As Bill Clinton might say, "I feel your frustration." But --

A nation which has 700+ military bases in foreign countries, which with some degree of regularity bombs whomever catches its eye, which shuffles the membership of its lapdog oligarchies whenever it suits it, and which strides about the world with nary a care as to the damage it occasions seems more an imperialist than a hegemon.

You know the drill: If it walks like a . . . .

Posted at May 9, 2008 8:48 PM in response to Is Neoconservatism the American Mainstream?

You don't pull the mask off the Ole Lone Ranger
And you don't mess around with Frank

Posted at May 9, 2008 9:46 AM in response to Barney Frank's foreclosure relief home run.l

It seems to me that neither Lind nor Rieff give the power of mythic language its due.

From 1942 through today(?) Americans were and are induced to believe the myth that the United States fought WWII for "freedom" rather than the reality that it fought back against two aggressive, expansionist states which had declared war on it.

Thus, American voters and a Kansas City haberdasher were unprepared to seek an accommodation (detente) with a Soviet Union, which to secure its borders promoted authoritarian communist regimes in its western marches (Poland, the Ostmark, Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, etc.). The idea that the leadership of a country which had lost 20 million of its citizens could, after Kursk, do anything else was fantasy.

But because admitting that reality would damage a mythology to which all sides of America's elite subscribed, the United States embarked upon the Cold War -- not to advance its commercial interests (the world was flat on its back) but rather to preserve its amour propre.

Posted at May 8, 2008 10:13 PM in response to Is Neoconservatism the American Mainstream?

. . . the case of Indo-China is perfectly clear. France has milked it for one hundred years. The people of IndoChina are entitled to something better than that. FDR Memo to Cordell Hull, 1/24/1944

Would Cochin China have been a trusteeship, despite Churchill's antipathy -- and he would have been Atleed-out of office anyway -- had FDR survived?

Posted at May 8, 2008 8:40 PM in response to Is Neoconservatism the American Mainstream?

I don't know about an "easier way" except to say, as Newman implies, that whenever we run into a writer using a common metaphor, especially a personification, its a good idea to check to see whether he's using poetical language to hide the real, responsible actor.

Posted at May 8, 2008 8:14 PM in response to Bashing China (and the US) from the Left - and Below

. . . this whole realpolitick discussion that reifies the "United States", "Russia", "China" and so on . . . . Nathan Newman

A "country" which is an abstract concept is reified when it is made an object and given human characteristics. Thus, we have David Rieff saying something silly such as -- "this country's historic sense of mission and place in the world."

A "country" is nothing but a shorthand term for a geographic locus out of which an elite class subscribing to a stable ideology home-bases its operations. Its elite class may be described as having some sort of "sense" because one not having that "sense" is, by definition, excluded from the class, but to claim the same for the "country" is to commit a fallacy of reification.

Posted at May 8, 2008 1:13 PM in response to Bashing China (and the US) from the Left - and Below

I'm with you, lbp. But enough of this ineffective whining!

What we should do is identify all those voters who'll take race into consideration and pull their voter ID cards. Problem solved.

Posted at May 8, 2008 8:09 AM in response to It's time to truly reject and denounce: your help required

Reification and All That Jazz

With that simple Marxist term Nathan has highlighted the semantic weaknesses (the language game being played) inherent in the arguments of all of these Davos Illuminati wannabes.

Whenever one of these professional IR twits identifies a country without prefacing the name with the phrase "the elite of" we should be reaching for our guns.

Posted at May 8, 2008 7:17 AM in response to Bashing China (and the US) from the Left - and Below

. . . this country's historic sense of mission and place in the world.

Why just the other day I was down at the Peoria Rotary Club and we was just sayin' how lucky we all are seeing as how those elites over there in Washington are making sure we got missions to feel historic about and a place in the world so's there'd be some purpose to our lives.

Posted at May 7, 2008 12:37 PM in response to A Different History

I honestly don't know how Lind is distinguishing between a "postwar" and a "Cold War" model here. Anne-Marie Slaughter

How about between cooperation and antagonism?

The United Nations Charter was signed by all five permanent members as of October 25, 1945. The Cold War began 18 months later, sometime after March 1947: Truman Doctrine (March 12, 1947); Kennan's Foreign Affairs article (July 1947); Marshall Plan (July 12, 1947); NATO (April 4, 1949)

Whether confronting the Soviet Union was best done in Cold War regalia is debatable. Whether there was a distinction between "postwar" and "Cold War" IR models -- as Lind notes -- is not.

Posted at May 7, 2008 8:26 AM in response to Burn the Straw Men