> Dwayne Monroe wrote:
>
>> Yes, this is similar to the point I try to make -- from time to time
>> -- when I
>> say it's not insignificant (though I think the full significance is
>> not yet fully
>> understood) that there's practically no area of the modern enterprise
>> in which
>> Americans possess a monopoly of expertise.
>
>
> I agree with this (and Seth's points too), but again, this has been
> around a while - it's not an innovation that can explain the Bush turn
> in foreign policy. Especially since the neocons conceived that turn
> during the 1990s, when the US economy was widely seen as the eighth
> wonder of the world.
I think there are some deep connections between perceptions of US decline and "the new imperialism." But they're tortured, contradictory, ambiguous, circuitous - not a straightforward causal relationship. I just finished reading James Mann's excellent Rise of the Vulcans, so I've been thinking a lot about this lately. The neocon idea was originally a reaction against the whole philosophy of detente, which was based on the assumption that US relative power had declined. If there's one unifying conviction tying together the neocons and "assertive nationalists" (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bolton, etc.), it's the vehement insistence that US power has *not* declined - that all the realist/liberal talk about how we need allies because we're weak is just an excuse to shackle US foreign policy with self-imposed restraints. But they insist on this so incessantly and loudly and obstinately that the psychoanalytically-inclined person (Doug!) would say: aren't these people protesting a little too much?
I think the "new imperialists" believe on some level that US power is always in danger of declining precisely because so many weak-willed people *perceive* (and talk about) US decline. But if those pansies would just steel themselves and muster the *will* (important Straussian concept!) to transcend/overcome those constraints/perceptions, the US wouldn't decline at all. Hence their constant resort to "escaping forward." Hence their obsessive focus on infinitely increasing US military power to the point where no one could ever defy us - whether we decline economically or not. (It's amazing how little attention they pay to exercising power through economic institutions like the IMF/WB.)
Just a historical point: I don't think the new imperialism dates from the 1990's. The regime-change-in-Iraq idea dates from the 1990's, but that was just a response to events on the ground. Saddam wasn't expected to last much longer than 1991; when he finally crushed the last CIA-INC coup plot in 1996, it was then that the neocons decided enough was enough - the longer Saddam sticks around, the more it sends the message that you can say fuck you to the US and get away with it. Before 1997, the idea of invading Iraq was virtually unheard-of in neocon circles.
Seth