Mr. Coulombe should consult for the State Department.

This extended essay by Mr. Coulombe is very interesting, enlightening, and thought-provoking.  While I agree with him that empire is not contrary to American principles, I would have to disagree that the only problem then is how to do the job and whether the Americans are up to it.  In concluding that Americans are not up to it, Mr. Coulombe implies that Americans are not up to their own principles.  That might be true and I would be happy if it is.  But we should not take for granted that there is nothing wrong with the principles.  While empires may not be intrinsically evil, an empire which aims at rule of the entire world is evil in its pride, its hubris.  Like Napoleon and the Jacobins, like the Communists, American imperialism has no theoretical limits short of world rule.  Indeed the relative success of American imperialism in western and now eastern Europe is attributable to those areas being first softened up by the French and Bolshevik revolutions respectively.  Had those countries maintained their traditional regimes and cultures, it is difficult to imagine the US dominating them the way it does.

Mr. Coulombe has written a thoughtful and well argued article.  I thank the editor for making his presence more frequent!

Martin van Creveld, the wisest man out there in the topics of war, the state, and rule, gets most empires right in his The Rise and Decline of the State, pp 35-52.  Empire, a very old form of rule, is a shakedown racket by a strongman and his cronies, from the Ancient Egyptian empire to the British and American empires.

There have only two good Empires and two mixed bags.  The mixed bags were the Roman Empire and the Hohenzollern ("the 2nd Reich").  On balance, they did a bit more good than evil. Indeed, seen only in terms of high culture, they left us a rich patrimony.

The Two Good Empires were the Holy Roman Empire (the 1st Reich), first under Charlemagne, then Otto, then under the Habsburgs, with its climax under Charles V; and the Austrian Empire.  Both were in fact something like confederations (the only kind of “empire” a member of the League of the South can even began to tolerate!), and both were rich and flourishing civilizations.  They both held Islam at bay.  They both were held together by (1) the most prestigious dynasty in Europe, (2) a common religion in the Catholic Faith, an (3) common enemies.  The Protestant Reformation destroy the former, Woodrow the Worst the latter.  And the leads to --

Mr. Coulombe is quite correct: Gringos have no business to be in the business of empire.  They are a poorly educated and rather stupid people, easily fooled by their leaders, knowing no foreign languages, and knowing even less about foreign ways.  Despite their vaulted sense of political achievement—an achievement destroyed by Lincoln—their only contribution to civilization has been solely techological, from the McCormick reaper and the cotton gin to the DVD and cell phones. And even most of the achievements, in the latter day, the Japanese have known knew better how to market. They think themselves great business men.  The subprime crisis shows this to be false.  Better businessmen have been the Flemish, the Dutch, the Swiss, and best of all the Venetians.

As for Europe, I welcome a voluntary confederation of sovereign European States—small states with the break up of Spain, Italy, France, and Germany into independent provinces— with Otto, Archduke von Hapsburg, and Emperor.  Just keep the Brits out.

This is a more penetrating examination by far of the
forms of imperialism and and of the American attempt
to create an empire than one would likely encounter in
Policy Review or a fortiori in Commentary or NR. But
what Charles might have added is an investigation
of empire-building as a leftist activity, an
enterprise that began during the French Third Republic
under Jules Ferry and then was seconded by the Fabian
socialists in England. What the neocon scribblers
typically do when the insist they are not
American expansionists is to contrast their global
democratic expansionism to some demonized model
of the German Second Empire or the policies
of the Third Reich. This of couse is silly, since
the more apt point of comparison would be Trotsky’s
plan to liberate Europeans from capitalism or the
project of the French Radicals to bring Jacobin ideals
to Indochina and Equatorial Africa.

I believe Mr. Buchanan makes a distinction between pre-1898 American policy (continental expansion) and post-1898 policy (extra-continental imperialism). Expansion into the lightly-populated West would produce nothing more than an expanded America - expansion further puts us into direct conflict with large numbers of foreign peoples and results in war. The other evil he addresses is the lamentable fact that imperialism is a two-way street. The imperialist send his cadres abroad and the imperialized migrate to the power center (ancient Rome was described as a miserable Syrian hole by one her historians). I offer Los Angeles, CA in evidence (or should it be called Barrio Los Angeles?).

I found the last paragraph to be very bad options regarding
the mass immigration of all of Israel to the USA.
Not to be confused with antisemitism, I find it unacceptable
that ANY nation follow a mass immigration course to the
USA, and suggest that Israel learn to play nice with their neighbors,
or start looking at Mexico, which will soon be vacant after all
of their citizens get here!

Sid, ever the cheerful Holy Roman Monarchist.........To agree and disagree with you in the span of six paragraphs is the type of entertainment one gets with, say.....Chainsaw sculpting or Competition Train Wrecking. One enjoys the quixotic show but does not question why for fear of breaking the spell.

As to Mr. Coulombe’s essay, a great sweeping ride but it would appear that he countenances our slapdash ride into Imperialism if only we were better at it. Perhaps I’m wrong but it seems very white of him to suggest that the only “downside” of the historical North American Anglo Saxon march of empire is the occasional bout of guilt experienced by the supplanting population over their various and sundry exterminations. It would appear by this that the guilt of the colonizer is a far greater tragedy than is the loss of multiple indigenous cultures, spiritual cultures whose spirituality ran like a freshet through their every action. As with but one example, the Mandans of the upper Missouri River who were universally described as gracious and interestingly diverse hosts only to see them wiped out by us reluctant imperialists. Today, a tiny band of them run a few hardscrabble casinos with the Hidatsa and I think it safe to say we’ve disabused them of the effectiveness of their spirituality.... if we have not christianized them, an essentially similar thing.

No matter how one wishes to cut the foot cheese, this American Amateur Hour of Imperial Hubris , an armed and dangerous and consumptively expensive surrender to base instincts is without doubt, bad, as in the absurdly futile brand of bad. It is a roundhouse wind-up haymaker to one’s own nose, a continuous drowning of ones new shoes with one’s own piss. It is a living evocation of why there are anti-racketeering laws. The rapid wall we’ve hit is the most spectacularly clear demonstration of this. Past empires declined over centuries while ours gets winded in less than a decade. Radical Islam is but one of the many dysfunctions of the American Have A Nice Day Empire. K Street is another, their two-party syndicate another and military bases from hell to breakfast another. Every good idea and deed we have had since the nineteenth century, including our education and health systems has been subsumed by the enervations of our Crusading Imperial Desires....our urges to go west....to conquer and “improve” and “enrich” and ...ahem, “democratize” at the end of a gun or a truncheon or blockade de jeur.

I do not think Mr. Coulombe suggests this but if one wishes to continue arming the globe to the teeth for a final Mexican Standoff over the remnants of a plundered paradise, then I suppose an empire is a good thing for you. Coulombe accurately makes a distinction between the rhetoric and actions of the American Government. We talk freedom and democracy but leave something altogether different in our wake....a kind of industrial comic book version of reality where consumption is the State Religion but it’s monks are Smiling Christians or Officious Bureaucrats.

