“I think there is no real argument that the historical lesson for the United States in the 20th Century has been the need for continued strong American involvement. I’m one of those individuals who is looking at the emerging debate as to the direction of American foreign policy, and I’m thinking about three writers in particular: Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan’s article called for continued American benevolent hegemony as the pole star of American policy – this is the article in Foreign Affairs magazine setting forth a Republican foreign policy on the one hand, and Richard Haass’ latest work analyzing the various strands in the foreign policy debate, dismissing the hegemony call, and arguing for the sheriff, the tough sheriff on the beat. Parenthetically, there is a bit of confusion there, because I think he’s actually calling for hegemony, and I asked him the question why he dismissed the hegemony argument so readily, and I wasn’t particularly convinced by his answer.”

—

Alberto Mora

, August 12, 1997:

DIA Interview

.

“It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”

–Harold Pinter,

The Nobel Prize Lecture

, December 2005.

• to begin with:The US maintains to this day over a dozen direct dependencies, the largest of which is Puerto Rico. Its military forces are active over most of the globe: at last audit about 226 countries have US military troops, 63 of which host American bases, while only 46 countries in the world have no US military presence – a projection of military power that makes the Roman, British, and Soviet empires pale in comparison. The bulk of this document will deal with what is alternatively referred to as “neo-colonialism”, “hegemony”, “proxy rule”, or “informal empire”: roughly, a system of “dual elite” political rule, in which domestic elites (the proxy) recieve backing from (are dependent on – to varying degrees) a foreign elite, and in return protect (to varying degrees) the foreign power’s interests in the country (security, economic, or domestic political interests). This is, at least, the framework within which I use the terms – as it is generally accepted by students of history. To take an explanation cited by Ariel Cohen as “One of the more successful attempts made to create a coherent theory of empires” in Russian Imperialism:
  

  “Empire is a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society. It can be achieved by force, by political collaboration, by economic, social, or cultural dependence. Imperialism is simply the process or policy of establishing or maintaining an empire.”

  –Michael Doyle,

Empires
As a point of reference formal American imperialism begins (or not – one would have to completely ignore the genocide of the native population, African and Native-American slavery, rapid and continuous expansion of the national borders through war, rapid and continuous expansion of mercantilism through war and the threat of war, the ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples, the mid 1800s mercantilist state established in Nicaragua, 100 uninhabited islands of bat shit, etc.) with the aquisition of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Phillipines after the Spanish-American War of 1898. It’s a good point to remember how that war started: part hoax, part sensationalized, war mongering “journalism”, and of course much talk about the brutality of the enemy and the necessity of our intervention on behalf of the suffering – in this case on behalf of the Cubans and their savage treatment at the hands of the tyrannical Spaniards: much better for them to suffer at our hands.
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