Bruce Fein is a constitutional scholar and served as the associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1982 and as general counsel to the Federal Communications Commission. He is cofounder of the American Freedom Agenda and writes weekly columns for The Washington Times and Politico.com. His forthcoming book American Empire, Before the Fall will be published by Campaign for Liberty.

We, the current citizens of the United States, have all been raised to embrace the American Empire without questioning its premises, just as British
subjects more than a century ago viscerally cherished and celebrated
the British Empire. The justifications for empires are
characteristically unexamined to conceal an unflattering truth: they
are all fueled by a base, animalistic craving to dominate other nations
and people for the sake of domination. Empires historically have
succumbed to ruination because of military overreach and global
resentments.

Acclaimed Austrian scholar Joseph Schumpeter captured the essence of empire in his 1919 description of imperialism in The Sociology of Imperialism:

For it is always a question, when one speaks of imperialism, of the assertion of an aggressiveness whose real basis does not lie in the aims followed at
the moment but an aggressiveness in itself. And actually history shows
us people and classes who desire expansion for the sake of expanding,
war for the sake of fighting, domination for the sake of dominating. It
values conquest not so much because of the advantages it brings, which
are often more than doubtful, as because it is conquest, success,
activity. Although expansion as self-purpose always needs concrete
objects to activate it and support it, its meaning is not included
therein. Hence its tendency toward the infinite unto the exhaustion of
its forces, and its motto: plus ultra. Thus we define: Imperialism
is
the object-less disposition of a state to expansion by force without
assigned limits.

Our analysis of historical material show[s]: First,
the undoubted fact that object-less tendencies toward forceful
expansion without definite limits of purpose, nonrational and
irrational, purely instinctive inclinations to war and conquest, play a
very great role in the history of humanity. As paradoxical as it
sounds, innumerable wars, perhaps the majority of all wars, have been
waged without sufficient reason.

Earmarks of the American Empire, further corroboration of Schumpeter's observations of imperialism, are legion.

In the American Republic, the law was king. In the American Empire, the President is law.

After 9/11, both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama claimed unchecked authority to assassinate any American suspected of creating a
"constant" and "imminent" danger to United States interests abroad.
President Bush was advised by the Department of Justice that his
Commander in Chief powers empowered him massacre civilians in the
alleged "war" on international terrorism.

President Obama asserts that the provision of legal services on behalf of a listed foreign terrorist organization or a specially designated global
terrorist to challenge the constitutionality of the listings or
designations is itself a federal felony, i.e., asserting innocence of
endangering national security is a crime! Punishing lawyers for
providing legal representation is what partially condemns Russia and
China as tyrannies. Indeed, Nazi lawyers in the postwar Nuremberg
Justice Cases were prosecuted for complicity in a decree of May 21,
1942, which stipulated, "that in accordance with the order on penal
justice in Poland of 4 December 1941 attorneys are not (to) undertake
the defense of Polish persons before tribunals in the incorporated
Eastern territories." Due process in the American Empire has reverted
to the legally primitive days before Magna Carta in 1215.

Anything done in the name of defeating international terrorism is legal. President
Bush was advised that his powers as Commander in Chief superseded
any limitation enacted by Congress -- including prohibitions of
torture, kidnapping, or even homicide -- if such presidential
lawlessness is thought helpful to thwarting jihadists.

Government lawlessness, like the rising and setting of the sun, is no longer news. The FBI illegally collected more than 2,000 U.S. telephone call records
between 2002 and 2006 by invoking bogus terrorism emergencies or
persuading phone companies to cooperate in violation of the Electronic
Communications Privacy Act. No FBI agent is sanctioned.

President Bush and his national security circle flouted the criminal prohibitions of
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for more than five years by
intercepting the phone calls or emails of American citizens on American
soil without a judicial warrant. No criminal investigation ensues.
Waterboarding, i.e., torture, likewise goes unprosecuted. Neither the
attorneys who concocted legal justifications for the crime nor doctors
who participated in the interrogation abuses nor government officials
who authorized it are sanctioned.

Former Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution, boasts that he showered billions of taxpayer dollars on
failing financial institutions without a crumb of legal authority yet
encountered no legal or political repercussions.

President Barack Obama has followed if not bettered the national security instruction of the Bush-Cheney duumvirate, confounding messianic
expectations.

His 2010 Nobel Peace Prize address boasted of the American Empire's six decades of policing the world and of his unchecked power, reminiscent of
British kings', to commence war in ostensible defense of the United
States or for professed humanitarian purposes on his say-so alone.
President Obama emphasized: "I -- like any head of state -- reserve the
right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation." The
President spoke while he unilaterally expanded United States wars in
Afghanistan and Pakistan against enemies unthreatening to United States
sovereignty

More than 100,000 American troops are fighting in Iraq while civil war or partition looms in the wake of the acrimonious elections of March 2010.
An indefinite military presence is planned there in hopes of
stabilizing the region.

The post-9/11 perpetual and global war against international terrorism continues
unabated. The United States claims unique legal power to violate the
sovereignty of every foreign country with predator drones, missile
strikes, or foot soldiers in seeking to capture or kill any al-Qaeda
suspect.

United States weapons, money, special forces, military advisors, and nation-building
bureaucrats are poised to intervene in Yemen in response to a foiled
Christmas Day attempt to blow up a commercial aircraft by a Muslim
youth who may have been radicalized there. Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton worries that "The instability in Yemen is a threat to regional
stability and even global stability." The Chairman of the Senate
Homeland Security Committee, Joe Lieberman (Ind., Conn.), declares the
incident an act of war that requires a military
not a law enforcement response -- like fighting the Nazi Luftwaffe or
Emperor Hirohito's Zero aircraft in World War II. He urges that the
would-be suicide bomber, 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, be
regarded as a prisoner of war and prosecuted before a military
commission, denuded of ordinary due process protections.

