If we are to judge from the objective record of history, it would seem that salt water is the natural cement of empire. For across the centuries, nation after nation has risen to towering stature in world affairs, only to give place to some' other; and the zenith of world power for each of them has coincided with its mastery of the seas. This principle should help us to set in true historical perspective the dominant role of the United States in the mid twentieth century world. For with America, as with other nations that have risen to hegemony, the zenith of its global power coincides with the possession of a maritime strength overshadowing that of other nations.
The United States in the 1950s is strong in every aspect of military power. But in only one of the several military arms—sea power —does it have such strength as to tower above all other countries in combination. Yet the America of our time, even though it occupies the place of great eminence that sundry empires have held in past centuries, is not an imperial power. The bases of its greatness differ from those of historic empires. And its relationship to the world differs correspondingly. America in mid-century is truly an empire, but only if we take some liberties with the word and stretch it to cover a type of national development unique in history.
The grandeur of Spain in its greatest age rested on various circumstances and forces— on the unfolding opportunity revealed to venturesome men by the Age of Discovery, on the driving power of religious conviction and missionary zeal, on the sensational abundance of precious metals in the New World, and on the vast flow of wealth back to the wharves of Sevilla. But, above all, Spain was able to seize opportunity and to be the premier nation of the sixteenth century because her galleons and the men who sailed and fought them were the best on the seas. When they ceased to be such, and Spain no longer could assure herself undisputed sea communication with the Americas, the decline of Spanish world power commenced. It continued until one of the greatest empires of history was wholly liquidated. Maritime power was not the central cause of Spanish primacy, but it was the instrumentality.
Great Britain’s world dominance, spread across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, owed its long endurance to the fact that it was solidly rooted in sea power and in commercial enterprise and was backed up by a high order of statesmanship. It was dramatically foreshadowed by the defeat of the Spanish Armada, just before the beginning of the seventeenth century. But its origins lay in the headstart the British enjoyed in the great industrial revolution that was to change the whole nature of the world. Insulated in some measure from Europe’s interminable, petty wars by twenty precious miles of salt water, Great Britain became a unified, modern state before the others. Driven to overseas trade by the very meagerness of their natural resources, the British made their island the workshop of the world; and their merchant fleets spread out over all the oceans, to extend the commercial and, in time, the military power of the United Kingdom. Thus the British put together an “empire on which the sun never sets.”
Britain’s empire was not built primarily by conquest, although military force was employed repeatedly in the subjugation of India, for example, and in many, many lesser segments. Maritime trade held the key. British traders went out in ships to buy the raw materials and to sell the products of a manufacturing and processing nation. British investors went out with the surplus profits of a thriving industrial system to commence the economic development of other lands. In time, British soldiers went out, in modest numbers, not vast armies, to tidy up the conquests made initially by sea-faring merchants. Britain’s surplus people went out in ships to open new continents and to settle North America and the other English-speaking dominions. Civil servants went out to provide discipline and order in the colonies, to establish the rule of law, and lay the foundations of democratic self-government in a quarter of the world.
All this was possible because British merchantmen could sail the oceans in measurable security and because British troops could be landed in unruly colonies and then be supported or reinforced by sea. For two centuries the great banking houses of London were able to guide the flow of most of the world’s risk capital into underdeveloped areas—to England’s sumptuous profit—because fighting ships of the Royal Navy were at hand to protect sea communications to all the continents, and, when necessary, to exercise that punitive force which insured the open door to British commerce and investment. Indeed, in the early period of the building of the British empire in South Asia and Africa, it was nearly impossible to distinguish between commercial enterprise and governmental activity. India was opened to trade and governed initially by a great commercial company, not by public agents of the British Government. But the security of sea communications was the prime prerequisite, and this was the task of British naval power.
This is not to say that sea power is a generating force in the course of empire. It is nothing of the sort, except as the strategic requirements of a fleet may call for the acquisition of a few outlying bases. Even the most stupid monarch would never have launched a colonial war or ventured on imperial expansion merely to make use of a fleet he happened to have at hand. Sea power, rather, is a tool of national or imperial policy. It is an instrumentality of government. Once a government is led to extend its authority into new territories—in quest of overseas markets, or to convert the heathen, or to protect its nationals abroad, or from any other incentive—sea power becomes the weapon of policy, whether for good ends or bad.
