{"id":31349,"date":"2018-02-21T09:57:37","date_gmt":"2018-02-21T14:57:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=31349"},"modified":"2018-02-21T09:57:37","modified_gmt":"2018-02-21T14:57:37","slug":"u-s-empire-still-incoherent-after-all-these-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=31349","title":{"rendered":"U.S. Empire Still Incoherent After All These Years"},"content":{"rendered":"
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U.S. Empire Still Incoherent After All These Years<\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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Exclusive: Without solid economic, political and ideological bases, the U.S. lacks the legitimacy and authority it needs to operate beyond its borders, argues Nicolas J.S. Davies in this essay.<\/p>\n

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I recently reread Michael Mann\u2019s book, Incoherent Empire<\/a><\/em>, which he wrote in 2003, soon after the U.S. invasion of Iraq.\u00a0Mann is a sociology professor at UCLA and the author of a four-volume series called The Sources of Social Power<\/a><\/em>, in which he explained the major developments of world history as the interplay between four types of power: military, economic, political, and ideological.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>In Incoherent Empire<\/em>, Mann used the same framework to examine what he called the U.S.\u2019s \u201cnew imperialism\u201d after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.\u00a0He\u00a0predicted that, \u201cThe American Empire will turn out to be a military giant; a back-seat economic driver; a political schizophrenic; and an ideological phantom.\u201d<\/p>\n

What struck me most forcefully as I reread Incoherent Empire<\/em> was that absolutely nothing has changed in the \u201cincoherence\u201d of U.S. imperialism.\u00a0 If I picked up the book for the first time today and didn\u2019t know it was written 15 years ago, I could read nearly all of it as a perceptive critique of American imperialism exactly as it exists today.<\/p>\n

In the intervening 15 years, U.S. policy failures have resulted in ever-spreading violence and chaos that affect hundreds of millions of people in at least a dozen countries.\u00a0The U.S. has utterly failed to bring any of its neo-imperial wars to a stable or peaceful end. \u00a0And yet the U.S. imperial project sails on, seemingly blind to its consistently catastrophic results.<\/p>\n

Instead, U.S. civilian and military leaders shamelessly blame their victims for the violence and chaos they have unleashed on them, and endlessly repackage the same old war propaganda to justify record military budgets<\/a> and\u00a0threaten new wars.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

U.S. Empire Still Incoherent After All These Years\u00a0 Exclusive: Without solid economic, political and ideological bases, the U.S. lacks the legitimacy and authority it needs to operate beyond its borders, argues Nicolas J.S. Davies in this essay. I recently reread Michael Mann\u2019s book, Incoherent Empire, which he wrote in 2003, soon after the U.S. invasion […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[3602,6963,259,18787,18786,11789,827],"class_list":["post-31349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-american-empire","tag-consortium-news","tag-empire","tag-incoherent-empire","tag-michael-mann","tag-nicolas-j-s-davies","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31349"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31349\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31350,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31349\/revisions\/31350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}