Cheap and abundant oil with the syringe of the internal combustion engine has brought us many remarkable things and nearly freed us from the constraints of biology and time but at this juncture, when confronted with ample evidence of dysfunction and self abuse, we find ourselves enmeshed in jingoism and an idea that technology IS energy. Detroit keeps a governor clamped down on their trusty engine block of Congress and we get an Energy Bill that trumpets it’s great success for something that Detroit should have been doing for simple prudent business reasons two decades ago. This is but another of the dysfunctions of our Gomer Pyle Goes Baghdad Byzantine Empire.

Perhaps we’ll simply begin conducting ourselves like rust belt counties and begin the farming of waste, taking on the refuse of both the occident and the orient, landfilling off the Pacific Coast to our hearts content and completing the circle of the land bridge that opened this continent up in the first place. We can keep on a-westering over the garbage of our discontent.

Sid’s right in one respect, empires are shakedown rackets and what is most interesting about this current one, this Sole Superpower With a Flat Tire is that it has taken to shaking down not only the Wogs of outer Woggery but her very own people.....a people that seem to like singing hymns to self destruction.

We are living the best seminar on the hazards of empire in history and we still think we need a government to “save us” through “leadership”. There is a popular culture of empire and the authentic culture of individuals in this nation who are unduly influenced by the counter-intuitive blandishments of popular culture. If the individual were to wake up to the farrago, we are capable of great things and could make the rhetoric of the Revolution and Republic real. Until that time, we’ll continue imbibing that rotgut bottle of Empire Gin and hew to that old course of the gutter-side tough guy, showing all comers that if they think they’re bad, they should just watch as he kicks his own ass.

We are at a point in human history where the limitations of the orb require a little cost benefit analysis. We have gotten great things and abject failures out of the imperial experiments of the past but if we think we can somehow improve upon them, think again kimosabe because it may just come to pass that the Lakota are doing the smartest thing they have ever done by checking out of the American Empire and telling the Great White Father to kiss it’s red ass.

Those who want to cast insults my way by calling me a Marxist Injun or Injun loving dreamer, think again, I aint that good. I’m just a the Affirmative Action Bureaucrat’s Nightmare, a Non-Mormon From Utah Lapsed Catholic Adopted New English Yankee Anarcho Capitalist Anti-Big Pagan.....Neo, paleo , all rights reserved.

Happily, an ending...thanks Mr. Coulombe.

Sadly, one more thing.....transplant all the Israelis here? Wait a minute now, I thought it was the Brits who Balfoured them to Palestine....resettle them all to the Falklands perhaps but not here. While the Ellis Island Generation of Jews had a great sense of humor, methinks this generation may have lost it.

Whoever wants to come here legally and fruitfully fine but mass evacuations and resettlements is but one more debit in the inventory of the Imperial Project.

Anyhow, don’t count the Jews out yet, as bad as it is over there, if the dysfunctions of armed empire were removed, the arena might fall apart and they would come to a proper solution mano a mano , business transaction to business transaction.

Mr. Coulombe wrote “Heavily damaged by the Protestant revolt, this idea nevertheless survived until 1806, when the last crowned Holy Roman Emperor abdicated. Having already proclaimed himself Emperor of Austria, he thus ensured that something survived in the Habsburg Monarchy. Its last ghost was not banished until the deposition of Bl. Charles I in 1918.”

Very important to note this history of the translatio imperii of the Holy Roman Empire to the Habsburgs in 1804 or 1806. Because of the deposition of Bl. Charles I in 1918 the Holy Roman empire has now been in a 100 year Abeyance. Translatio imperii is a very important “doctrine” of the history of the Holy Roman Empire.

@Mr Warning:
Did I read somewhere that with the abeyance of the Empire, the Pope holds the imperial privileges?
@Mr Sabin,
It’s never too late to come home to our Mother, as I, too, did.

Many thanks to Mr. Coulombe for discussing openly subjects that most people do not dare to touch.  Dealing with empires on TakiMag creates an obvious problem with space-limits, and there is one detail that deserves more attention than Mr. Coulombe could give it:  when, why and how do expanding empires turn into declining ones? 

Rome and England provide interesting evidence on this detail: at the time of expansion, there was no emperor.  There was a very small state (it is not far wrong to call England the city-state of London) slowly expanding.  Even though the state could fight ferociously when necessary, central government was weak and limited, and the expansion was carried out mostly by attraction:  foreigners found the ideas of the (future) empire to be acceptable and regarded them as something they wanted to adopt.

The turn to decline was marked by an expanding state and an ever more centralized decision making, which in Rome led to absolute rule—this has not happened in England. (Yet. Knock wood.) In foreign policy, the decline was marked by the old idea of expanding by attraction, assimilation and voluntary choice being substituted by ever greater reliance to military force and compulsion. 

The effects of these chances are obvious:  at home the ever growing government buraucracy results in corruption and stagnation that over time sap the empire’s economical strength.  In foreign policy, the use of brute force creates hostility that brings into being military coalitions capable of stopping the empire. 

The distinction between expanding and declining is crucial, because many of the empires Coulombe mentions are actually failures.  I.e., we may end up trying to learn from what in reality were case-studies of things going wrong.  For example, the time of Augustus was when Rome’s expansion stopped. Unfortunately, the failure of whatever enabled the expansion happened at a time when Rome’s northern border was just about the longest line that could be drawn across Europe—the end of expansion thus was bound to have disastrous long-term effects.  Britain is similar:  we generally think about the late 19th century as the golden period of the British Empire.  Yet, by that time she had already stopped expanding, i.e., something had seriously failed.

Mr. Coulombe’s piece and the remarks, especially by Messrs. Cundiff and Sabin, are superb.  Aren’t we thankful that Woodrow Wilson earnestly believed that God intended the Anglo-Saxon race to rule the world in the name of Jesus Christ (Calvinist)?  Being imperialist might not be so bad if we had any talent for it, but we don’t.

Interesting article, but as a Greek I have a problem with historical revision. Alexander the Great was the leader of the Greek kingdom of Macedonia. Macedonia was without a doubt a state with many races within it, but there is no doubt of the fact that it was a Greek kingdom.

Thanks

Which brings us to the last question: are we suited to doing this, as a people?

No. Such is why the media propaganda, outright lies, fear/crisis management to get the sheeple behind the empirical agenda of the fools on the hill. Such is why the Orwellian spin, the hermaneutic bullcrap and why Jesus, the prince of peace, has been turned into a war-monger with his flock fooled into fomenting the apocalypse for his return.

@ Kirt who disagrees with Mr. Columbe that Americans are not up for the job. Kirt imitates that the Americans are up for the job because they know their principles.

Americans are NOT up for the job because they are uneducated, politically correct, never travel, don’t speak another language, are a bunch of simpletons. Political Correctness in America STUNTS American foreign policy because God Forbid that people are different from other people!  I grew up in the American system---then lived in Europe, at the bottom for over three years---and People are Different. The Anerican educational system steeped in Political correctness damages the American grasp of reality.  It blinds them to realities.  The Fiasco of the Iraq War, in first starting it and then trying to control the aftermath, is evidence of the blinders on Americans---They’re idiots.  For a country that had a party called the “Know-nothings”, is a small symbol of the country that created it.  America is the Land of Know-nothings and hence incompetent, incapable, running an Empire. 