What has been said of the Spanish and British empires in their epochs of greatness might be said with some modifications of the empire-building of Portugal and the frugal, systematic colonial expansion of the Dutch. France provides a quite different pattern, but proves the same point. For the heart of the French imperial system is in northern and central Africa, lying just across the Mediterranean from the homeland. In consequence, French sea power has been employed in an effort above all else to link France and her African colonies by secure control of the western Mediterranean.
In each case, empire has been the product of commercial enterprise, surplus population, investment, religious zeal, the humanitarian spirit, or the sheer vanity of monarchs—or some combination among these. Yet in each case, empire has emerged only when the catalyst of sea power has been present and active. It has been the agency through which these generative forces have brought about the extension of national power to imperial dimensions.
It is not only the empires created in the last five centuries that help to clarify our central thesis. There is something also to be learned from the empires that never quite came off—the grand designs of ambitious nations that collapsed before their empires could be buttressed and consolidated. Several times, Germany was the premier military power of the world. And in one period, from the turn of the twentieth century until the Battle of Jutland, Germany was also an eager bidder for naval supremacy. That, furthermore, was the period when Germany had something of an empire, with possessions in Africa and among the great and small islands of the Pacific. As long as Wilhelm’s Germany had a great fleet, a German empire was building. When the High Seas Fleet was eclipsed, proving again the ancient rule that a second-best fleet is worth next to nothing, the German empire was doomed. Soon after, it was dismantled. The Kaiser’s Germany mustered the greatest army known up to that time; but without sea mastery it could not assert its claim either to domination of Europe or to an empire overseas.
After a generation of uneasy peace, another Germany, that of Adolf Hitler, made a new bid. Hitler in fact carved out for his Reich a continental empire reaching from the Pyrenees to the North Cape of Norway, from the English Channel to the Black Sea. But it did not last 1000 years, as he had boasted it would. It lasted from 1940 to 1945. There are various reasons why it lasted only five years instead of 1000 years. But chief of them was the fact that its evil architect relied too greatly on superior ground and air forces. He was defeated by salt water, for without sea power he could not draw on overseas sources to support his war machine, he could not support his forces beyond the Mediterranean in North Africa, he could not invade the British Isles, and he could not prevent the marshalling of the vast power of the United States and its deployment by sea into Africa and Western Europe.
Hitler was more cunning than Wilhelm and his councillors, for he sought first to build a continental empire and only then reach out into West Africa and Latin America and South Asia—where he already had laid the groundwork for Nazi conquest. With greater patience, he might conceivably have succeeded; for once he commanded the bulk of continental Europe, he had the shipyards and heavy industry to create the engines of sea power—the only possible key to that global expansion of which he dreamed. Fortunately for the world, he was impatient.
Japan’s bid for great empire was more methodically planned, was marked by greater patience, and by far greater reliance on sea power, as befitted an island nation. Before the war, this waxing empire embraced Korea and Formosa, and the three clusters of diminutive islands that dot the central Pacific, which the Japanese scooped up after Wilhelm’s bid for empire failed. But the imperial system blueprinted in Tokyo was something immensely greater than this. It was to serve a highly industrialized Japan as Britain’s nineteenth century empire had served her industrial and trading economy. At its greatest extent, Japan’s empire embraced Manchuria, most of China, all of sputheast Asia, the whole of Indonesia, Burma, and even a segment of India. It lasted in this massive form from 1942 until 1945. Many factors—and many American fighting men—had a hand in its collapse. But if we are to single out a central factor, we may say Japan’s bid for great empire folded up because the Japanese did not have enough sea power to protect it. More specifically, they did not have enough air-sea power to win the crucial battles of Coral Sea and Midway, or enough anti-submarine sea power to prevent the slow, relentless strangulation of their home islands by undersea blockade.
Those successful empires that matured slowly and then endured for many years define for us the vital role of maritime power. So in a negative fashion do the abortive imperial designs that nearly came into secure existence, but stumbled on the very doorstep of empire. The command of sea communications holds the key, whether it be used patiently and unobtrusively, as by the British or the Dutch, or whether it be employed with frenetic haste, and unsuccessfully, as by Germany or Japan.
