Billman wrote a pretty good post over at his blog that one unfortunate tendency of thought that that I find over represented, at least implicitly, in this community and among many liberals.
He states, "Wilkerson strikes me as reasonably representative of the technicians who actually run the empire -- and his assumptions largely appear to reflect those of his class."
"American supremacy is a taken as a given, requiring no legal or moral justification. Not because America has any grand historical mission to spread the blessings of democracy to the heathen, but because American power maintains the world order and keeps the peace, or at least something approximating it. It also keeps the sea lanes open and the oil flowing and the wheels of industry turning, not just here but around the world.
It does appear to have dawned on Wilkerson that the U.S. hegemony isn't viewed as quite such an exercise in utilitarian benevolence by the rest of the world, but I'm not sure he understands exactly why this is. I think he puts far too much blame on the cabal's shenanigans -- although these admittedly have made things worse -- and not enough on the fact that empires, even the practical, no nonsense type favored by the realists, are anachronisms in the modern world."
Let's imagine something for a second, the United States decides that it no longer is an empire and should not be one. We decide that instead we should only defend our own borders make treaties that deal only with the interest of the United States as a territorially bound entity and pull back our land forces from Eurasia, pull back our navy from much of the pacific and the south china sea, and close up every base that is not in the United States.
What would happen? I'm not sure the world would throw roses in our general direction and get on to a happy peaceful reign of triumph and general glee for the foreseeable future. Instead the more probable scenario is that Japan immediately rearms, causing everyone else in the region, who certainly haven't forgotten WWII to rearm. Europe seeing this threat might decide that it was in its interest to actually have large armies again. The next time some Muslim decided to blow something up in a European country, that country and others, deciding that there were too many threats to think about to include some idiot fundamentalists, would probably ship them all back to whatever country their grandparents probably came from. And the next time they got bombed they'd probably bomb that country in retaliation. A rise in general nationalism would probably occur. And my guess is that in the next 60 years we'd see a major power war, which would make all of the wars we worry about, such as Iraq which on the scale of things is pretty small , including the ones that no one likes the mention, like the civil or regional war in the Congo which has claimed about three million lives in the last 10 years and may be ready to spark back up, look like small conflicts rather than wars.
The world is an impressively dangerous place. No country is inherently more evil or more good than any other country, they can only be judged by their actions in the breach.
I'd say that even with the Iraq war and the numerous, numerous small wars the United States has engaged in since, well, the Barbary pirates, even with all of them, We've been more not evil than evil. (There's generally very little chance to be good unless your opponent is much more evil than you)
And what has been the greatest not evil thing the United States has been able to do. Not start a major power war. That's really rare if you read your history. We fought our proxy wars with the Soviet Union, we've mucked around stupidly in the middle east and Latin America, we've been pretty retarded. Though I'll say we can't be truly retarded institutionally since well we haven't done anything to jeopardize our power such as start a major power war.
Another way to put it is that were the big dog on the block that barks a lot and bites the small dogs sometimes but we haven't attacked the big dogs where all the other dogs would have to get involved leaving everyone whimpering and bloody.
Imagine China in our position; imagine Japan, hell Imagine France. I can't see them doing much better and a lot worse.
It doesn't seem to me that it matters if other countries love the way we do things, that's never going to occur, it also doesn't matter if its morally right for us to have the power we have. If we didn't either someone else would or we'd be back to Europe before WWI
and balance of power politics.
Billmon makes the mistake, I think, in believing that the fundamentals of relations between countries and the basic rules of power dynamics have changed over the last say, 5000 years. The main difference I see is that we have larger rocks than they did back then to bash Grock's head in. Otherwise the same principles of group interactions exist because we're human and we stay human.
And last thing for this rambling diary, were not really an empire. We're just called that because we don't have a good word for a country with as much possible power, and I say possible because we haven't ramped up the military machine to full tilt since WWII, as we have that hasn't tried to systematically take over the world. We do invade countries, and we do take out leaders we don't like, but we generally stay out of trying to directly rule another country forever.