All vassal states enjoy very wide latitude to oppress and exploit their citizens or subjects until and unless such oppression and exploitation rises to a level that threatens system integrity.
Neo-Imperialism
Unbelievably Small
Even worse, for the committedly anti-committal majority, which seems to include the President himself, the proposal of minimal means is burdened not only by threateningly maximal moral and historical justification, but by multiple additional independently intimidating justifications, each seemingly more disqualifyingly persuasive than the last.
A Referendum on the Global Security System and the American Presidency
The President has put before Congress a vote on the international system in its America-centric or Neo-Imperial form, with his office, as it has developed, and the norm against mass annihilation of people, as interdependent critical features of that system, subject to simultaneous yay or nay.
What We Find Interesting: Reply to Noah Millman on Obsolete IR Realism
If any serious attempt to define the American national interest leads us to an overdetermining or geographically, political-economically, and ideologically mutually conditioning internationalism or transnational impetus, borne out in the great events and ideas and seemingly inexorable material processes of the last two centuries, resulting in the state of the world as we know it, then nation-state Realism in relationship to America turns itself inside out or upside down.
Posted in History, International Relations, Neo-Imperialism, Philosophy Tagged with: neo-imperialism
Re-Statement on the World State of States, in Seven Theses, in Relation to International Relations Realism
The United State of America, by process of geographical and historical election, and by related ideological pre-disposition, plays a unique role in the administration of the global state interest, a role seemingly little understood by many whose occupations and pre-occupations are explaining, arguing about, and, in some places, denying it.
Posted in History, International Relations, Neo-Imperialism, War Tagged with: American Conservative Conservatism, neo-imperialism
Syria and the Neo-Imperial Interest
If we agree that we want a world in which nation-states do not use chemical weapons against their peoples, or a world in which chemical and other WMD use does not spread in interstate or other conflict situations, and the only way to ensure that worthy goal is to assert and enforce a transnational imperative, then we are neo-imperialists, and the only reason we do not confess as much is that we have inherited an ideological-terminological allergy.
A Global Force for Goods
What the commercials want to tell or remind us is this: The US Navy is the US global-historical role and purpose objectified, American ideology concretely, defined by a presumption that the two meanings of “for good” become the same meaning over time, are always approaching each other via that arc “bending toward justice” that the President likes to recall in his seemingly most heartfelt speeches.
Posted in Neo-Imperialism, TV, War Tagged with: A Global Force for Good, neo-imperialism, The Lyric Poetry of Late Capitalism, The State of the Empire Is Strong, US Navy
What they mean by “neo-isolationist”
The Republican neo-imperialists believe that the empire needs to be more aggressively defended and wherever possible expanded. The Democratic neo-imperialists believe that the empire needs mainly to be secured, or, if expanded, expanded via collaboration. The citizenry appears somewhat agnostic or passive on the main questions, except when unsettled by events suggestive of a possible un-managed and abrupt rollback that would also entail a downward adjustment in consumption and other disruptions of accustomed expectations – a possibility or set of possibilities that few outside the neo-imperial mainstream seem equipped to analyze concretely.
Posted in Neo-Imperialism, Politics Tagged with: American Conservative, Democratic Party, Isolationism, neo-imperialism, Obama, Republican Party
Controlled Demolition, not Flypaper (Ten Years After Cont’d) – UPDATED
We do not have an in fact unresolved history of war with Syria or Assad as we did with Iraq/Saddam, and we operate from greater confidence in regard to terrorist threats than in the early 2000s. If this confidence is misplaced, it is something that will have to be proved to us before we embark upon some new improved version of a newly vindicated Bush Doctrine.