Is the attainment of great empire possible by other means than sea power? There can be no conclusive answer to this question. Hitler’s bid for world domination and its failure would suggest that in the conditions of the twentieth century it is not possible to achieve a true world hegemony without command of the oceans. But there is one possibility we dare not overlook. Asia, Europe and Africa form a vast continental complex. It could be a wholly self-contained region, with six-sevenths of the world’s people and most of its natural resources, were it brought under the discipline of a single imperial authority. And while the link with Africa is a tenuous one across the Suez Peninsula, it is at least conceivable that virtually all this “world island” might be conquered and held by ground-force armies, with some air support. If so, it would be great enough to exercise world domination.
There is a sinister promise of such an earth-bound empire in the stirring chronicle of the great Khans in the thirteenth century. The tools of war were very different then. But with the tools at hand, Genghis Khan started from his native Mongolia, in the heart of Asia. Before he died at age 70, he had brought northern China under his control, and also the steppe lands westward to the Caspian Sea. Kublai Khan extended his power, by further conquests and by wise administration, until it embraced all China and reached into what is now Tibet, Burma, and Indo-China. Batu Khan, another grandson of Genghis, with his Golden Horde, carried the ruthless conquest westward until most of European Russia and Turkey were corralled in this strange empire; and the western battle line ranged on through Poland, Hungary and Silesia. At no time was this vast domain a single, well-ordered political entity. Yet here was an empire of sorts, reaching from Hong Kong almost to Budapest. It was created by Mongol horsemen, the Panzer divisions of the thirteenth century, around the nucleus of the Eurasian heartland.
Who is to say it cannot happen again, and in the twentieth century? It would be foolhardy to say so, flatly; for this is the one region of our world in which military power without a maritime component may be able to carve out world empire. And more than one astute geopolitician has given the warning that control of the heartland of Eurasia confers the means of achieving world domination.
If one takes a map of Eurasia and plots on it the outermost limits of the great Khans in the year 1275, he finds that the frontiers reached by Genghis, Kublai, and Batu are substantially those of the Communist world of the 1950s. Both systems embrace China, Manchuria, Siberia, Russia, and a belt of eastern Europe. There is an ominous identity between the two areas. It confirms that any far-flung empire built by sea power and cemented by salt water may be challenged by a continental empire fashioned around the heartland of central Asia.
This is all the more meaningful at a time when American forces have been operating for more than two years at the outer end of a 6000-mile sea communication line in Korea, to impose a limit on the outward thrust of Communist power on the Asian mainland. It is doubly so when hard-pressed French forces are struggling to the same end in southeast Asia. Although ideologies and weapons alike have changed, it is in many respects the same basic conflict. Through centuries of history, and now in our own midcentury years, the fortunes of the world have revolved about this rivalry between the earthbound power of the Eurasian heartland and the sea-based power of successive empires sprawled over sundry continents and seas.
It is idle to attempt to formulate any clear-cut answer to the question. The most we can say is that world empires as a rule have been created by sea power, and that central Asia is the focal point from which great empire may perhaps be attained without sea power. And we may add that Soviet imperialism in our century has gone somewhat farther, geographically, than did the primitive imperialism of the Khans in the thirteenth century. One conclusion is inescapable. If the Kremlin’s bid for world power is to be contained or defeated, it will have to be done by a maritime empire—one that can summon its resources through the mobility conferred by sea command. This means the American empire, for America today possesses more sea power than all the other nations of the world combined.
But is there an American empire?
To this question, the answer cannot be a simple yes or no. The term empire could mean a far-flung maze of territories governed by American pro-consuls, where the American flag flies and where the law is given by the American Government, where all the peoples are “natives” and the fiat of a distant authority is indisputable. If that is what we mean by empire, there is no American empire, nor have the American people ever aspired to one. They have fought against imperialism more than once; and they are not likely to adopt and practice it.
However, there is a broader meaning for the term. An empire might mean a system of allies and partners spread around the world, looking to the strongest of their number for an integrating leadership, for wise counsel, for economic assistance, and for armed protection. Supplementing this, it might mean also a system of military bases from which the strongest of the family of free nations deploys its armed might, the better to contain any hostile force that threatens any member of the family. If this is a valid extension of the term empire, then there unmistakably is an American empire. In the 1950s, it probably is somewhere near the zenith of its world power.