But the purpose of America is not to run an Empire, the Purpose of America is the Globalization of the World by Americanizing all and sundry, spreading mercantilism, capitalism and its decadent puerile culture everywhere.  America is not pushing an Empire, it is pushy a deadly evil design/ideology upon the world--the Novus Ordo Secularum---One World Government.

For once I agree with Sid’s first comment.  Good one Sid.

Goodness gracious sakes alive, takimag is the most intellectually stimulating thing I have discovered since books.

“ While I agree with him that empire is not contrary to American principles, I would have to disagree that the only problem then is how to do the job and whether the Americans are up to it.  In concluding that Americans are not up to it, Mr. Coulombe implies that Americans are not up to their own principles.  That might be true and I would be happy if it is.  But we should not take for granted that there is nothing wrong with the principles.  While empires may not be intrinsically evil, an empire which aims at rule of the entire world is evil in its pride . .. .”
Kirt Higdon - from my original post on this theme

I’m not sure why Mr. Wheeler is misrepresenting what I wrote when it is there for everyone to read.  Does any of the above sound like I am claiming that Americans are up for the job of empire because they know their principles?  I agreed that with Mr. Coulombe that empire is not contrary to American principles and expressed the hope that they were not up to the job because the principles themselves are based on pride and hence evil.  To try to put this in simpler terms so that even Mr. Wheeler can understand, Americans will fail at empire because they are not the godlike supermen, supreme in virtue and competence, that their principles tell them they are.  They are not exceptional - just sinful, prideful human beings with an exagerrated idea of their own virtue and abilities.

The USofA can be seen as Lennie Small in John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men”.

Lennie Small is a strong, mentally retarded man that dreams of a simple luxury: petting rabbits.  His undoing is his strength, mental retardation, and his pursuit of luxury: he kills a woman by petting her, too hard, of course.  Lennie’s friend, the diminutive, yet cunning and caring George Milton shoots him in the back of the head to save him from a more gruesome death at the hands of a lynch mob, coming after him for the accidental killing of the woman he was petting.

The USofA is a strong, ignorant country that dreams of a simple luxury: bringing happiness to the world.  It’s undoing is it’s strength, it’s ignorance, and it’s pursuit of luxury: it destroys civilization after civilization by trying to bring it happiness.  Question: who plays the roll of George Milton?  Some group of American people themselves, some foreign country (France?), or some other force that brings down this Revolution we call the USofA?

Funny, for a moment you seemed to talk about “General MacArthur even managing to legalize abortion in the 1949 law code” as if it were some kind of accomplishment. Of course, it has done nothing but destroy lives and destroy the moral standing of a people, just as abortion does everywhere it is legal.

MacArthur hated the Japanese with a burning passion, and would gladly have killed every last one of them if he could. Instead he left them to die of purposelessness, moral vacuum, and self-loathing. And this is precisely what they are doing. It would have been more merciful simply to vaporize them.

American hatred of foreigners, which is intense, is expressed strangely. It is expressed not in terms of tribe or race. Instead, America, believing itself, its culture, and its political system to be the finest thing ever created and the self-evident savior of humanity, accepts all foreigners who wish to fall in slavish imitation of it, and labels all foreigners who wish to keep their own cultures, religions, and political systems to any degree greater than a kitschey show ("We’ll let them keep sushi and not freak out when they wear kimonos on special occasions") as pure evil.

The man who put a bullet through Benazir Bhutto’s heart this week did so because he did not wish his country to become Connecticut with curry. He did so because he could see the visage of MacArthur shoving abortion down the throats of the Japanese, and laughing from Hell as they slowly go extinct. He did so because the idea of raising a daughter - the next generation of his country’s women (and women re the moral backbone of any society) - who would dress, talk, and act like Lindsay Lohan was enough that he’d rather die.

And so he did. And so did Benazir Bhutto. And so will many more Americans and Brits and Australians and Pakistanis and Iraqis and Afghans. In the end, Bush, Cheney, and Petraeus will either be Truman and MacArthur - cramming degeneracy down the throats of a ruined people in order to slowly kill it from the inside - or will be Gorbachev and Varennikov, in which case we will leave (and likely collapse soon thereafter). Wanna take bets on which is more likely?

Empire is not contrary to American principles. But American principles are some pretty nasty stuff.

Americans will fail at empire because they are not the godlike supermen -Higdon

From the first recorded wars, unification of mesopotamia [currently Iraq and led then by Sargo], which was building of empire, thru military conquest, have failed.

Nearly 5000 years of failed empire building have gone by. These same men attempted to build towers to heaven,like Babel, which fell, to the heavens, in quest to be ‘Godlike’ men. God, seeing what the people were able to accomplish while they remained unified, scattered them.

Unification, thru military conquest, empire, God knew, would lead to eternal war.

Unification, thru war, no matter how good the intent, can never lead to peace. Democracy, no matter how great we think it is, cannot ever spread thru military conquest, when it does it fails.

I, for this reason, agree with Kurts opinion.

Empire is not contrary to American principles.-Sergol

Empire is not contrary to capitalism. We are a Christian nation and its those principles that are, I think, contrary to empire.

Empire is only possible when you have the finances to support it. When the gold supply dries out, the empire dies.

The Venetians had a monopoly on salt trade in the Mediterranean, which made them incredibly rich. Their empire was a multicultural one. Most of their soldiers and seamen were “oltramarini” or ultra-marines, meaning people from overseas. The Venetians managed somehow to knit all their territories and peoples together, without any ideology to speak of. Power and glory sufficed.

This article should have concentrated more on the economic aspects of empires, which is what really matters.

Does anyone believe that Israel would still be able to behave like the big time local bully without the billions of free dollars from the US?

Does anyone believe that the US will be allowed to print money at will, forever? To cover its wars and luxury consumption with Mickey Mouse money?

I’m not clever. I’m barely clever and
well-read enough to be here at all.
Merchants don’t do well in expanding
american capitalism, and AC has become the
advertisment of humungous purchases of
american military equipment by third worlders.
All made possible by credit, of course.
I look long-term. The christians who are
invested emotionally with the rep party will
leave. The RP will be a husk of it’s old self
and will re-create itself by accepting into
it’s small folds corporate Democrat sloths and
Libertarians. When the parties wither, as they
will, the empire will constrict and we will be
what we were in 1897.

I think it’s important to distinguish between expansion of the American state, with conquest and displacement/genocide of other peoples - the 19th c American paradigm -vs ruling over other peoples supposedly for their own benefit, the Leftist and neocon paradigm.  The first, in its American form, is not imperialism, any more than the Saxon conquest of Roman Britain was imperialism.  The second is a form of imperialism - Leftist in origin, as Gottfried points out.  This imperialism is what America is what America’s leadership class are remarkably bad at, due to their complete lack of empathy with the subject peoples.  In their ability to turn potentially conciliable subject peoples against them, only the Nazis come close.

