On October 12 2004 the Elliott School hosted Ivan Eland, Director of the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute in Oakland, CA. Elad has an M.B.A. and a Ph.D. in National Security Policy from GW. He came to GW to discuss his first book, The Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed. The Elliott School’s Professor Henry R. Nau, was also present to give his comments.

A self-described “realist minimalist,” Eland declared that he wrote the book “to help bring back the tradition of the founders—less military intervention overseas.” He claimed that the United States currently relies too much on military force, and too little on diplomacy to achieve its objectives. He largely blamed American arrogance for the spread of anti-American sentiment across the globe.

While insisting that the U.S. is correct to pursue Al-Qaeda and other terrorists, he expressed the opinion that on 9/11 “we saw the disadvantages of an empire.” Eland also called for an end to Cold War-era arrangements such as NATO; instead he suggested a U.S. foreign policy centered on naval power, dedicated to preventing the rise of a new hegemon in either Europe or Asia.

Eland divided his book into three parts: explaining his thesis to conservatives, to liberals, and to the public at large. Conservatives, he said, should be outraged by the growth of government that usually results from military escapades; he noted that Social Security, the most expensive program currently run by the federal government, has origins in a program to compensate wounded veterans. Liberals, said Eland, should be angered by the infringements on civil liberties that war often causes; he also attempts to dispel what he calls “liberal illusions” about intervention for humanitarian purposes, stating that such actions will likely discredit democracy rather than promote it. Finally, he warned all Americans of what he believes to be the emergence of a dangerously imperialistic presidency. He bases this argument on extraordinary military power the American President has at his fingertips, and the wide latitude he has in using it. “The founders would turn over in their graves,” he claimed, if they knew the disproportionate power of the presidency, relative to the other federal branches.

While Professor Nau agreed with his former student that American military forcers are overextended, he disagreed with Eland’s call to end old alliances. Instead, he favored injecting a more political outlook into NATO and other alignments, and for a restructuring of military arrangements to better enable the U.S., Europe and Japan to prevent future threats from arising. Nau also disputed Eland’s claim that American actions were primarily responsible for the threats currently facing the superpower, attributed part of the blame to pressure, by interest groups in other nations, to insert anti-Americanism into their countries’ foreign policies. The Professor compared such pressures to the influence of domestic politics on American foreign policy.

Nonetheless, the Professor was impressed with his former student, and praised him for returning what he called, “the underappreciated Jacksonian tradition” to the foreign policy debate.