The Emperor Wore Cowboy Boots

Why does it matter if the United States is an empire in any objectively definable sense? All this academic and political pundit hand-wringing, over whether the United States should technically be labeled an empire or not, seems oddly out of step with the sorts of egregious foreign policy behaviors the United States engages in on a daily basis. Yet the words we use to describe something do matter a great deal to what we see and how we act in the world. In this paper, I argue that the closer one looks at the debate over the empire designation, the more one begins to see an underlying dynamic of political self-delusion that is endemic to the American power project. America wields enormous power that affects the daily lives of people around the globe, but like a schoolchild on the playground it does not like to be called names. The extent to which political observers participate in this obfuscation is an interesting topic in its own right, as it underscores how name-calling is a political act in itself.