Ironic how Trump apologists, especially certain types of “American Conservative” paleo-cons, self-styled republican constitutionalists, and diverse fellow travelers all the way extending to everyday “Deplorables” drunkenly hurling foul epithets at campaign reporters, have adopted a main strategic rationale of the despised Neocons and Globalists.
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.
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.
The difference here is, I believe, in strategic concepts – possibly even a different implicit understanding of what the U.S. and therefore its interests even are or should be.
We like to believe we are Lockean, but we suspect we are Machiavellian or on our best days Ciceronian, and we are ever-insecurely deluded about having evaded Hegel and Rousseau.