It now must be our concern to recall the stages by which this unique American empire-without-imperialism came into being, and then to notice in what respects it resembles and in what respects it differs from the maritime empires of the past. Thus we may define its character and appraise its historic mission of containing the hostile power of the Soviet empire which has emerged in Eurasia with the same frontiers as the Mongol empires of seven centuries ago.
There is no well-defined, dramatic date at which the center of world power passed from Western Europe to North America. So there is no point in time at which this American empire came into formal existence. Just as the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 merely punctuates a gradual shift of dominance from Spain to England, so a single event might be chosen to mark the emergence of American power. The Battle of Midway, in early June of 1942, should do as well as any other milestone, for it represented the successful use of American sea power to turn the tide against the Axis Powers and foretell their ultimate downfall. But it remains only a punctuation mark—a dramatic episode in an extended historical process.
In the decades before the Battle of Midway, the focus of world power was still in the capitals of Europe, especially in London. There were found the bankers to the world, there the statesmen who made high policy for the international community. In Western Europe were found the great modern armies of the world, and the great armament industries. There also were the capitals from which five traditional empires were administered.
Gradually, American money, American productive facilities, American policy-making, and American military forces supplemented and supplanted those of Europe. The end of World War II brought the sudden disappearance of Germany and Japan as great military powers. It also left Great Britain, France, and their lesser neighbors greatly reduced in resources and strength. Some of the former centers of world power even became power vacuums for a time. With awesome suddenness, it fell to the United States to come forward and provide the leadership, the initiative, the economic resources, and the military strength to preserve, rebuild and protect the free world whose freedom had been rescued at such appalling cost.
From 1945, indeed from 1942, Washington, D. C., has been the acknowledged “capital” of the free world. There in the war years the Combined Chiefs of Staff shaped the military policy of a great coalition. There, even before Pearl Harbor, an American Congress placed billions of dollars worth of war materials in the scales, to help turn the tide of world conflict. There, after the war, successive Congresses allotted unprecedented sums of money for UNRRA aid, for the Marshall Plan, for military assistance to a score of friendly nations. Between the beginning of the war and the middle of 1952, the United States extended overseas aid to the staggering total of $82 billions—some in loans, some in conditional grants, some in outright gifts, and some as contributions to the aid programs of various international •agencies. Half of that astounding total was given or lent after V-J Day—not in desperation to win a war but in hope and faith to build a new kind of empire and thus a workable world order.
Imperialism? It is the reverse of imperialism. For the traditional goal of empire was to squeeze the utmost profit or tribute from outlying dominions. Never had the world seen any flow of wealth from one rich country into other countries on a scale remotely comparable. These were not loans or gifts of money. They were orders on the productive facilities of the United States, for every sort of merchandise—foodstuffs, industrial raw materials, farm machinery and seeds, industrial and transport equipment, guns, tanks, aircraft, ships—almost anything one might name.
Yet this stupendous outflow of goods was one of the vital processes by which this new American empire was created. It had for its purpose the reconstruction and revitalizing of those nations whose vigor and security were essential to our own. It helped to bring about the spectacular recovery of Western Europe. It helped to save Greece from absorption into the Communist empire. It helped to make Turkey a strong bulwark of the free world. It revived Japan and made her once more a bastion against Russian power in the Far East. It is now preserving the industrial half of Germany for the coalition of the West.
One of the larger purposes of this long- range policy was the restoration of the strength of our oldest and most trusted allies, such as Great Britain and France. Another purpose was the buttressing of certain vital strategic positions and communications routes. This is exemplified in the Greek-Turkish aid program launched early in 1947, which insured the independence of Turkey and Greece and the security of the Dardanelles, and so the safety of the Mediterranean sea route. Still another purpose, made urgent by aggressive Soviet imperialism, was to draw the defeated enemies, Japan, Germany, and Italy, into the Western orbit, to make them partners against the new empire threatening us from middle Asia. Yet another was to build up steadily the military potential of those friendly states who might serve most effectively in an anti- Soviet coalition.
