"...a 'shadow government' of senior federal agency officials..."
We live in a political world | Under the microscope, | You can travel anywhere and hang yourself there | You always got more than enough rope.
The greater risk facing the United States at this juncture is that it will squander the opportunity to bring about a world supportive of its core interests by doing too little. Imperial understretch, not overstretch, appears the greater danger of the two.
Richard Haass (CFR)
The most obvious changes in policy practice have been a 78 percent real increase in defense expenditures since 1998 and a dramatic surge in US military activity abroad. US spending on national defense and war is now about $650 billion (FY 2008) per annum, which constitutes 50 percent of the world total. In real terms, the United States has not spent so much in any year since 1946. As for military activity: The current (2007) number of US armed forces personnel deployed in crisis operations abroad exceeds 200,000. This is almost 300 percent of the average level of crisis deployments during the years 1989-2001, measured in terms of the numbers of people deployed and the duration of their deployment.
"...remains in place at secure locations outside Washington..."
We live in a political world | Turning and a'thrashing about, | As soon as you're awake, you're trained to take | What looks like the easy way out.
What's the point of having this superb military...if we can't use it?
Madeleine Albright
What the "new imperialists" prescribe is not an explicitly exploitative or extractive enterprise. Rather they see US hegemony as the best or only guarantor of a relatively peaceful global system and the most reliable agent for the stable advance of market democracy. According to Haass, the effort would entail America enacting "a foreign policy that attempts to organize the world along certain principles affecting relations between states and conditions within them" – a new rule set.
The sphere of Pax Americana would expand by a process of integration involving, to varying extents, the direct management of key unstable areas and some failed or failing states. There is an "inside" and an "outside" to the schema – or in Thomas Barnett’s rendering, a "core" and a "gap". The former comprises the hegemon and its partners; the latter, those states and areas subject to compulsion, control, or management. Thus, at its outer edges, the expanding sphere of hegemonic peace takes on a distinctly imperial aspect.
Carl Conetta | Cul de sac: 9/11 and the paradox of American power
Good paper. It echoes much of what the Happy Tutor posited several years ago, i.e. the collapse of the Soviet Union signaled the end of democracy. So where to now? I'm afraid it looks like more of the same...
We live in a political world | Where peace is not welcome at all, | It's turned away from the door to wander some more | Or put up against the wall.
Bob Dylan | Political World
