Fall 2009

I  have bad news for you. You’re an imperialist. I realize that for a man like you, educated in the highest circles of modern academia, what I’ve said is a grave insult. While I’m at it, let me offend you completely. Your foreign policy is an attempt “To veil the threat of terror / And check the show of pride.” You’ve vowed to “Send forth the best ye breed—Go bind your sons to exile / To serve your captives’ need.” The result of all this will be to—I’ll bet you a second term—“Watch Sloth and heathen Folly / Bring all your hope to naught.”

The poem I’ve been quoting is by Rudyard Kipling (British, 1865­­–1936). I doubt they teach much Kipling in the highest circles of academia these days. And I doubt they teach much about imperialism except that it’s an epithet. To learn about the slur you can’t escape you’ll have to go back to premodern academia, before it got high and started going in circles. In the 1940s, Hans Kohn, the Sydenham Clark Parsons Professor of History at Smith College, wrote that “the concept of imperialism carried various connotations in the different periods of history.” According to Kohn, among these connotations is a “liberal” one. We owe it to Alexander the Great. And it has been recurring intermittently for 24 centuries: “a world state, a cosmopolis, in which all the inhabitants would live in complete equality, in intermarriage and commercial exchange, on the basis of one common civilization.” Professor Kohn argued that what nineteenth-century British imperialism connoted was an attempt “to bring the occidental concepts of political liberty and human dignity to oriental nations.” Professor Kohn further argued that “as a result of its ethical basis, liberal imperialism carried its self-annulment with it.” He was wrong on this last point. Because here are the British—and us along with them—“somewheres east of Suez” again, bringing more occidental concepts to eastern nations whose previous supply seems to be used up.

There is an irony to this, which brings us back to Kipling. He was fond of irony. And he was considered to be the poet laureate of imperialism when imperialism was still considered to be worthy of laurels. Mr. President, undo some of the damage from the hours you wasted as an undergraduate reading Frantz Fanon and Edward Said and brush up on your Kipling.

P. J. O’Rourke is a political satirist, author, and correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly.