The argument for imperialism has always been two-edged, what the great Old Rightist Garet Garrett called (in his classic The People’sToday’s Lunatic Foreign Policy – LewRockwell.com.
In 1990, Murray Rothbard clearly identified the earliest signs of the ultimately successful decade-long push by the neocons to replace their dearly missed Cold War with a global, imperialist, and permanent War on Islamic fundamentalism and for “Democracy.” He wrote in his April 1990 column “The Post-Cold War World: Whither U.S. Foreign Policy” (which can be found in the collection The Irrepressible Rothbard):
“But if the Cold War died in the Communist collapse of 1989, what can the ruling conservative-liberal Establishment come up with to justify the policy of massive intervention by the U.S. everywhere on the globe? In short, what cloak can the Establishment now find to mask and vindicate the continuance of U.S. imperialism? With their perks and their power at stake, the Court apologists for imperialism have been quick to offer excuses and alternatives, even if they don’t always hang together. Perhaps the feeling is that one of them may stick.
The argument for imperialism has always been two-edged, what the great Old Rightist Garet Garrett called (in his classic The People’s Pottage) “a complex of fear and vaunting.” Fear means alleged threats to American interests and the American people. To replace the Soviet-international Communist threat, three candidates have been offered by various Establishment pundits. (…) [Rothbard here offers international narco-terrorism and reunified Germany as the first two potential bogeymen.]
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