From the preface to a new edition of V.G.Kiernan's America: The New Imperialism.
The prominent underlying supposition
of this article, is that, since the tragedy of 9/11, the US has continued a vigourous policy of pursuing global supremecy, which is quite likely to fail and leave the rest of the world not only struggling with the immediate problems caused by occupation, but possibly reeling from the long term consequences of prolonged
military intervention in politically highly sensitive regions.
Hobsbawn argues that from the launch pad of an historically unique position at the turn of this century, following the fall and subsequent physical and mythical disintegration of the old USSR, which acted as the only palpable limitation on US world domination, the country has maintained three fundamental links with cold war attempts at assertion, but a huge ideological shift has taken place which threatens to undermine America's position as a monopoliser of global influence.
The first connection, is that although the US hold over international economies (apart from the almost segregated area comprised of countries once behind the Iron Curtain) is still determined very much by the financial climate created after 1945, gradual changes are occuring which which will ultimately permanently alter the US's main cornerstones of
economic strength. Decline in manufacturing, the exporting of money and American companies buying up foreign firms and expanding abroad, together with the limited timespan that Asia (once a strategic aim of the US, now the centre of the world economy) would be willing to tolerate its huge fiscal deficit, is starting to outweigh the inherited power bases of the dollar being the world currency, firms being organised to American business practices and the commercial success of its armourament industries. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, he says, there has been no negative advocacy through mutual fear of the USSR.
The world wide military dominance allowed following the collapse of that regime, is America's only irrefutable asset and the second link to its historical position is the hegemonic expansionism pursued towards eventual control of the whole western hemisphere. Favouring satellite states to do its bidding therefore without the responsibility of colonialism it is now without any sense of vulnerability or its own limitations, as felt during the cold war and by its precursor, the British Empire.
This is also part of the third vein which runs through current foreign policy and has since America became a global power in 1914, but which now has far more dangerous implications. Hobsbawn argues, that the almost religious furvour of convictions driving the lone soldier state to save the world from cultures it believes contradict or threaten the American dream of capitalism and freedom, is allowing raging ambition to be concealed behind the need to neutralise perceived enemies; once the USSR, now al-Qaida. He leans viciously against what he sees as the exploitation of the current global situation and indeed Iraq, to bring to life the world transforming visions of a select group of imperialists in Washington (who earn only the scorn of the old school of Kissinger and the ilk.)
The danger is in the very nature of the lack of proper ideas; unashamed imperialism without any ideology apart from the attainment of military omnipotence and lacking any real moral or economic justification, which ignores the vital components of a successful empire, namely the State Department, military planning and military intelligence. Other disasters such as Iraq will happen, he says and America is in danger of doing irreperable damage to itself through this absence of forethought as well as to the safety and stability of the rest of the world.