I have argued before, and continue to believe, that the American Empire is simply the Monroe Doctrine writ larger.
Manifest Destiny took us from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean, and the Canadians and Mexicans kept us from going any further north or south through the use of force, which we've forgotten, but they haven't.
The Japanese in WWII and now the Chinese will keep us from physically dominating the Pacific basin more than we do, but the Atlantic is ours, and we keep the peace in the Pacific, too.
It's been that way for decades, incrementally ever more so. Now we're keeping the peace in the Mediterranean, the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, and moving our military bases into Eastern Europe and Western Asia.
Kerry's not going to reverse that. You haven't heard one peep from him about reversing that. He may try to make it less nakedly nationalistic, more window dressing as multilateral as Clinton did in Bosnia and Kosovo. |
