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^ That's what empires tend to do? Get involved and domineer over everyone else. Look how many other countries America thinks it can control?
Oh so it's wrong for us but it's ok for China, Iran, Venezuela, Russia, Syria, etc to stick their noses in other countries affairs?
Case in point is when Chavez whines about the "imperialist occupation" of Puerto Rico and the Dutch West Indies (Aruba, Curacao, etc) while at the same time he keeps trying the export his "Bolivarian revolution" to the rest of Latin America.
The American empire is coming to an end because it was doomed to fail from the start. Our founders spoke about all men being created equal while importing humans to work as slaves. They talked about democracy when only rich white landowners could vote. This hypocrisy grew and grew. Americans began to think of themselves as the best nation on Earth; a nation that took care of it's own and helped the downtrodden and needy of other nations; we sent our military to save the world. However, the hypocrosy is that Americans only ever cared about self. The real American motto has always been, "Forget about you, I got what I need." But Americans have always perceived themselves to be "above" other nations; to the point that "the American Way" became the state religion.
Protestantism was always the unofficial national religion. But starting in the early 1900's, large numbers of Catholics and Jews began arriving. Since the constitution allowed freedom of religious expression, it became difficult to identify Protestantism as the unofficial national religion. In the 20th century America experienced an eroding of specific religious identifications. What was created was something unique, an American civil religion: That the sun rose and set on America, and that God was our ultimate guide, that God blessed America, and that He was on our side; that America was on a sacred mission.
Americans began to see America as the Promised Land, sort of how the Jews regard Israel. The Revolutionary War was our "Exodus from Egypt," our breakaway from opressive control. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were our "Ten Commandments." The Civil War was our breakaway from "Roman Rule," an attempt to stamp out the evil that was slavery.
We had our important days of worship, like all religions do. Memorial Day recognizes the sacredness of the wars we fought. The Fourth of July recognizes the signing of that spiritual document, the Declaration of Independence. Every four years we elected a new spiritual advisor.
We invoked our American religion in our foreign adventures. In the 19th century we had Manifest Destiny, our God-given duty to "civilize" the American continent and convert the savages. Our entry into all wars was a religious crusade to make those places safe for our American religion (democracy).
Our religion is in trouble. Because of it's abstract nature, it's adherents can and do violently disagree with it. All of our interventions and expansions have always been denounced by some as as immoral acts. Our leaders could not find a way to express their beliefs in a way that would satisfy most Americans. They undermined the legitimacy of the state as a whole.
Our only option now is to make the transition to a world civil religion that takes into account a cross-cultural recognition of our moral responsibilities for all human beings and nations, while recognizing their own rights to self-determination.
The Founding Fathers were, yes, imperfect like the rest of us, but they did have an ideal to which they pointed the country. The Constitution has served well for the 200+ years of its existence, but the problem that permeates American politics was predicted by some of the FF and spelled out in The Federalist Papers. They were afraid of factions arising, which would serve self-interests only.
Of course, self-interest is the basis for our quasi-capitalist economic system, but it does not work well within the political realm. Congress lives to serve special interest groups over and against the majority, and it will always be that way. Money buys election (advertisements, mailings, paybacks, etc.) and only special interest groups can garner the amount needed to prevail (and we ARE talking about Goldman $achs here also).
Of course they stopped teaching about The Federalist Papers years ago, so few Americans even know about the insight/foresight/fears of the FF regarding the inability of the Constitution to prevent factions arising. In fact, our split Federal-State-Local government powers was not to prevent factions (that cannot be done), but to render factions unable to become powerful enough to overwhelm the majority. This is why the call by many to let the Federal government take over what was formerly state (or local) responsibility is particularly worrisome.
Maybe in 100 years the party will be over; till then, the rest of the world would be wise in not underestimating the USA.
China; despite is huge population is a pipsqueak per capita compared to here----------besides; it has 1 Billion poor people vs. ca. 150 million affluent ones. Can someone see another 'Cultural Revolution' waiting in the wings?
Japan's population is diminishing------------which brings up another point: there are not the population pressures anymore that tend to trigger wars. Yes; most of Africa/Middle East and parts of Asia still have high birthrates..........just that every nation involved is an economic weakling which could be taken out via warfare in a few days.
i don't like the idea of an empire. countries should be self-sustaining or work towards that end.
actually, it would be most ideal if the UN were to evolve as a one world government platform that represented the equal interest of all countries. that would be very scifi and evolved. lol
All that would do is bring the civilized world back to tribsl era. The UN can even agree on anyhting and has no power to enforce anything.It can't even police it'swn prgrams;remember the oil for food scandal? Face it as long as their are human its a loss cause and noly the powerful survive.
This NIC report claims that the American Empire days are closing. After reading the pdf of the report I'm still not sure.
What do you think?
" In November 2008, the National Intelligence Council (NIC), an affiliate of the Central Intelligence Agency, issued the latest in a series of futuristic publications intended to guide the incoming Obama administration. Peering into its analytic crystal ball in a report entitled Global Trends 2025, it predicted that America's global preeminence would gradually disappear over the next 15 years -- in conjunction with the rise of new global powerhouses, especially China and India. The report examined many facets of the future strategic environment, but its most startling, and news-making, finding concerned the projected long-term erosion of American dominance and the emergence of new global competitors. "Although the United States is likely to remain the single most powerful actor [in 2025]," it stated definitively, the country's "relative strength -- even in the military realm -- will decline and U.S. leverage will become more constrained.""
