Ian Murray wrote:
>
> we can't assume that if the US
> 'collapses' or takes a Ghandian stance towards the rest of the world
> that violence between groups and nations will disappear. What of
> non-hegemonic 'military humanism' then?
>
This can be granted I think. What I would claim is that no peace can be established globally in a single action. What U.S. hegemony does (quite aside from the human misery that it directly or indirectly imposes by its own actions is to make it impossible for other regions to fight out (work out) their more local contradictions. The U.S. would, internally, be a far more violent place now if foreign powers had interfered in the Civil War -- as happened in the case of all other western hemisphere nations. And while we have Mao's prediction that China, having changed its color, will be a threat to other nations, internally China is certainly a more peaceful region then it was from (say) 1850-1950 when it was subject to foreign domination.
(I'm not discussing the whole topic of violence here, just the specific point raised in the excerpt from your post.)
If Israel collapsed into Palestine, and foreign powers were excluded from western asia and north africa, that would not bring peace to the area -- but it would limit the scope of the wars to follow and open up at least the abstract possibility of peace at some point.
(Since I take a nominalist view of "violence," I of course reject out of hand as more or less empty of any material content the claim that violence begets violence. Nor do I see how that proposition can be fruitfully debated even.)
Carrol