Our national security institutions were invented to serve the needs of the Cold War and are not appropriate in today's environment. In fact, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wrote in a memo that the United States does not have the organizational capacity either to run Iraq after the war is over or to engage in a struggle of ideas with the Islamic world. So if the United States continues its current interventionist policies, we will need to create new organizations to support our global position.

One such organization would be an imperial civil service--a corps of people who live in a foreign country, becoming very familiar with that local culture, and work with that culture to achieve minimally acceptable local conditions. The British had such a corps, forming a well-informed, culturally sensitive, administrative infrastructure, in countries belonging to their empire. Harvard students, who are interested in public service but not in joining the military, might like to serve their country abroad in this way, helping to create local order and preventing the kinds of catastrophes that could potentially affect the United States.

Harvard, the institution, also could play a role in legitimizing the American empire. Historically, empires made themselves acceptable to the peoples over whom they ruled by creating networks of schools that socialized members of the local elites into the imperial culture. The Athenians, Romans, Chinese, and British all engaged in this cultural transmission of dominant values. Schools, in other words, have been powerful mechanisms for integrating empires. Harvard, which has many international students, is already in the business of educating the American empire's elite, an institutional role that has profound implications.