The best bet for America would be retreat from empire; this would save lots of money, restore America’s international standing, and allow resources to be directed towards the country’s internal problems.  The big risk though would be the imperial backwash that has done for Britain and France, the millions of Muslim immigrants from former colonies - in this case, its the millions of Iraqi ‘refugees’ that the neocons and Left will seek to foist on a retrenching America.

“Empire is not contrary to American principles. But American principles are some pretty nasty stuff.” - Nergol

We can only speculate as to what was in the heart of Bhutto’s assassin as we don’t at this point even know who he was.  But overall, Nergol is correct about the attitude of Americans toward foreigners.  It was perhaps best expressed by the quote attributed to some nameless Vietnam era military officer - “Inside every gook, there’s an American struggling to get out.” And as Nergol says, any foreigner who does not want to become an American by adopting American “values” (basically enlightenment liberal values) is deemed evil and deserving of being killed.

Let’s be fair to the fallen Mrs. Bhutto. See this report from Lifenews:

The world mourned the loss of assassinated Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto on Thursday, but her death was more than a setback for those hoping for democracy in this war-torn nation. Bhutto was a member of an international pro-life women’s movement that understood abortion causes medical, mental health and other problems for women.

When Bhutto was the prime minister of Pakistan, she helped lead a delegation to the 1994 Cairo population conference that confronted abortion advocates looking to make abortion an international right.

“I dream ...of a world where we can commit our social resources to the development of human life and not to its destruction,” she told the United Nations panel at the time.

Bhutto was one of only two women to address the conference.

Instead of telling women in nations where population growth is an issue that they should kill their offspring, Bhutto told world leaders that the best solutions is “tackling infant mortality, by providing villages with electrification, by raising an army of women.”

She hoped to “educate our mothers, sisters, daughters, in child welfare and population control, by setting up a bank run by women for women, to help women achieve economic independence, and to have the wherewithal to make independent choices.”

Bhutto warned conference participants that “this conference must not be viewed by the teeming masses of the world as a universal social charter seeking to impose adultery, abortion...and other such matters on individuals, societies and religions which have their own social ethos.”

One of the leading pro-life women’s groups in the United States, Feminists for Life of America, honored Bhutto in the 1998 issue of its publication The American Feminist. The group named Bhutto as one of the first and best “remarkable pro-life women” around the world.

“Prime Minister Bhutto advocated a more holistic approach to resolving population-control issues worldwide,” the group said of the Pakistani leader.

FFLA said Bhutto prefers “the empowerment of women” over their destruction via abortion.

Related web sites:
Feminists for Life of America - http://www.feministsforlife.org

I thank Craig Senna for his remarks on Venice.

What is really engrossing in Mr. Coulombe’s article is the implied suggestion that loyality to a royal dynasty can indeed be principle of social cohesion.  It’s at least better than some other principles.

Mr. Coulombe: There is only one true Empire and that Empire is The Holy Roman Empire. The world tends to lump all “empires” together with The Holy Roman Empire, thereby dis-missing the importance of the authority of The Holy Roman Empire.

Most defenders of the Holy Roman Empire claim that it’s origins is of a Divine making: It is the Only Divinely Ordained Empire set to rule over all the other man-made “empires”

The Imperial “doctrine” of Translatio Imperii tells us that the Roman Empire can be transferred from one people to another. But your article reads as if the Roman Empire was transferred to many peoples and many nations, thus attaching no importance to the Imperial “doctrine” of Translatio Imperii. 

The House of Habsburg was last in possession of this authority of the Roman Empire as far as I can tell, and now is in a 100 year abeyance.

Mr. Coulombe you write: “To begin with, we really do need to define our terms.”

But you have not defined the differences between the man-made empires from the Only Divinely Ordained Empire - Holy Roman Empire, thus leaving the impression that one empire is just as valid as another.

Dante and others knew the importance of the origin of The Roman Empire, but these men are ignored today.

The office of the Holy Roman Emperor is now in a 100 year Abeyance and will be so for a few more years to come, until men realize the importance of such an office. But the terms man-made Empire & Divinely Ordained Empire must be defined first.

For those who lump all man-empires together with the Holy Roman Empire
Aesop has a fable for you:

Buffoon and the Countryman

“At a country fair there was a Buffoon who made all the people
laugh by imitating the cries of various animals.  He finished off
by squeaking so like a pig that the spectators thought that he had
a porker concealed about him.  But a Countryman who stood by said:
“Call that a pig s squeak!  Nothing like it.  You give me till
tomorrow and I will show you what it’s like.” The audience
laughed, but next day, sure enough, the Countryman appeared on the
stage, and putting his head down squealed so hideously that the
spectators hissed and threw stones at him to make him stop.  “You
fools!” he cried, “see what you have been hissing,” and held up a
little pig whose ear he had been pinching to make him utter the
squeals.”

Men often applaud an imitation and hiss the real thing.

My pig squeals.

Jet you wrote: “Empire is not contrary to capitalism.”

Craig Senna you wrote: “This article should have concentrated more on the economic aspects of empires, which is what really matters.”

To both of you men a True Empire hinders and abolishes avarice and greed it does not promote it. So yes a True Empire is contrary to capitalism.

So say Dante and others, but this True Empire is the Holy Roman Empire. Other man-made empires promote avarice etc..

Because of the 100 year abayence of the authority of the Holy Roman Emperor, capitalism and other perverse ideas have had their day in the sun these last 100 years.

When the authority of the Holy Roman Emperor re-emerges on the world scene it will be attacked by Wall Street etc..

From Dante’s Convivio:

“Since the human mind does not rest content with limited possession of land but always seeks to achieve glory through further conquest, as we see from experience, discord and war must spring up between one kingdom and another. Such things are the tribulations of cities, of the surrounding cities, of the communities, and of the households of individuals; and so happiness is hindered.

Consequently, in order to do away with these wars and their causes, it is necessary that the whole earth, and all that is given to the human race to possess, should be a Monarchy–that is, a single principality, having one prince who, possessing all things and being unable to desire anything else, would keep the kings content within the boundaries of their kingdoms and preserve among them the peace in which the cities might rest. Through this peace the communities would come to love one another, and by this love all households would provide for their needs, which when provided would bring man happiness, for this is the end for which he is born…..

This pre-eminent office is called the Empire, without qualification, because it is the command of all other commands. And thus he who is placed in this office is called the Emperor, since he is the commander of all other commands; and what he says is law for all and ought to be obeyed by all, and every other command gains strength and authority from his. And so it is clear that the imperial majesty and authority are the highest in the fellowship of mankind.”

Of course Empire is a good thing and I am sure most foreigners who have been killed by us are grateful.

Sadly, in these modern times, many foreigners are not even aware The United States Constitution provides that all foreign governments must elect leaders subservient to Washington, so, of course, there is bound to be some griping and resentment amongst those we were predestined to rule and dominate.

However, were we to put ourselves in their shoes (pieces of bark lashed together with vines) and mentally occupy their homes (mud huts) in their native lands (US National Interest) I am sure we would all recognise that to be dominated and ruled by men of such genius, compassion, and civility, is right and just.

Amen.

