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American Empire

  • 6/12/2022

    Top-Gunning for Empire

    by Scott Laderman

    "Top Gun: Maverick" is ressurecting the theatergoing experience. Will it do the same for American enthusiasm for the imperial ambitions it represents? 

  • SOURCE: New York Review of Books
    2/3/2022

    Who's Afraid of Isolationism?

    by Stephen Wertheim

    It's past time for "isolationism" to stop being a dirty word in discussing America's relationship to the world. The use of the term as a pejorative has justified too many ill-considered military interventions.

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    10/7/2021

    Never Having to Say You're Sorry

    by Karen J. Greenberg

    Numerous players with large and small roles in creating the expansive War on Terror have issued mea culpas; the major architects and the interests who profit from war have not. 

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    10/4/2021

    Abandoning Afghans From the Start

    by Christian G. Appy

    The Washington Post's Afganistan Papers present an opportunity to avoid the mistake of blaming military defeat on bad judgment and focus on the inherent problem of America's imperial ambitions, says historian Christian Appy.

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    9/28/2021

    Droning On: America's Assassins-in-Chief

    by Tom Engelhardt

    Since the Bush administration, every President has used drone technology to be the nation's assassin-in-chief. In a nation increasingly tolerant of mass COVID death at home, does this even have the power to shock?

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    9/30/2021

    "A Horrible Mistake": Time to Ditch CENTCOM

    by Andrew Bacevich

    Created by military reorganization undertaken by the Reagan administration, CENTCOM assumes control of potential military operations in 20 nations, where a half-billion people live. In the decades of its existence, it has overseen the decline and imminent collapse of American empire. 

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    8/19/2021

    The All-American Base World

    by Patterson Deppen

    Despite the withdrawal from Afghanistan, there are still 750 US military bases around the world, showing that America's "forever wars" may only be briefly paused. 

  • SOURCE: Foreign Exchanges
    4/26/2021

    Necessary but Not Sufficient

    by Daniel Bessner

    The 2001 AUMF in effect has become yet another tool to enable the United States to prosecute a series of endless wars in the Global South.

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    3/28/2021

    America’s Longest War Winds Down

    by Andrew Bacevich

    Public fatigue over the ongoing War on Terror must not allow political leaders to do what they seem to want most to do: avoid taking responsibility or learning lessons.

  • SOURCE: NYT
    3-5-13

    Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman: Come Home, America

    Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, a professor of American foreign relations at San Diego State University, is the author, most recently, of “American Umpire.”EVERYONE talks about getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan. But what about Germany and Japan?The sequester — $85 billion this year in across-the-board budget cuts, about half of which will come from the Pentagon — gives Americans an opportunity to discuss a question we’ve put off too long: Why we are still fighting World War II?Since 1947, when President Harry S. Truman set forth a policy to stop further Soviet expansion and “support free peoples” who were “resisting subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” America has acted as the world’s policeman....