Ne Plus Ultra Imperialism
Marilyn B. Young
...What is the regulatory mechanism of the new transnational world order? Who possesses the preponderance of coercive power? Who will command it? And in whose interests? The concept of postimperialism, at least in these two essays, does not seem to address these questions.
"Can you even imagine America as not an empire?" William Appleman Williams asked 13 years ago. For me, that question remains unanswered....For ten years the United States funded the vicious war in El Salvador. The U.N. Commission report states that the killings by the treasury police under the U.S. protege, General Rene Emilio Ponce, "closed off all possibilities of a negotiated solution to the political crisis at the end of 1980." Some 80,000 deaths later, the spokesman for the Clinton administration chooses to leave the question of U.S. responsibility to "the historians to judge."
One of the most ambitious (ultra? post?) imperialist documents of the 20th century, NSC-68, argued that the problem of the postwar world was not the Soviet Union but the "absence of order among nations" and declared the U.S. alone capable of imposing order. What has changed? Not much, judging by what you read in the New York Times. "Apart from humanitarian concern," Anthony Lewis argues in a typical column, "Clinton has a profound stake in the horror of Bosnia. It is the world's belief in his will to use American power." Belief in that power, Lewis argues, "has for many years been the most effective deterrent to international aggression." American credibility will be "undermined if petty tyrants treat the United States with contempt and get away with it." Only the immediate use of American military force can save those twin "victims" -- the civilians of Srebrenica and "the credibility of American power in the world."
...If the global military power continues to be a near U.S. monopoly, then it may follow that the politics of anti-imperialism remain the order of the day.
<http://chnm.gmu.edu/rhr/young.htm> -- Yoshie
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