I am not Spartacus wrote:"Sadly, in these modern times, many foreigners are not even aware The United States Constitution provides that all foreign governments must elect leaders subservient to Washington..”

Please show me where you find this?

Since the world is now governed by might and not by reason or any Divine Mandate, it is not unreasonable for the USA to enforce and claim authority over the other nations by military and economic might. Might makes right in today’s world.

The USA is not claiming anything that it is not allowed to do. It is the big dog for now. It’s origins are man-made and it behaves in the manner as it should.

Now if the USA claimed a Divine origin, then that would be a problem and it would be over-reaching it’s authority.

But USA will not claim any Divine Mandate to rule over other nations because it does not acknowledge the Blessed Trinity.

Reading this stream sharpens a strain of thought I’ve been chewing on of late...namely, the existence of two distinct realities in this current era of American Dystopia. There is the so called Popular culture, a madhouse funfest of disreputable activity.....a sustained alley fight in essence and the other reality that is far more important but unfortunately commandeered by the popular culture: our individual lives in contact with other individuals. This is the distinction we should all be focusing upon because it is a route out of the mess we’ve assiduously created by abandoning all but the most narcissistic aspects of individualism. Healthy individualism still exists in America, the individualism that respects the commonweal and if we return our gaze to it, we might recover from this feckless immersion in Crusading Empire. Capitalism....the mano a mano version of it, the trans-lingual language of transaction that places a complex array of individual realities into a forum of mutual benefit is a powerful tool in empowering the individual and sustaining the conversation that once made this Republic the envy of the world.

The idea of America is what has stunned the world. Empire building distracts this intellectual construct, diverting it’s attentions to the tribalistic territorialism that may have jump-started the species into advancement but bedevils it on a crowded planet.

All of us possess several circles of friendship and contact. Some within it are assholes, some tolerable and some positively beloved. Subtract the noise of the popular culture from them and these relationships reveal the truer meaning of America.....an America that still exists and will always exist because it is not a place as much as it is an idea.
Religion is a wonderful forum for this but at present, Religion is bogged down in the Rollerderby of popular discontent and fear. Religion is gunning the accelerator and steering by the rear view mirror.

Lets get back to basics...to our individual relationships and the enrichment possible there. Centralization, Corporatization and a mania for the big and flashy has distracted us and obliterated a cultural memory that served us better when the Popular Culture did not medicate us to the degree it has. Small.......is bigger than we think.

I may not love you but so what if we can come to a mutually beneficial state of transaction...verbal.... economic..... civic...whatever the case may be. Consumerism and it’s Host, the Centralized Bureaucracy of a Government-Corporate Syndicate blocks this by breeding a class of spectators when what we need is actors. For us to return to the dynamic Republic we once had, labor must stop being considered a pejorative.....Marx, like all idealogues was only smart by half. Individual labor and trade will return the self respect the nation has been habituated to forsake.

The technological juggernaut of Globalism has brought some amazing things but the psychology of the individual has not adapted apace, surrendering the will to “leaders” who neither lead nor care a whit about the individual. We have some work to do and it starts within the authentic circle of our acquaintances.

Mr. Sabin, it would seem, is desperately clinging to the radical idea of salvation of the species via the social and economic contract which, once shorn of “narcissistic aspects of individualism”, cannot help but result in the “enrichment” of “individual relationships” and a “return to the dynamic Republic we once had”.  And it gets better:

“The idea of America is what has stunned the world… America…will always exist because it is not a place as much as it is an idea.”

Indeed, as was Rome - and what a stunning idea it is; an idea and experiment so stunningly revolutionary that it is the first of its kind to derive its authority not from God, upon Whom all authority rests, but - from the authority of all that is true and good - “We the people”.  And we have the audacity to then ask the “Creator” mentioned in our Declaration of Independence (the ecumenical, pluralistic and indifferent universal god of liberty, fraternity and equality) to “bless America” when the true God of all nations and governments has been told to take a hike - after all, Christendom, thank you very much, had its chance and was found wanting. 

So rise up all ye laborers who yearn to be free, for if you wish to keep apace with the amazing wonders of globalism, one must not surrender to the will of “leaders who neither lead nor care a whit about the individual”; our work, we are told, begins “within the authentic circle of our acquaintances.”

Let us convert our neighbors to the new religion; the religion of unfettered “Capitalism....the mano a mano version of it, the trans-lingual language of transaction that places a complex array of individual realities into a forum of mutual benefit is a powerful tool in empowering the individual and sustaining the conversation that once made this Republic the envy of the world.”

Music to the ears of every true Austrian schooled Libertarian.

Let’s listen, rather, to the voice of wisdom and truth - the collective “we” of supreme authority alluded to by Mr. Warning and the voice Merrs. Coulombe and Richert know all too well:

“But, on the contrary, by ignoring the laws governing human nature and by breaking the bounds within which they operate, the human person is lead, not toward progress, but towards death. This, nevertheless, is what they want to do with human society; they dream of changing its natural and traditional foundations; they dream of a Future City built on different principles, and they [the Sillonists] dare to proclaim these more fruitful and more beneficial than the principles upon which the present Christian City rests.

No, Venerable Brethren, We must repeat with the utmost energy in these times of social and intellectual anarchy when everyone takes it upon himself to teach as a teacher and lawmaker - the City cannot be built otherwise than as God has built it; society cannot be setup unless the Church lays the foundations and supervises the work; no, civilization is not something yet to be found, nor is the New City to be built on hazy notions; it has been in existence and still is: it is Christian civilization, it is the Catholic City. It has only to be set up and restored continually against the unremitting attacks of insane dreamers, rebels and miscreants. Omnia instaurare in Christo.” (Pope St. Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910)

Without this truth in front of us, the discussion of a viable empire or of a nation state divorced from this divine reality is, really, for naught - for both are doomed to failure and even extinction. “Let us get back to basics.” Agreed; our work then begins with the conversion of the nation, one soul at a time (and we do not need the blessings of the present and all too fallible Vatican hierarchy, lost in its own ecumenical meaninglessness, to commence and to join in this great work).

Truth, you see, never changes. 

Vivo Christo Rey!

Jesus was not for empire. So why would GOD be for it?

The tower of babel fell when mankind began engaging in military conquest and unification thru force.

Jesus turned the table of the money changers [usury] He did not embrace wealth and those that want to capitalise [exploit] his fellow mans labors and needs.

I am not Spartacus wrote:"Sadly, in these modern times, many foreigners are not even aware The United States Constitution provides that all foreign governments must elect leaders subservient to Washington..”

Please show me where you find this?

Book of Sarcasm 1:1

and we do not need the blessings of the present and all too fallible Vatican hierarchy, lost in its own ecumenical meaninglessness, to commence and to join in this great work

Jaroslav Pelikan could have had you in mind when he wrote “"Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.”

If this conversation had occured a hundred years ago it might have made more sense.

