Merriam-Webster defines empire as a “major political unit having a territory of great extent or a number of territories or peoples under a single sovereign authority.” Although the term American Empire has often been used to symbolize the bluster, ambition and arrogance of the United States, until now, it did not meet that definition. Recent events, however, may have made the definition fit. Here are what appear to be the rules of the new political order.

Critical global policy decisions will be made in the United States, and the nations of the world will be expected to cooperate fully in implementing them. Those who resist will be defined as the nation’s enemies, and will be subject to whatever sanctions America deems appropriate. On issues that do not threaten, limit or otherwise run counter to U.S. interests, states may devise their own policies. The formerly sovereign nations of the world are allowed to develop general global rules and institutions, but the United States is exempt from their authority.

The first set of principles is a generalization of the Bush doctrine, which states that the U.S. will root out terrorism wherever it exists. Governments that refuse to cooperate will be defined as enemies. Whether because they were all convinced of the rightness of the doctrine or because they were pressured by America to go along, only Afghanistan’s Taliban openly refused to comply with the doctrine’s requirements. By issuing that edict, without serious challenge, the U.S. has established a precedent that will make it difficult for formerly sovereign nations to resist obeying similar orders in future.

Existing international law forbids the world’s nations, including the States, from using force against another “sovereign” country except under carefully defined conditions. Under most circumstances, force is supposed to be the monopoly of the United Nations Security Council. The U.S. did go to the Security Council and won its approval for a global effort against terrorism, but not for its bombing of Afghanistan.

Under international law, nations may use force to defend themselves. The U.S. justified its bombing in Afghanistan partially on that basis. However, such force may be used only under conditions (such as when troops are pouring across the border) that did not exist in the Afghanistan case, according to Michael Mandel of Osgoode Hall Law School. “The right of unilateral self-defence,” according to professor Mandel, “does not include the right to retaliate once an attack has stopped.”

The collapse of the Taliban under aerial bombardment forestalled a looming international crisis. Support for the bombing was high in America.

In much of the rest of the world, however, support for military action in Afghanistan was collapsing. This, even as governmental backing for such anti-terrorism methods as increased sharing of intelligence and financial information was solid. It is not unlikely that domestic political pressure would have required some of America’s erstwhile allies to reject the aerial assault. That would have produced a test of the Bush doctrine.

Would the U.S. be willing to define Germany, for instance, as its enemy because Germany refused to go along with America’s illegal military intervention in a third country? Last week the German government survived by a narrow margin a vote of confidence over its promise of military assistance to the American effort.

That crisis is still on the horizon. The devastating military power demonstrated in Afghanistan is likely to stimulate America’s hawks to insist that daisy cutters and carpet bombing now be used against Iraq, Somalia and other governments said to be harbouring so-called terrorists. In several recent statements, U.S. officials have given signals that it has every intention of bombing other nations who do not cooperate fully with its directives, regardless of world opinion.

The American Empire’s exemption from international rules was illustrated recently by the approval expressed by the Bush Administration to a bill working its way through Congress. The bill says, in effect, that — in addition to not cooperating with the International Criminal Court being developed — the government authorizes the President to send in troops to rescue Americans who are taken into ICC custody. Since the court will reside in the Netherlands, international lawyers have dubbed the legislation the “Hague Invasion Act.”

Instead of seeking a consensus on the appropriate method for dealing with alleged terrorists, Bush last week issued an executive order that unilaterally establishes a U.S. military court to do that. That step elicited howls of protest, even from conservative voices in the United States. But Dubya is standing firm.

It is difficult to imagine actions more contemptuous of the notion of a democratic global order in which all nations are subject equally to the rule of law.

I wish there was a practical strategy for countering what history might very well record as Dubya’s global coup, but I don’t know of any. There does not appear to be any conjunction of forces willing and able to stand up to the United States. Perhaps we ought to volunteer for annexation. Then, at least, we Canadians would have some say in crucial global policy making.

Roy Adams

Roy J. Adams is Professor Emeritus at McMaster University. He has previously been a regular contributor to contributed regularly to magazines such as Straight Goods, Our Times and the CCPA Monitor as well...