There have been at least two elephants in the room since September 11, 2001. The one nobody wants to arouse is Islam; the one nobody wants to acknowledge is conquest. We don't "do" conquest anymore. Our presumptions seem to be that we shouldn't do it, and that we can't do it. Thus in the polymorphous scholarship and commentary that have appeared since last September 11, those who would influence policy argue over the lures of pre-emption and the limits of power. They debate a putative U.S. imperial role and reflect on the predicates of American history. But old-fashioned conquest, in which ground is seized and populations are controlled against their will for extended periods, is never raised as a policy option. The world community, such as it is, has come to oppose utterly wars fought overtly and permanently to occupy, subjugate or seize another country or its population. This represents a genuine if frequently overlooked new norm of international politics.
World War II is the obvious watershed for this new norm. That war was initiated by those bent on literal conquest on the grandest scale, and once they were beaten the Allies came up with all sorts of safeguards to prevent conquerors from ever again being able to contemplate such a project. Nuclear weapons soon came to represent another deterrent in our anti-conquest arsenal, and the creation of the United Nations yet another. Indeed, the UN exists only because member states agree that territorial sovereignty is so inviolate that cross-border invasion should be a punishable offense. The rapid dissolution of the vast British and French colonial empires after World War II was to some degree a result of the new anti-conquest norm, but it also contributed to it by illustrating the impermanence and costly trouble of imperial control.
