If at this moment the President appears less than he was, he is the image of our own self-diminution reflected back at us: His state is our state.
#neo-imperialism
After East Ghouta 1: Minimum Leader
Posted in Featured, International Relations, Neo-Imperialism, War Tagged with: After East Ghouta, neo-imperialism, Obama, Syria, War
Strategic Hypochondria
“Resolving conflict worldwide” and “changing dictatorship into democracies” count in this context as simplistic, even childish reductions of any questions truly before us. When we focus on such simplisms instead of treating them for what they are, every movement of any kind falls subject to strategic hypochondria, a condition under which even a move consequentially “inward” also becomes impossible: A hypochondriac nation will resist turning consequentially in any direction at all.
No Center at the Center
The world’s chieftain cannot serve the general interest effectively and reliably unless convinced that serving the general interest also serves “his” self-interest – that the two interests are finally the same or non-severable. When the chieftain falls into a depressive state – of apathy, or aboulia, or neurasthenia; doubting all, negating itself to negate all – the system fails, and the will to stasis is realized, or hypostatized, as crisis.
Posted in Featured, History, International Relations, Neo-Imperialism, The Exception Tagged with: neo-imperialism, Political Philosophy, Political Theology, Rousseau, The Exception, United Nations
Putin: If the world is essentially Americanized, who needs America?
Putin’s argument against American exceptionalism is effectively that the American project as an ideological project is essentially over. The prophecy has been fulfilled: What in 1776 was a message of a few colonial upstarts – that “all men are created equal” – is now everyone’s basic belief, even the belief of Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad. Belief in equality no longer sets Americans apart: Everyone believes everyone is equal – or equal before God – so there’s nothing exceptional about believing so, and no need for Americans to go abroad seeking monsters to destroy.
Posted in International Relations, Neo-Imperialism, notes Tagged with: neo-imperialism, Putin, Syria
Prodigal Son (on the Russian Initiative)
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.
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.