All this had been accomplished by the end of 1952, excepting only the final inclusion of the German Federal State in the European community. Still another task, reserved for future accomplishment but already well under way, is the integration of the whole community of free Europe. Only if it is federated or otherwise united can it become a productive, efficient defensible political unit, strong enough to counter the pressures from the Communist empire to the east. Through the Schuman coal-steel plan, the Council of Europe, the projected European defense community, and many other devices, the integration of Europe is proceeding, step by step. In no small part, this unification of Europe has been the product of American initiative, encouragement, and prodding.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, with its military and civilian organs, its regional commands, its land, sea, and air commands, is one of the great instrumentalities of this unique American empire. And like every other aspect of that empire, it is not authoritarian, in the tradition of empires of the past. It is a coalition of free and independent states, pooling their resources of manpower, weapons, and productive resources and skills for a common strategic purpose. But the leadership, like the original initiative, is centered in the United States, which has a role of primus inter pares.
A similar structure of the self-governing island peoples of the Pacific, including Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and the Philippines, in partnership with the United States, has been set up through various treaties. Profoundly different from NATO though it is, it nevertheless serves a roughly analogous strategic purpose. Likewise all of Latin America has been linked with the United States in a hemispheric alliance of mutual defense. And thus America’s twentieth- century empire of equals now extends from the shores of eastern Asia across the Pacific, the American continents, and the length of Europe to the farthest boundary of Turkey at the Caucasus range.
All through this vast reach of oceanic and continental space—through 290 degrees of longitude, and from the North Pole to the southernmost tip of Argentina—there are scores upon scores of American military bases, for ground, sea and air forces. Additionally there are many more bases where no American flag is flown, but where the forces of any member of the grand coalition might be based, if need arose. And linking all the members and associate members together are the highways of the sea. Salt water is unmistakably the cement of this global coalition. This giant partnership could not survive, even briefly, if its sea communications were not secure against an enemy’s interdiction.
This makes a pattern, a significant strategic pattern. There is a pooling of resources by many nations for a common purpose. There is leadership from the center, and an outflow of economic and military aid to weaker members in vulnerable positions on the perimeter. There is joint planning by the political, economic, and military spokesmen of the major partners in the enterprise. There is a formal legal structure of interlocking treaties by which every participating nation, however weak or exposed, has the positive assurance of firm backing in a showdown. Back of all this, there is a common heritage of democratic self-government, the common denominator of the entire body of peoples committed to this great common enterprise. And somewhere down inside, there is the confident optimism of the United States, based upon its vast resources, its immense and efficient productive machine, and its comforting tradition of successful venture.
Can we call this an American empire? We can, but only if we redefine the word to mean something a little different from its historic connotation. It is an extension of American power through half the world. That surely is a normal attribute of empire. It is a deployment of American sea and air power and even ground-force strength across the oceans and into distant continents. That likewise is a common quality of empires of the past. It is a utilization of American economic strength to build new strength in other regions, to create bulwarks for the free world where none existed a few years ago. This certainly is something the better empires of past centuries have sought to do when their leadership was far-sighted. Above all, it is an orderly deployment of the total strength of a great fraternity of peoples, so that their common resources may be utilized in an integrated strategy for their common security.
We may justly call it an American empire, because it is doing, in the mid-twentieth century world, exactly what the best minds of the better empires of the past sought to do, with some measure of success. British dominance in the world through the nineteenth century gave substantial peace for a hundred years. This was not because orders issued in Whitehall were obeyed implicitly all over the world. It was because canny, farsighted men in London used sterling loans and woolen yard goods and merchant ships and occasional battalions of fusiliers and ships of the line—all with a good deal of discernment—to keep some equilibrium in an otherwise disordered world. They wore moderately successful, until the resources at their command were spent. They were not altruists, the Britons who pulled the strings and moved the pieces on the world chessboard. They were the sensible, realistic, and reasonably selfish managers of an empire so great and resourceful that it could and did keep the world in tolerable balance for a century of time.
In some part, the task has been transferred to the United Nations, embracing almost the whole international community. And the more of the job it can perform, the happier we all should be. But now and for a long time to come, most of the task rests with the American nation, which has the greatest single quantum of the kind of power that is decisive in world politics today. This sort of power is compounded of all the things that fuse together to support modern warfare— trained military manpower, weapons, mass production facilities, industrial and military technology, raw materials, labor skills. Because it has the power, the United States also has the responsibility.