The U.S. no longer has the ECONOMIC base to sustain even a limited empire. Its economy is collapsing, the $ is collapsing, the Bof P is beyond unsustainable, the country seems to be smiling and dreaming all the way to the liquidators office, just like Lohan goes to her next court appearance. The population is aging, is obese, diabetic, plagued with heart disease and mental illness, and ignorant. So where is the economic basis for empire and where are the people who will make this happen? The comptroller general of the U.S. has sounded a five alarm fire warning yet the intellectuals of this country spend their time engaged in mental M*****bating. Global climate chaos is upon us, NY is headed underwater, as is Florida.

China is the new economic, industrial and military superpower and has already replace the U.S. as the major investor in Africa and Asia.

The only lesson I take today is that 2000 years later we are fiddling like Nero as Rome is burning.

Re; M Ryan
Yes....the “truths” of your assertions never change, anyone who might question them is automatically a death-loving nihilist.

I do believe Christ was a firm adherent to the benefits of labor...fishing, carpentry, preaching...etc. His message was subsumed by subsequent Christian Empires and turned into a master-servant relationship, uniquely suitable for exploitation by every crackpot imperial project since. While his brutal death and resurrection are the focus of veneration, it is in the story of his life and words and actions that I myself find the richest vein to plumb. Given his eviction of the money changers from the Temple, I imagine he would howl when confronted with the pridefully debauched state of many of those who claim to support his words and actions today.

Something tells me that given an explanation of Austrian Schooled Libertarianism and the Perversities of the Power and Soul -hungry Religionists of today and yesterday, Christ would not be as automatically dismissive as you seem to assert. 

I do not so much repudiate religion as I do the righteous perversions and tyranny...and anti-intellectualism and anti-individualism of Statist Religion. Unfortunately, one needs a millennia of cheeks to turn in the face of the continuous assault of the righteous on the dignity of the individual. Statist religion has all too often been the Judas of the ages, kissing the masses while dispensing the rod freely.

When and if the final parade of victory over the lapsed Republic occurs, I am confident the lead chariot will be occupied by a despot who has a venal “priest” at his right hand, listening pruriently to the power-plays of the kinds of henchmen who demand obedience and abjure the individual. Taxes are, of course to the glory of the State and special dispensations are on sale to those made worthy by a handful of ducats. Keep thinking about the fires of hell to make the tyranny we exert upon you today seem less unjust.

Seeking to categorize me as some form of antagonist because I may remind you of long-dead Sillonists is a true waste of time and spirit . Nonetheless, thanks for the reference, it’ll be an interesting thing to research and ponder, relativistically speaking of course.

For the record, “dreaming” of “salvation” or creating an army of laborers for a perfect state whose “religion is unfettered Capitalism “ would seem to be beside the point because perfection is anathema....a charade, something dangled by the powerful as in the free cheese always found in the mouse trap.

It is always interesting to me when some religious authoritarians assume secular humanists wish to pound their own ideas into a codified religion meant to replace traditional religion. I personally do not possess such certitude as that and would defend the religious against such assaults. Hellfire and brimstone is the coda of the coward and seduction of the despot.

RE “I Am Not Spartacus”: Book of Sarcasm 1:1...nice one…

And “Allen”, I’m not sure the conversation is quite 200 years late but it is at least as late as the time that has elapsed since the last chunk of the Berlin wall hit the ground. China’s supremacy is not a foregone conclusion, despite their current economic advances. But you are right, there is alot of fiddling going on, mine included.

Sabin:
I am an economist, (the dismal art), believe me the current structural problems being faced by the U.S. seem insurmoutable.
Empire is only possible if you have the economic wherewithal and the population. The U.S. has neither.
Its industrial base is so eroded that it has taken 4 years to produce a few thousand up armoured humvees. That says it all.
It can’t sustain an occupation of a coountry of 25 million (Iraq) oops I meant 19 million, (4 million refugees, 2 million dead). Today the U.S. army is surviving in Afghanistan as long as Pakistan’s army keeps distracting the insurgents. Think about it.
The chinese do not have one soldier outside their borders, they are therefore able to tie in Africa and Asia and and the Americas into their economic empire. Today they sell their goods to the U.S and take all its surplus. Isn’t the U.S. already a Chinese colony?
They give the dry alcoholics who run the U.S. all the money they want to borrow to destroy what is left of its influence.
Sorry my friend all options are bad or worse.
The U.S. has to get an Indian to run Citibank because American educated CEO’s lack the ability to understand the worl. Obama says he is more qualified because he was schooled in Indonesia. What kind of empire is this?

Nice and well writen article.
Just one argument I have - can’t see why you call Alexander the Great “barbarian king”
1) He was Greek - Aristoteles was his teacher
2) Macedonia was just one of Greek Kingdoms - participating in olymbic games.
3) Barbarians at that time were defined as those who did not speak Greek, and I am sure Alexander was fluent in this language.

Happy new year to you and all the commentantors here.
__________________

Mr. Sarto;

Certainly I appreciate the late Mrs. Bhutto’s pro-life stance - this is what caused the real heartfeltness of my prayer for her soul a couple of days ago. That said:

FFLA said Bhutto prefers “the empowerment of women” over their destruction via abortion.

That’s the problem. The “empowerment” of women is basically inseparable from the masculinization of women, the sexual revolution, and the abortion “rights” movement. Or at very least, it has been at any point since around the time Rousseau picked up a pen. Mrs. Bhutto tried to stay in the middle of the road between traditionalism/religion and modernity/secularism, and got run over in both directions.

Literally. Condi Rice sent her back to Pakistan on a suicide mission - it couldn’t have been any more so if they’d flown her back into Pakistan in an Okha rocket plane. And al-Quaeda did, well, what al-Quaeda does - the old story of the fox and the scorpion crossing the river comes to mind.

Mr. Waring;

The Holy Roman Empire is the only true and Christian empire, you say, and the only real follow-on to Rome?

*cough*Byzantium*cough*

Mr. Sabin;

It seems that America is your religion. The problem with that is that anything that your god hands you down from on high is infallible. And what your god has been handing down lately ain’t exactly the Sermon on the Mount.

What happens when the US draws it’s
tentacles back from the world. Will this mean
more liberty for the world or more anarchy. I
see it as an eventuality, but how will the
people of the world react when the US isn’t
barking orders via a military or militaristic
foreign policy advisors. We’re going to bring
our troops home from Korea and Japan one day.
What will they do then?

Rich:
Kore and Japan will survive without us. Believe me they survived for many milenia before the U.S. had a flag.
We need to pull back and spend that trillion $ a year in retolling our economy, in building new infrastructure in developing new technologies, new energy sources, new medical systems, in educating our people, and attacking climate disasters.
Let the Israelis bury themslves, the rest of the world will survive fine.
By staying on we are simply letting the Russians and the Chinese bleed us of resources we don’t have in the first place.
Start by arresting the neocon fifth column.

Rich by the way:

Lets stop talking about liberty and freedom. The U.S bringing up that topic now sounds like the town whore complaining about all the loose women in town

@ Allen;

You’re not much of a people person are you?
I neglected to say anarchy is liberty!
Balkanization is the natural state of affairs
with regard to humankind. Short and brutal is
how it should be unless you prefer a society
full of ivy-league schooled technocrats
working for themselves. Down with Yale! Down
with greatness.

