> nationalist interests. It seem overvalued stock markets allow American
> companies to buy up more than their fair share of the global capitalist
> economies, and then periodic military crises consolidate all the old ways to
> maintain the American imperium.
Not quite. The US has been running humongous trade and capital account deficits for decades, meaning it's deeply dependent on the continued inflow of East Asian/EU capital; the Wall Street bubble temporarily papered over this contradiction, but not any more. Given that the US is run by an unelected, braindead oiligarchy in thrall to a bizarre cult of petro-Christianity ("Jesus plus oil derricks"), it makes perfect sense that our elites would declare a holy war on petro-Islam. Local fundamentalisms are the distorted mirror-image of the global ones, which is why each has singled out the other for its pathologic fury.
-- Dennis