The new order envisaged by the Bush doctrine hasn’t quite worked out as it was meant to. That’s because, from the beginning, the White House has acted on the assumption that bold action would make our allies rally behind us and our enemies cower. Building a consensus with our friends before we acted only encouraged quarrelsomeness. The point wasn’t that dictation was superior to consensus; the point was that it created consensus.Again and again, things didn’t turn out that way.
In the wake of Cheney's gaffe over the Christmas holidays about the idea of an American empire, of course it began to be a topic of discussion in some circles. I'd normally be willing to dismiss the occaisional single word coming up, whether they be references to an empire, Bush's crack a few years back about how it'd be easier to run a dictatorship, and so on as jokes or overblown statements which fell on their face in most cases. We are, after all, generally human, and just about every president, prime minister, king, congressman, member of Parliament, general, colonel, private, CEO, teacher, student and dog has said at least one Stupid thing in their career at the Worst Possible Time.
However, it starts becoming a bit more worthy of attention when it starts echoing a bit too uncomfortably through the halls of current events. Political discource in the United States has a number of things it can be divided on, but if you really want to start a bar fight you raise the question of whether the United States currently presides over an empire or not. The arguments on both sides are silly at times: the "yes" side will say things like the mere fact of foreign entanglements means that America is an empire, and the "no" side will claim America isn't one because their government is democratically elected and - as Cheney's fabulously stupid riposte says - the United States doesn't cover a certain percentage of the Earth's surface.
Joshua Marshall of the New Yorker believes that America is, or at least has, an empire - and has for some time now. This empire isn't necessasrily one of strictly military domination like the great European empires of the nineteenth century as much as it is one of ideas; a web of alliances, consensus, and backchannel influence which replaces domination with the deeper and generally less-violent idea of hegemony. However, in Marshall's article in the New Yorker, the Bush Administration has no clue how to manage their house. Discussing the history and characteristics of this empire, Marshall points to a growing militarization and unilateralism coming out of Washington, a shift of character of American hegemony which runs the risk of self-destructing it.
Posted by zibblsnrt at February 1, 2004 04:01 PM