The Imperial End Game : AMERICA INVULNERABLE The Quest for Absolute Security From 1812 to Star Wars<i> by James Chace and Caleb Carr (Summit Books: $19.95; 367 pp.) </i>

The United States had its Dien Bien Phu 13 years ago with the fall of Saigon, its Suez crisis 15 years ago with the first Arab oil embargo. Since then, the standard of living for the average American family has fallen, and the nation’s worldwide military predominance has been irrevocably lost. As the Reagan Administration prepares to leave office, its failure to arrest the decline of the American empire is increasingly clear.

So holds a growing body of popular history. Paul Kennedy, professor at Yale, kicked the trend into high gear with a thick tome with a thick name, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.” Kennedy’s less-than-startling thesis, that empires rise and empires fall, has won him a surprising stay on the best-seller list and 15 minutes of fame. In “America Invulnerable,” James Chace and Caleb Carr develop another variation of the end-of-empire theme. They argue that the United States from its earliest days has sought absolute security from other nations and trusted no ally in the pursuit of that goal. But, they say, absolute security is a dangerous delusion in a well-armed and multipolar world.

In all, four distinct arguments can be identified in the current end-of-empire vogue. Perhaps the most common theme is that the American empire is an unprofitable economic proposition; this is Kennedy’s essential point. It is Chace and Carr’s view, furthermore, that empire of any kind is a risky anachronism. These two positions are perhaps a consensus of the Democratic Party.

Two less common end-of-empire themes, more unsettling in their implications, have also received persuasive exposition. In “The Culture of Terrorism,” MIT Prof. Noam Chomsky argues the first; namely, that American imperialism in its decline has lashed out with unprecedented viciousness at its Third World challengers. Bill Moyers, in his superb TV documentary “The Secret Government,” aired last fall, made the case for the second; namely, that the American empire is a threat to constitutional democracy at home.

While these authors come from widely different political and intellectual viewpoints, I would argue that their theses are more complementary than contradictory. In any case, their differences are far less significant than their simultaneous emergence in the late 1980s. The question on many American minds is: What is the justification for the American empire, such as it is?

“Absolute security” is Chace and Carr’s answer. They say that the American empire was built as a buffer from all manner of territorial and ideological threats. They make their case through a series of witty and illuminating historical essays. They begin with the sacking of Washington in the War of 1812, which they say burned the fear of national vulnerability into the American consciousness. The machinations of President Polk in the 1840s plucked California from the grasp of Britain and Mexico. Polk’s agent, John C. Fremont, comes off as an Oliver North of the high Sierras, a vicious and egotistical twit who stretched the ambiguous and devious orders of his commander-in-chief.

By the end of the 19th Century, American expansionists were prepared to leap across the seas to Cuba and to the Philippines. Through incisive sketches of Alfred Thayer Mahan and Woodrow Wilson, the authors show how the U.S. government swung back and forth between frank imperialism and moralistic crusading. The common denominator was “absolute security.”

It is here that the limitation of Chace and Carr’s approach needs to be recognized. They have not written the history of the debate over empire and absolute security in the United States. Rather, in the absence of a debate, they have inferred the concept from the historical record. “Absolute security” is not a recurrent credo used by government officials throughout American history. It is the conceptual umbrella under which different themes from different eras--manifest destiny, imperialism, Wilsonian moralism, and anti-communism--can all fit.

There is a historical truth here. As Chace and Carr show in their final chapter, the allure of absolute security is especially evident, within U.S. nuclear strategy, in the fantasies of Star Wars. But “absolute security” may also confuse the contemporary debate.

“Absolute security,” as defined by Chace and Carr, resembles nothing so much as “national security.” This was the notion enshrined into U.S. policy after World War II when the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency were established. But the phrase “absolute security” has a reassuring ring. Who doesn’t want absolute safety? If the policy is misguided, it is at least understandable.

“National security,” by contrast, has a much-deserved darker connotation. It too is a conceptual umbrella. Under the justification of national security, the United States has routinely sponsored assassination, the overthrow of democratically elected governments, and the subversion of Congressional policies such as the Boland Amendment banning aid to the Nicaraguan Contras.

By suggesting that during the last four decades the desire for absolute security has guided U.S. foreign policy, Chace and Carr overlook one of the most important issues of the imperial debate: the reality of the national security bureaucracy in the NSC, the CIA, and the covert action community.

Chace and Carr are not apologists for empire. Far from it. Their heroes are those officials in the highest circles of the U.S. government who had misgivings about the imperial impulse. They laud Sen. Thomas Hart Benton who resisted the war fevers of the 1840s. They praise Secretary of State Robert Lansing who sought to temper Woodrow Wilson’s moralistic fervor. They praise former Secretary of State Dean Acheson for his belated call for withdrawal from Vietnam.

But Chace and Carr, in my view, attach too much significance to these actors. Acheson’s change of heart was not the result of sweet reason, but of massive popular revulsion over the war. It was of little importance in ending the Vietnam War.

In “America Invulnerable,” Chace and Carr succeed in their primary aim: to provide an enlightening history of U.S. imperial ambitions. They are less likely to succeed in their secondary goal of prodding a current generation of U.S. policy-makers to rethink the American empire before it is too late. During the last 15 years, the doctrine of national security has steadily reduced the power of elite officials in Washington to respond to such entreaties. That’s why the end of empire is at hand.