Rich;

The US only “protects” the world with its tentacles in the Urotsukidoji sense, and I’m sure the world will be as happy when the tentacles are retracted as the female characters in the above-mentioned production were.

Rich:
Its hard to be a people person when you are upto your ass**le in neocon alligaters as is the case often on this site these days.
Anarchy, balkanization liberty or Yale skull and X bones. Whatever turns you on. Just bring the troops back from Afhganistan befor we have to remake Gallipoli set to the strains of Albinoni in memory of what used to be.

Allen;
“Bring the troops home” they’re your troops
and it’s your home! Are your houses out of
touch as ours? Careers and whatnot, eh? Well,
all the best to you and yours. All praise due
to the trust fund.

@ Allen, “China is the new economic, industrial and military superpower”

Obviously you’ve never spent much time there.  China is a disunited basket case of a state, composed of myriad regional statelets governed arbitrarily by LOCAL economic and military warlords over whom the central government has very little real control.  “The mountains are high, the emperor is far away”.  China is a continental empire pretending to be a unified state.  As for its economy, it’s
a mirage and a disaster in progress; another great famine is a very real potential danger in the near future; and the Communist Party (which is by no means united except by its habit of lying and stealing) has never ceased to lie about its “economic” data.  Heaven only knows why so many Westerners still allow themselves to be conned by the fake economic figures concocted by the Chinese government(s) (plural because the central and provincial powers are, well, plural.)

The best the world can hope for is that China doesn’t explode into civil war or another Cultural Revolution.  China’s weakness (including the weakness of the moral fiber of most of its people) is what makes it so potentially dangerous.

The ultimate Pyrrhic victory is the empire that collapses under its own weight.

While Americans have feared the Nazis, Imperial Japan, Soviet Union, al Qaeda and a host of other foreign malefactors, it should be noted that our real enemy is in Washington, DC.

What the Russians could not due with a nuclear blast or Islamic terrorists with suicide bombers, Congress is doing with the national debt: Sinking America under the weight of her own negligence.

Heaven only knows why so many Westerners still allow themselves to be conned by the fake economic figures concocted by the Chinese government(s) (plural because the central and provincial powers are, well, plural.)

Excellent, Mr. Ball. From what I know (A materials-engineer and GE Exec family member who was there to install some turbines) the Chinese have to steal and/or reverse engineer much of the technology they will eventually misuse.

I think one reason so many Americans buy into the China threat is they are victims of the paranoid propaganda produced by the establishment Empire which needs an enemy abroad to justify limiting liberty at home.

@ Mr I Am Not Spartacus,

“the Chinese have to steal and/or reverse engineer much of the technology they will eventually misuse.”

Yep, and they do the same thing to Western ideas of ALL kinds, including Marxism. 
I have ALMOST nothing but contempt for Karl Marx and his crackpot ideology, but Marx had SOME good qualities and a FEW ideas worth thinking about.  But Mao and the Chinese Communist Party turned “Marxism” into something they call “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, which is not the least bit Marxist or Western at all.  If Marx could have seen Mao’s Communist Party, or today’s Chinese Communist Party, he would turn over in his grave and then convert to Christianity (which, for all we know, Marx might be doing in Purgatory.  Although I’ve become a Protestant, Purgatory is one of the beliefs of the Catholic Church which I think the Protestants were stupid to repudidate.)

And the contemporary Chinese interpretation of “free markets” is equally as bastardised as Mao’s interpretation of Marxism.  Americans who believe in China’s “economic miracle” are not only stupid, but willfully evil in their refusal to think about this in honest ways.

And you wrote:

“I think one reason so many Americans buy into the China threat is they are victims of the paranoid propaganda produced by the establishment Empire which needs an enemy abroad to justify limiting liberty at home.”

True to some extent, but there’s more to it than that.  The American fantasy of China as a “great power” (which Europeans have shared to a lesser extent) is over 200 years old.  But it’s especially American to fantasise about China as a “great power”, and a lot of it has to do with the American fantasy of “going West” toward El Dorado while repudiating Europe, as all too many so-called “non-interventionists” (many, but not all of whom were Nazi fifth-columnists) did in 1940.

Robert Taft advocated American intervention against Mao’s China in the early 1950s.  I admit, he was mostly a wise and honourable man, but I wish his acolytes among the American so-called “Old Right” would take a closer look at the flimsy (albeit honourable) icon of Saint Robert Taft, who tended to agree with the America Firsters (like JFK who got us into the swamps of Viet Nam), whose policy was not so much “America First” as it was “ASIA First!”

The American-nationalist tendency to look toward the Far East as the locus of America’s manifest destinty, is over 200 years old.  I’m asking our readers to step back and take a deep breath and please think about that, a lot, and hopefully then some of them MIGHT begin to re-think the myths they believe in, about Saint Robert Taft (a good man, in my opinion) and Charles Lindbergh (a useful idiot of the Nazis, in my opinion), and the whole complex narrative of the American “Old Right”, which needs to do a hell of a lot of re-thinking.

(Oh and for what it’s worth, my grandfather, John D Ball Sr (1899-1962), was nicknamed the “Mr Republican (in the 1940s-50s meaning, the ‘Robert Taft’) of Montgomery County Pennsylvania.” My grandfather adored Senator Taft - in my grandfather’s time.  But then in 1974, shortly before Nixon (a man whom I admire in many ways) resigned, my father (who had “converted” to the Democratic Party because of his scorn of the corruptions of Nixon’s party which KEPT our boys in Viet Nam for TOO long) - my father said, at the dinner table in 1974, that “the Republican Party should have gone extinct, like the Whigs, in 1969 after Nixon broke his promise and kept our boys in Viet Nam....”

That said, throughout the Viet Nam war my father always wrote letters, once a month, to every one of his former students who was sent to Viet Nam.  Because my Dad remembered (from 1944-45) what it was like to be a very young man in combat, far from home.  But my Dad began to curse Nixon in 1969, because Nixon broke his promise to get America out of that stupid war in which several dozen of my Dad’s students were killed.

Anyway, that PS is just my way of letting you know that I, too, belong to the heritage of Senator Robert Taft.  I just hope that all of Senator Taft’s other acolytes will think a bit more about how inconsistent the American “non-interventionists” have been.  JFK belonged to “America First”, but then he got us entangled in the swamps of Viet Nam.  So here’s a reminder, that there’s a big difference between “talking the talk” of non-interventionism, versus CONSISTENTLY “walking the walk.” So-called “non-interventionists” can (and often do) arbitrarily define foreign wars as matters of American national interest.
As I’m a lawyer, I of all people understand how (as Mark Twain said), “the difference between lightning and a lightning bug is only one word.”

So, please, all of your self-described “non-interventionists”, please always remember, that the difference between “intervention” versus “America’s national interest” can very easily be changed, through just one word, arbitrarily spoken.

Regardless of the intentions of neoliberals and neocons, Americans do not have the willpower to maintain an empire.

