Gary > It does become somewhat obvious that the US would want to take over the world when their top grossing product is CEO's that rip off shareholders
Here's an interesting piece which addresses the present American mind-set and highlights that the US preoccupation with wars around the globe may, in fact, contribute to its own decline.
redress.btinternet.co.uk
>>>Imperial overstretch in Iraq
Rather than the triumph of a new imperial order, the war may actually accelerate the decline of US hegemony. In late 2002, Charles Kupchan, a professor at Georgetown University and a member of the National Security Council in the Clinton administration, released a book titled The End of the American Era. Cast in mainstream political language, Kupchan argues that "Pax Americana" will end due to "the rise of alternative centres of power and a declining and unilateralist US internationalism". Even before France and Germany headed up the Western opposition to the US war in Iraqi, Kupchan asserted that the European Union would be in the forefront of an emergent "multipolar world" that will eclipse US ascendancy in the early part of the 21st century.
Back in the late 1980s Paul Kennedy, another fairly mainstream scholar at Yale University, asserted in The Rise and Fall of Great Powers that, in their waning years, empires engage in "overstretch". As they begin to decline, the dominant powers almost invariably resort to war and belligerency, thereby accelerating their demise as they waste their national treasuries on military spending to the detriment of their economies and their peoples. The intended implications of Kennedy's thesis for the United States were apparent at the time his book came out.
In reality, the Bush administration's unilateralist foreign policy represents an effort to reassert a US hegemony that it believes was compromised by the diffusion of US power under Clinton. The neo-conservatives, the driving force behind US policy today, are in fact engaging in foreign adventures precisely because they are fearful that US dominance in the world is being undermined. Major luminaries of the Bush administration, such as Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Vice-President Dick Cheney and Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, came together back in 1997 to form The Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Lambasting the Clinton administration for allowing US global power to languish, the founding charter of PNAC declared it is "increasingly difficult to sustain American influence around the world".
Then, on the eve of the presidential elections in 2000, the PNAC released a special report entitled Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century. It called for stepped up military spending, the projection of US power around the world and the use of "constabulary forces" whenever necessary. It became the blueprint for the Bush administration's foreign policy, particularly after 11 September 2001. Refusing to accept any limits on US power, the neo-conservative's mission of remaking the world in the US image fits in perfectly with Kennedy's argument that empires in their final stages bring to the fore bellicose leaders who increase military expenditures and engage in wars that actually accelerate their nations' demise.
Other commentators and analysts are also suggesting that something is going wrong with the new US imperium. Independent Strategy, a financial research company for institutional investors, argues, in a paper that is being circulated in the boardrooms of big investment banks like Goldman Sachs, that the US empire has reached its peak. It foresees heightened global terrorism in response to US unilateralism. Independent Strategy also argues that the US economy faces serious economic difficulties due in part to the costs of the war and Bush's massive tax cuts. The dollar is falling in international markets "because the good empire has the same fault lines as many other empires: unsustainable living standards at the core [that] depend on flows of wealth from the periphery". It adds: "The costs of war and unilateralism will increase the thirst for capital, but reduce the return earned by it."
Paul Kennedy has also reappeared in the public debate with an article in the Washington Post at the end of April in which he points to the state of the British empire in the early 20th century, arguing that the Bush administration is in trouble abroad. Kennedy contends: "The US has taken on military commitments all over the globe, from the Balkans and Kuwait to Afghanistan and Korea. Its armed forces look colossal (as did Britain's in 1919), but its obligations look even larger.
In his editorial in the New Left Review, Tariq Ali calls upon the anti-globalization and anti-war movements to form a broad "anti-imperialist league" to resist US aggression. While he underestimates the importance of the challenge posed by European nations to US hegemony, he does point to the central role of the popular movement in contesting US domination: "The history of the rise and fall of empires teaches us that it is when their own citizens finally lose faith in the virtue of infinite war and permanent occupations that the system enters into retreat." <<<
I suppose that's why they keep telling us that the "polls show" that the American people are fully behind GWB in whatever he does. |