NIC 2025 Project (http://www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_2025_project.html - broken link)
The report.....
http://www.dni.gov/nic/PDF_2025/2025_Global_Trends_Final_Report.pdf (broken link)
Yes, I think we're headed for something very ugly. I don't think it will be limited to just the US, but I do think Americans will be the most shocked by it. We've had unrealistic expectations and an "it can't happen to us" naivete for so long now.
Oh so it's wrong for us but it's ok for China, Iran, Venezuela, Russia, Syria, etc to stick their noses in other countries affairs?
Case in point is when Chavez whines about the "imperialist occupation" of Puerto Rico and the Dutch West Indies (Aruba, Curacao, etc) while at the same time he keeps trying the export his "Bolivarian revolution" to the rest of Latin America.
Can you point to some evidence that Chavez has "exported" the Bolivarian revolution to the rest of Latin America? Does the Venezuelan flag fly in any other country, as the US flag flies in Puerto Rico and the Dutch flag in Aruba?
The Bolivarian revolution is a phenomenon of Latin American countries observing the example of Venezuela, and recognizing that taking control of their economic destiny is in their better interests than letting foreign-based corporations control it. It did not start with Chavez, it didn't even start with Castro. The CIA had to go into Guatemala and assassinate Arbenz,the elcted president in 1954 who threatened to redistribute United Fruit's holdings to the peasants. Essentially the same thing the US did to Allende in Chile. I don't see Chavez running around the world assassinating presidents.
Can you give me one single example of one of the countries you mentioned "sticking its nose" into the affairs of a country that it does not share an adjacent border with? The way the US did in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Panama, Somalia, the list goes on almost endlessly.
- Soviet troops in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side
- German and Italian troops in the Spanish Civil War on the Nationalist side
- The Spanish "Blue Division" on the Eastern Front of WWII
- The Soviets in North Korea during the Korean War
- The Soviets and the Chinese in North Vietnam during the Vietnam War
- The Chinese troops in Mozambique to train the anti Apartheid resistance movements in the 1970s and 80s - the anti Apartheid movement was very much a Communist effort.
- The Chinese troops in Mozambique to train the Rhodesian African resistance movements in the 1970s.
- the Cuban and Soviet troops in the Ogaden War between Somalia and Ethiopia in 1977.
- The Cuban troops in Angola in the 1970s and 80s officially as "advisors" for the Southwest African People's Army however they were in direct combat with the South African troops and the Soutwest African Territorial Force on numerous occasions in the 1980s most notably at the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1987.
- Soviet troops in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side
- German and Italian troops in the Spanish Civil War on the Nationalist side
- The Spanish "Blue Division" on the Eastern Front of WWII
- The Soviets in North Korea during the Korean War
- The Soviets and the Chinese in North Vietnam during the Vietnam War
- The Chinese troops in Mozambique to train the anti Apartheid resistance movements in the 1970s and 80s - the anti Apartheid movement was very much a Communist effort.
- The Chinese troops in Mozambique to train the Rhodesian African resistance movements in the 1970s.
- the Cuban and Soviet troops in the Ogaden War between Somalia and Ethiopia in 1977.
- The Cuban troops in Angola in the 1970s and 80s officially as "advisors" for the Southwest African People's Army however they were in direct combat with the South African troops and the Soutwest African Territorial Force on numerous occasions in the 1980s most notably at the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1987.
I could go on all night.
The USA has invaded more sovereign nations with lethal firepower without a single belligerent action against us, in more cases than you have just named. Your inclusion of troops offered as advisors is not the equal of the American actually invading militarily. The US, in fact, has trained the troops of almost every country in the world. You have come up with a scant few incidents that are roughly the equivalent of Poland's "invasion" of Iraq. You are really stretching it by including incidents that took place when many European contries maintained empires on far flung continents.
The assassinations of the freely elected presidents of Guatemala and Chile took place under the direct command of the CIA. None of those incidents you described comes anywhere near the Americans decade-long massacre of perhaps a million (who was counting?) Vietnamese civilians, setting many of them on fire and watching them burn.
To offer up training Rhodesian resistance movements in comparison to America's shock and awe in Iraq, our Vietnam fiasco, the killing of thousands of Panamanians in order to bring a drug dealer to trial, is . . . I'm thinking of words like silly and laughable, but there just is no word for it.
America still thinks the unilateral Monroe Doctrine is in force in Latin America, giving us the right to intervene anywhere in this entire hemisphere as though the Pope had granted the whole thing to us.
The one thing that really underscores your failure to grasp any of the realities is that you obviously cut and pasted your entire list, apparently, from somebody's (probably your hero, Jesse Helms) hysterical 1980's anti-communist blog, which recognized Cuba, China and the USSR as the only countries on earth that were evil incarnate.
Last edited by jtur88; 11-01-2009 at 06:07 PM..
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