After Yemen, Somalia is in the queue to be invaded by the American Empire because of collaboration between the Somali terrorist organization al-Shabab and
al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. War ineluctably expands to wherever
a terrorist may dwell.

Empire's exponents falsely assert that critical intelligence will be frustrated if suspected terrorists are criminally prosecuted because defense lawyers
will advise silence. Yet in more than 200 terrorist-related convictions
obtained since 9/11, criminal defendants have regularly provided
counterterrorism intelligence to obtain leniency or other deals. In
November 2009, federal prosecutors in Minneapolis unsealed criminal
charges against eight Somali men who had served as recruiters, sending
area youths from the Twin Cities into Africa to serve as suicide
bombers. The prosecution's case was assembled with help from suspects
who had been quietly cooperating with authorities.

A Chicago suspect, after detention at O'Hare International Airport, exposed fresh details of the
2008 plot to bomb hotels, a train station, and a Jewish cultural center
in Mumbai. David Coleman Headley has pleaded guilty to a crime and is
cooperating with prosecutors, U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald
has disclosed.

Bryant Neal Vinas, a former New York City transit worker and convert to Islam, provided U.S. and Belgian law
enforcement a deeper understanding of al-Qaeda training camps and
testified in European courts against fellow trainees, according to
court papers.

The incentive to talk in exchange for reduced criminal charges or punishment is
enormous. Abdulmutallab continues to talk to the FBI despite receiving
Miranda warnings and retaining an attorney.

Tiny Denmark, whose defense budget is a decimal point of the Pentagon's, is less
easily frightened than the United States. On January 1, 2010, a Somali
Muslim attempted to assassinate artist Kurt Westergaard in revenge for
a 2005 cartoon depicting the Prophet Mohammad as a terrorist. The
portrayal had earlier provoked Muslim firebombing attacks on Danish
diplomatic missions and three other radical Islamic plots to kill the
Danish cartoonist. Denmark's intelligence chief asserted the
assassination incident was "terrorist related," with a possible
connection to al-Shabab. The Danish Prime Minister descried the
terrorism as "an attack on our open society and our democracy." Yet
Denmark did not declare war on terrorism or against al-Shabab. It did
not declare the would-be assassin a prisoner of war or slate him for
trial before a military commission. The Danish government arrested and
charged the accused with attempted murder subject to prosecution in
civilian courts with customary due process protections. The easily
alarmed American Empire, in contrast, would have condemned the
attempted assassination as an act of war subject to prosecution before
a military tribunal.

Fright and expense prompted the Obama administration to abandon a federal criminal
prosecution of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, mastermind of the 9/11
abominations, in New York City.

The United States has never been safer from existential threats. Yet Americans are
inundated with an endless stream of fear-inducing stories featured in
leading newspapers and broadcasts. As Scott Shane in The New York
Times has written (January 13, 2010): "As terrorist plots against
the United States have piled up in recent months, politicians and the
news media have sounded the alarm with a riveting message for
Americans: Be afraid. Al Qaeda is on the march again, targeting the
country from within and without, and your hapless government cannot
protect you.

"But the politically charged clamor has lumped together disparate cases and
obscured the fact that the enemies on American soil in 2009 ... were a
scattered, uncoordinated group of amateurs who displayed more fervor
than skill...

"Exactly 14 of the approximately 14,000 murders in the United States resulted from
allegedly jihadist attacks: 13 people shot at Fort Hood in Texas in
November and one at a military recruiting station in Little Rock, Ark.,
in June." In contrast, 21 were murdered at Virginia Tech by a mentally
imbalanced student in 2007.

The American Empire's exaggerations corroborate General Douglas MacArthur's
post-World War II observation: "Our economy is now geared to an arms
economy bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and
an incessant propaganda of fear." Fear is chronically brandished by
demagogic leaders to coax the masses to accept anything in the name of
safety. H.L. Mencken elaborated in 1918: "Civilization, in fact, grows
more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it
tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of
practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous
to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them
imaginary."

The Founding Fathers would be appalled by the American Empire. They had constructed
an American Republic to repudiate crusades, constant warfare, or
virtual deification of the Commander in Chief. They had pledged their
lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to defeat the British Empire with its
global military tentacles, unchecked executive, secrecy, and ubiquitous
government regulation and protectionism. President Thomas Jefferson's
First Inaugural Address proclaimed: "Peace, commerce, and honest
friendship with all nations -- entangling alliances with none."
President Grover Cleveland elaborated on the foreign policy of the
United States inherited from the Constitution's makers:

It is the policy of peace suitable to our interests. It is the policy of
neutrality; rejecting any share in foreign brawls and ambitions on
other continents, and repelling their intrusion here. It is the policy
of Monroe and of Washington and Jefferson: Peace, commerce, and honest
friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.

The Founding Fathers' handiwork has turned to ashes. The vast majority of Americans
irrespective of political persuasion unthinkingly assume that the
United States should project itself into every nook and cranny of the
globe to bolster national security and freedom by guaranteeing
international stability and giving birth to new democracies. President
Barack Obama, speaking at West Point on December 1, 2009, insisted that
the United States has fought and will continue to fight for a better
future for our children and grandchildren, whose future, in turn,
depends on
other people living in freedom and opportunity. In other words, the
United States must fight to purge the world of tyranny and to prevent
retrogression (as from Russia's Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin)
because freedom for Americans requires liberty throughout the planet.

That moral conviction stems partially from the Empire's self-righteousness.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower sermonized: "America is great because
she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to
be great."

Taken from the Forthcoming book: American
Empire, Before the Fall

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