Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>
> the US-led multinational
> empire's most effective weapon is political and economic, not
> military
I agree with the predicate here, but I believe the subject presupposes an analysis that in fact does not exist, and thus forecloses central questions. We have _not_ yet successfully theorized 21st-c imperialism.
The assumptions that (a) there is a single empire, (b) that it is multi-national and (c) that it is US-led are, at best, empirical generalizations. Were it in truth multi-national the stresses within it would be no more serious than those within u.s. capital* (or German capital, or Chinese capital). But this is at best arguable; it definitely has not been demonstrated, and I think it unlikely. Imperialism _still_ as in the past (and more so than during the period of the Cold War) exists in and through a number of distinct and competing power centers, and there is no real unity of U.S., European, Japanese, Russian, & Chinese capital, whatever rough-and-ready surface-unity may be achieved on this or that particular occasion. (Compare the 'unity' achieved by the U.S. and the European powers at the time of the Boxer Rebellion.) Though most of both Lenin's and Luxemburg's analyses of 19th-c imperialism are no longer relevant, their shared perception of the essentially competitive nature of capitalism still holds today.
In the case of the U.S. invasion of the Middle East, though the U.S. was able to bully other imperial power centers into (mostly reluctant) acquiescence, its more fundamental failure to achieve real unity is pretty obvious. Were it a single empire, for example, the Middle East would not so handicap the u.s. in its policing of its core imperial domain of Latin America.
We may be closer to a needed theory with the publication in November of Robert Albritton, Robert Jessop and Richard Westra (eds), POLITICAL ECONOMY AND GLOBAL CAPITALISM. The symposium in Historical Materialism on Harvey (which also includes discussion of Wood) is valuable too, though it is Wood herself who at the end of her books suggests that our theorization of imperialism remains unsatisfactory -- radically incomplete.
The U.S. needs its own troops in the Middle East just _because_ we have no single "multinational empire" but rather competing centers of Imperial power, of which the U.S. is now dominant. But such dominance is by no means the same as would be the leadership of a multinational empire.
For us in the U.S., however, U.S. imperialism remains _The_ enemy, and we should not count (as Dennis R seems to count) on any powers _within_ the capitalist world as representing a more civilized capitalism. Rosa Luxemburg's label (barbarism) applies equally to Europe, the U.S., Japan, Russia, and China. Temporary differences in military or economic might are just that, differences in might, not in humanity or inhumanity. France, after all, was the primary villain in the Rwanda genocide, Germany in the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Carrol
[*Somewhere recently I read a well-argued case for using "capital" as a single term for the miscellaneous forces, entities, persons, etc. that dominate u.s. life. In any case I intend to use it regularly without bothering to respond to critiques of it.]