``... it is hard to see how progressives in the US could work with potentially a large body of the US population to oppose global policing in principle...
Although it goes against the grain for me to lift the definition of the USA as the target, and looks very unmilitant, I suspect that progressive people in the USA may be able to contribute to a new global strategy better by making tactical demands about the process rather than the fact of globalisation - eg that it is more practical as well as fairer to invest funds in aid for countries in the middle east than just to spend it on imperfectly guided massive bombs, that it is more rational to support the idea of permanent international court of crimes against humanity and to get international approval for interventions, because it is counterproductive for the USA to intervene alone. etc etc.
Does anyone have a better formula in the new power balance for how the working people of the world should unite?'' Chris Burford
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I don't have a better formula, but I have some thoughts on how this is likely to turn out. Short form, it will turn out badly.
The US has reduced all the problems of its global expansion of economic, military, and cultural hegemony (Empire) down to a focus on on its own security. We are following the general strategy of Israeli v Palestinian, UK v IRA model, which is to ignore the entire spectrum of blatantly obvious reasons for endless low grade wars of occupation and terrorism and insist the only issue is security.
On the tactical level, US security model in its foreign policy is constructed around its own domestic anti-crime/drug war policies over the last three administrations. These amount to ignoring all of the socio-economic and political conditions that build and sustain whole communities and criminalize them, and simply focus on repression. The reciprocal images between our foreign and domestic policies are between fortress Amerika v World, and the tidy suburban gated communities of the bourgeois v urban working class/poor.
So, in similitude with the long history of US domestic anti-crime policies, the lines will trace out congruent figures.
Sensible arguments and proposals to focus on the underlying conditions that breed terrorism and hatred of the US will be met with complete dismissals as more bleeding heart liberalism. The rightwing reaction will turn the tables and claim the reason there are terrorist elements, rogue states, and US hatred is because of liberal and humanitarian policies that bred them. It will then follow, that liberalism is the ideological root bed of anti-american sentiments and the terrorists out to destroy the American Way of Life.
Who knows what the results will be. The concrete fact is that the world is not a US urban slum that can not be merely dismissed and repressed out of hand.
The most progressive and positive development that I can think of would be for the rhetorical analogy between the US govt's domestic anti-crime policies and its foreign policy modeling of security, to become a more identifiable and concrete reality. Instead of identifying with the US govt, the potential exists for domestic US communities that have been criminalized and impoverished, to finally seen their reciprocal images not in the faces of their masters, but in the mass of foreign faces abroad who are undergoing ever more brutal repressions under the same masters of the universe, the US elites.
I have no idea how to establish that linkage or develop that kind of solidarity, but that is the best outcome I can come up with at the moment.
Chuck Grimes