scholarly perspective, critical exchanges like this—between sympathetic authors with different approaches to American hegemony—might just be the best way to begin that conversation.