Accepting the challenge of world leadership, the United States has undertaken to build an empire, but a wholly different kind of empire. It has poured goods into diverse regions to restore their economic health. It has refashioned its own military machine on a massive scale, in order to meet the brunt of any attack and then take the offensive in reprisal. It has pioneered on the outer margins of human knowledge, in nuclear physics, to insure that its weapons may be the most effective possible. It has provided the principal sinews in Korea to turn back an unlawful, unprovoked Communist aggression. It has created the legal entities, in the Atlantic and Pacific communities, to pool the efforts of the many free peoples who want to remain free. It has guided the rearmament of a score of nations, and supported their new military postures, to the end that they may come to carry their share of the common burden of defense.
The United States has done more. It has commenced, at least, the task of funnelling new capital, new productive equipment, and new techniques of production into lagging countries whose chief enemy is not an alien state or empire but only poverty. One may call it technical assistance, or Point Four, or something else. But it is an essential task. It is backed up by the large scale flow of private investment funds into many backward countries. Together, these operations are substantially what the bankers and statesmen of London were doing for generations, when British investment capital built the railroads, canals, bridges, and port works of a score of nations overseas, leading to the greatest material development the world had seen up to that time.
American policy-makers were none too well prepared for the mighty assignment thrust on them so suddenly. Theirs was a hurried apprenticeship. But the fair-minded observer has to agree that the job has been done remarkably well so far, in spite of some waste, some stumbling, some egregious errors made at great cost. And he must agree also that American military leaders have played an important and constructive part—not because they were heroes of a successful war, although that increased their prestige, but because they had been thinking and planning for many years in geopolitical terms—in terms of a world in which sheer power had to be the decisive factor.
Such is the American empire—this system created in the last half-dozen years, which reaches from Formosa to Mt. Ararat, on the eastern margin of Turkey. It matters very little what we call it. For it is a military coalition, a system of international organization, a pool of economic resources. It is also a habit of cooperation among free peoples with some vital things in common. But more than all this, it is the use of non-coercive techniques in foreign policy to deploy the stupendous economic and military resources of the American nation, in the pursuit of a planned world policy. In this special sense, it is truly an empire—without imperialism.
In the last fifty years, the British Empire has remade itself in a pattern very different from that of the centuries gone. It has become for the most part a concert of self- governing nations, working together for common interests. It still is evolving in that wholesome pattern. When the center of world power passed from Europe to North America, however, the main responsibility for guiding and stabilizing the world community crossed the Atlantic also. Fortunately, the British Commonwealth has fitted itself into this pattern. Its resources and traditions and its know-how in world politics are at the service of the larger coalition now in being. So are the resources of the French empire, which despite many strains is a sturdy combination of diverse peoples now in a stage of rapid economic development.
This fusion of empires in a larger whole is possible because the American empire came into being in an unusual way. Commonly, a world empire emerges and rises to splendor after the defeat of its predecessor, as when England defeated Spain at sea in 1588, or when the Christian Powers defeated the Turkish fleet at Lepanto 17 years earlier, and made an end of the Ottoman domination of the Mediterranean. But the United States moved into leadership, not by supplanting an acknowledged leader through its defeat, but by joining with old friends, leaders of the past, in order to defeat two challengers. Thus there was a coalescence of empires, all of them in process of change from the pattern of authority to the pattern of cooperation.
Empire or coalition or system of alliances —whatever one may call it, the fact is that it works. It had to come into existence, because a land-locked empire was emerging in Eurasia, a reincarnation of the ancient challenge from the heartland of the Great Continent. It falls heir to the same task that other maritime empires have had. And fortunately, it undertakes its mission with overwhelming superiority in sea power, the premier instrument by which it may hope to contain the new threat from the steppe lands of the great Khans.
Sea power is much changed. The tools and tactics are different from those the Spaniards and the Dutch and the British used in their time. Tools and tactics are changing still. As sail gave place to steam, so the gunfiring ship has yielded primacy to the aircraft carrier with its brood of swift, deadly planes. But the essential strategic function of sea power is the same. Sea power is the means by which the full resources of a great coalition of peoples from diverse continents may be deployed against an enemy, even though this enemy be a continental power with interior lines, striking outward from the heart of the world island.
No nation in the world’s history ever faced a greater challenge or assumed a greater burden than that of the America of the mid-twentieth century. It is the first world empire built without imperialism. It is fashioned specifically to contain the forces of a hostile imperialism, in the service of an evil ideology. No empire ever was built to serve a more honorable purpose. And none ever brought to its historic task such great resources of skill, intelligence, productive power, technology, and good will.