The United States won the 20th century. It became, as the journalist Henry Luce had prophesied, "the American Century."
By the end of the 1990s -- victorious in two world wars, emerging triumphant from the long, twilight struggle with the Soviet Union -- the United States had achieved a position of unrivaled strength.
As they entered the new millennium, Americans saw little reason to doubt that this era of American ascendance would continue indefinitely. They interpreted the nation's global preeminence as evidence of a providentially ordained design, unfolding according to plan. They took it for granted that the juggernaut of democratic capitalism was destined to sweep the world. That the emerging age of globalization would be compatible with American values and interests seemed certain.
Atop this new order, the United States would preside, unchallenged, secure in the knowledge of its good intentions, its republican virtues intact.
The horrific events of Sept. 11, 2001, demolished these sunny assumptions. Developments since that day -- in particular the ever-expanding dimensions of President Bush's "war on terror" -- have raised progressively more troubling questions about the implications of American primacy and the costs required to maintain it.
In this regard, the effort underway to overthrow Saddam Hussein marks a decisive turn. This war should finally clear away the underbrush of myth, obfuscation and willful denial thus far preventing Americans from seeing the momentous changes, now well advanced, in their own thinking about military power and the use of force.
Disclaimers issued by the White House notwithstanding, this war has not been thrust upon us. We have chosen it. That choice -- made by Bush but endorsed by both houses of Congress and supported by the majority of the American people -- reveals much.
By going to war out of a concern for what Hussein might do in the future, the United States has embraced a doctrine of preventive war. By initiating hostilities without explicit United Nations sanction and despite fierce opposition abroad, it has shown that when it comes to using force, the world's sole superpower insists upon absolute freedom of action. Coming 12 years after a prior war with Iraq inaugurated an outburst of U.S. military activism -- with Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan being just a few of the highlights -- this latest intervention makes one point unmistakably clear: The United States no longer views force as something to be used reluctantly or as a last resort.
