The United States has always been an empire that told itself it was not one, and this fortnight it stopped bothering with the story. It bombed a capital, seized a head of state, flew him to a cell in New York, and spoke, before and after, plainly and without embarrassment, of the oil it intended to take. A striking amount of the commentary has treated this candour as almost bracing, a clarifying honesty after decades of humanitarian pretext, and I want to argue the opposite: that the honesty of empire is more dangerous than its hypocrisy, not less, and that the relief being expressed at the dropping of the mask is a profound misreading of what the mask was for.
Judith Shklar, who built a political philosophy around the ordinary vices and thought harder than almost anyone about hypocrisy, warned against the easy anti-hypocrisy that treats the unmasking of pretence as automatically virtuous, the posture that says at least now we know where we stand. Shklar's insight, drawing on a line as old as La Rochefoucauld, who called hypocrisy the tribute vice pays to virtue, was that hypocrisy, however contemptible, contains a hidden concession of enormous value: the hypocrite, by troubling to lie, admits that the truth would be unacceptable, and thereby acknowledges the authority of the standard he is violating. The hypocrite who cloaks conquest in the language of freedom is conceding that conquest needs cloaking, that the principle of freedom still holds enough power over him that he must pretend to serve it, and that concession, thin as it is, is a lever, because a power that still feels obliged to lie about its crimes can still be shamed by the gap between its words and its deeds. The power that stops lying has removed the lever. It has announced that the standard no longer holds any authority over it at all.
The counterargument is genuinely attractive and I felt its pull before I thought it through: is not honesty better than lies, even from an empire? Is not the candid avowal of interest more respectable, more possible to reckon with, than the nauseating pretence of humanitarian mission under which so many of the last century's worst crimes were committed? Would we not rather deal with a power that says plainly what it wants than one that drapes its greed in the language of our own liberation, adding insult to injury and gaslighting to theft? I understand the appeal, and I hold no brief for the humanitarian lie, which was often more murderous than any honest conquest because it demanded that its victims be grateful. But the choice being offered, between the honest empire and the hypocritical one, is a trap, because it invites us to prefer the one that has stopped pretending, when the pretence was the last remaining evidence that principle retained any hold on power at all. To welcome the candour is to celebrate the removal of the only constraint the situation still contained.
I say this from a specific inheritance, and it is not neutral of me. My people have lived under both faces of empire, the hypocritical and the honest, across a long and bloody education, and I will not pretend the hypocrisy was benign, because the talk of freedom and democracy and protection accompanied real bombs and real occupations and demanded, on top of everything, that we applaud. But I learned to see that the obligation to lie was also the one thing we could use, the gap we could pry at, the standard we could hold the liar to, because he had, by lying, admitted the standard existed. The honesty removes even that. An empire that announces it takes what it wants because it can, and needs no excuse, has declared that there is no standard to appeal to, no gap to pry at, no shame to invoke, and for the weak, which is most of the world, the disappearance of that appeal is not clarity but catastrophe.
So I do not join the commentators who find the candour refreshing. The clarity is real, and it is the clarity of a threat rather than a confession. It announces a world in which the strong take what they want and dare the weak to invoke a principle the strong have publicly retired, and everyone who is weak should understand exactly what the honesty means: not that the empire has become more truthful, which would be an improvement, but that it has stopped feeling the need to pretend, which is the final stage, the one where even the tribute vice paid to virtue is withdrawn, and power stands unclothed and unashamed, having discovered that it no longer has to pay virtue anything at all. The lie was the last of the principle. This fortnight, over the oil, in Caracas, they stopped paying it, and the applause for their honesty is the sound of the weak mistaking the removal of their last lever for the arrival of the truth.