What cannot now be disguised, as U.S. marines swagger around the Iraqi capital swathing toppled statues of Saddam Hussein with the stars and stripes and declaring 'We own Baghdad,' is the crudely colonial nature of this enterprise," wrote Seumas Milne, a columnist in The Guardian, the leftist British daily.

Mr. Milne's comment, in a newspaper that rarely misses a chance to cast the United States in a negative light, was an especially virulent and hostile expression of a view that has become common in recent days.

That view, which Mr. Milne shares with many other commentators and government officials, is that the war in Iraq confirms the status of the United States as no longer just a superpower, but an unambiguously imperial power. It is seen as a country that uses its might to establish dominion over much of the rest of the world, as Rome once did, or as Britain did in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Many Americans will quarrel with that view, convinced not just of the absence of any American ambition to control foreign territory but persuaded by the Bush administration's assurance that power in Iraq will be turned over to Iraqis as swiftly as possible. It is not generally part of the American self-conception to associate the United States or even the Pax Americana with the great empires of the past.

But elsewhere in the world, the United States is being seen in a new way, as the latest -- and perhaps most powerful -- of the imperialist powers that bestrode the globe over the centuries. As evidence, critics cite not just the sudden collapse of Iraqi resistance, but the stunning American military triumphs in recent years, in Afghanistan, Kosovo and in the Persian Gulf war of 1991.

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"The key terms of the new imperialism will be the ability of the U.S. to provide security and stability for other nations without imposing an American way of life," Karl-Otto Honrich, a sociologist at Goethe University in Frankfurt, said in a telephone interview. After the war in Iraq began, Mr. Honrich wrote a much noted article subtitled "Without a Hegemonic Power There Can Be No Peace."

"Over the last 10 years, U.S. hegemony has become clearer as a function of what America has done in the world," he said. "It has taken on the role of world police in several cases, and successfully done so.

"The function of the U.S. right now is to tell the world there is someone who is ready to fight in cases of big security and disorder," Mr. Honrich said. "The U.S. has taken on this role, and hence its leadership has become a social reality."
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"Traditionally, the U.S. has emphasized its great convincing and coercive power on other states," Mr. Parmentier said. "Its foreign policy managed to convince other heads of state that what they were doing was in their national interest, and this was American's great strength.

"Today, the U.S. is affirming a much more blunt and brutal stance," Mr. Parmentier continued. "Its vision for foreign affairs has somewhat retrograded to a more national or even nationalistic definition, in the most limited sense of the term, as it was understood in the 19th century."
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No historical period is exactly like another, and few people are arguing that the United States is a new Rome or a new colonialist Britain. In the main view being expressed in Europe, it is not the classic imperialist goal of national wealth and resources that is driving the United States.

In the more radical view of American power -- represented by The Guardian or by Mr. Frölich -- the United States is seeking global dominance almost for its own sake. The more moderate view is that Washington has reacted, or perhaps overreacted, to the threat of terrorism. The American destiny, as the German newsweekly Der Spiegel put it recently, is "to bring peace to the world through war." In other words, the motive is good, even if the actions are violent and possibly unjustified.

» CNN.com - Echoes of empires past - Apr. 14, 2003