Reviewing Pat Buchanan’s new book, Day of Reckoning, Chilton Williamson Jr. writes in the newest issue of Middle American News (Jan. 2008):

“...Americans, who for better than two centuries have been pleased to think of their nation as God’s country, have lacked nevertheless the haughty self-confidence and sense of racial, cultural and class superiority that allowed the European nation-states (Great Britain especially) to succeed at creating and managing their empires from early modern times until 1945.  And nowadays, they lack it more than ever. What the would-be masters of American empire fail to comprehend is that their multicultural agenda works to undermine the cultural self-confidence that their imperial agenda requires for its successful realization.  As a substitute, they offer capitalistic-democratism that is supposed to explain and justify American imperialism while giving giving the American people a new ideological confidence to replace their old discredited cultural assurance.  But democratism is a poor substitute.  Indeed, it is no substitute at all.”

If America were the country it claims to be, and if Americans were the people they claimed to be, in 1949 they would have inundated the Japanese with Christian missionaries, not cursed them with legal abortion. That fact says everything you need to know about America - a place that has never really believed any of the things that it ever loudly proclaimed.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men were created equal; that they were endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"… unless you’re black, of course. After all, if we extended that idea to the darkies we might actually have to pay someone a market wage to pick our cotton, and we can’t have that, can we?

In fact, the only consistent principle in American life through the centuries has been the drive to dodge having to pay market price for the things we want, which is the one principle we pursue no matter what the cost. From “free” slave labor to “free” land stolen from the Indians or Mexico to the cheap labor of successive floods of immigrants which prevented the existing labor force from improving wages to the illusion of cheap gasoline, America has shown time and again that it will pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe in order to not have to pay going market rates for what it wants.

I wouldn’t say it’s fair to accuse Nixon of “breaking his promise” to end the Vietnam War. He did - just slower than some would have liked (and faster than others would have liked). Let’s not forget that though opposition to the war gets the attention in historical retrospect, there was a lot of vociferous support for it, too.  He faced a pretty untenable position, and got out of it with as much grace as probably anyone could have. At least, anyone not armed with forty years of 20/20 hindsight.

but Marx had SOME good qualities and a FEW ideas worth thinking about.—John Ball.

Let’s list all three of them:
1. The worst social class is the Lumpenproletariat (not the bourgeoisie).
2. Nationalism and racialism are stupid ideas.
3. The state is bad for children and other living things.

Thanks to John Ball for his perspective on China, a view we haven’t seen in the press. Remember in the 90s after Princess Di’s death we were told that the British Monarchy was finished?  Remember back in the 80s when we were told that the 21st Century was going to be the “Japanese Century”?  Remember back in the 70s when we were told about the future belonging to “Eurocommunism”?  Remember when Big K said the Soviet Union would bury us, with Sputnik as his example?  Remember when Woodrow the Worst told us World War I was “the war to end all wars?”

@BEde, as to the willpower of Americans to maintain an
empire, they seem to lack two things, the willingness
to sacrifice and the focused attention span required
not to forget what needs to be done if something
else comes along.

The problem is that no one says the word “sacrifice”
any more unless it is as a curse (Thank you, Ayn Rand,
for undermining our moral fiber), I mean, when our
Idiot in Chief says that in order to defeat terrorism
we need to… go shopping, that tells you how screwed
up we are as a nation. As for a focused attention span,
that flies in the face of instant gratification.

And, sadly, you cannot blame the Left for this, but
the good old capitalist advertising industry that
keeps promising more, more, more, and faster, faster,
faster, until we tend to think of it as normal.

@Adriana
God save us from those who “know everything and understand nothing”
At this time the U.S. is sacrificing about a trillion dollars a year to maintain the fantasy of “empire”.
This money could provide medicine for all americans, housing for the homeless, food for the hungry and leave enough to deal with the need to re-educate the unemployed and rebuild the inner strength of America.
Instead we are being baffled by BULL to fall in line and support the next diabolical conspiracy of the elders of zion, in the name of “empire”.
What empire?
These days nations are fragmenting as people are no longer willing to suffer hegemons, even those waving their own flags.
Lets get real, listen to Pat Buchannan, he knows a thing or two about the world we live in.
Listen to Ron Paul.
Lets cleanse ourselves of the diabolical neocon thought patterns that keep turning up as flesh eating viruses every where we turn

“The likelihood that Israel will one day follow in the path of French Algeria and Rhodesia. One would much prefer a peaceful evacuation of the Israeli population to the United States rather than a bloodbath.” Why to the United States? The French Algerians went to France. The British Rhodesians went to the UK. America has no need for an additional polyglot. Pack the Yemeni Jews to Yemen; the Iraqis, to Iraq; the Germans, to Germany; the Russians, to Russia, etc. The individuals will be better off as will the various nations, many of whom have regrets about the outflow of human capital. The United States should not be the default dumping ground for the detritus from failed colonial experiments. There is no reason for America to be the world’s policeman or its dustbin.

...The native population may be entirely destroyed, or at least much reduced, and replaced with settlers. This was done in most of North America, and Australia, New Zealand, and republican Argentina.

Isn’t this how most European nations got their start? Where are the Britons, the Gauls, the Iberians, or the Osco-Umbrians today? They were replaced by the English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italians.

There was a comedian who had a bit about space aliens wondering just who is in charge on Earth after watching people picking up dog poop and following their dogs around Here is a hint:  If they can tell you to go, and you have to, then you’re probably not an imperial power.  True, we imposed democracy (eek!) on South Korea (or did we?), but who really is the vassal there?  And in what sense could actions against the Barbary pirates legitimately be deemed to be imperialism?  Leftists think selling Coca-Cola is imperialism, doesn’t make it so.  The minor foray into Iraq doesn’t signal the beginning of an American Empire
it is simply a distraction designed to keep conservative and Republican supporter’s minds off their impending dispossession (America IS an empire, but only an internal one) and how well it works is amply demonstrated by this rather silly discussion.  I mean, “The native population may be entirely destroyed, or at least much reduced, and replaced with settlers” - can you think of a place where this is happening?

Great article, Charles!

Allen and Nergol,
No Nergol, my religion is not America. I think it a fair 50-50 chance that the lapsed Republic will seriously stumble within the next few years as the ramifications of the drunken fiat Economy and imperial over reach come home to roost. The clueless average American will be woefully unprepared to deal with it if it occurs, because the average citizen has not the first clue of the ridiculous nature of it debt-centered consumerist lifestyle. Allen, as an economist, you must be stunned by the counterintuitive American approach to “superpowerhood”

I do possess stubborn admiration for the initial idea of America, when triumphalism had not created the cluster boink that is present today..... when the idea of an empowered and productive citizen with a small government held sway. The Founders created a creaky machinery of clunks and pauses to combat the perversions of centralized power only to see the current generation turn that idea on it’s head.

Happy New Year to all.

Well done, Charles.
Here is also a contrast between the Spanish Empire and the American: at it’s core Spain was motivated by a genuine desire and belief in duty to spreading the Roman Catholic faith to its newly-discovered subjects. Ratification for this was sought and obtained by Pope Alexander VI in the Papal Bull, Inter Coetera.
The United States can point to nothing remotely similar other than Protestant “Manifet Destiny”. The United States now wishes to spread something as nebulous as “democracy” without any true understanding of the term’s meaning or history. “Democracy” is. ultimately, not