kylax4
19.10.17, 17:59
nationalinterest.org/feature/america-empire-22768
Bardzo ciekawy artykuł. USA, które powstały na gruncie wolności i antyimperializmu, w swojej pogoni za nimi, same przyjęły cechy imperiów, ogromna militaryzacja polityki, wszechobecne służby, ograniczające wolność, i ciągłe wojny za granicą.
Artykuł jest dość długi, dlatego zacytuję tylko fragment, kto chce czytać całość, zapraszam do linku:
I am of the latter school. America’s zeal for anti-imperialist projects abroad has created a new imperialism of its own that is expansive and provocative of conflict. America’s role over the last seventy years is often justified as building an “anti-imperial” world, that is, a liberal world order that is “rule-based” and in which American dominance is critical to avoid the predations of opposing despotic empires. This widely accepted account ignores the degree to which the United States got in the habit of violating the rules, rather than upholding them. It fails to appreciate that the “liberal order” has itself undergone great change, greatly expanding its geographical reach and abandoning rules (like nonintervention and sovereignty) that were once central to it. The pluralist conception of the society of states, once closely identified with liberalism, became over the last generation a shadow of its former self, displaced by doctrines of indispensability and exceptionalism and revolutionary overthrow that have given the United States a wide remit to intervene in the affairs of other nations. The pattern of rule breaking and support for revolutionary upheaval abroad, especially marked in the last fifteen years, raises a question about America’s fidelity to liberal ideals. It also raises a question about its provision of “world public goods”—that is, systemic benefits to the global order from which all states profit, an advantage often touted on its behalf.
Especially notable as counterevidence to the sunny portrait of America’s liberal purposes—and of its beneficence in bestowing public goods—is U.S. culpability in sowing disorder in the Greater Middle East. There the American formula for ensuring stability and establishing peace and liberty has proven deeply destructive. Absurdly, this quest was informed by the view that destroying existing state structures was a viable path to goal of peace, when its manifest tendency was to unleash anarchy throughout the region, giving extremist groups a wide field of maneuver. In seeking the overthrow of so many governments, the United States became deeply complicit in sowing disorder, a far cry from its order-building efforts in Western Europe and East Asia after World War II.
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The republican liberalism embraced by the Founders understood that peace was a condition of liberty. They thoroughly digested the danger that military establishments, forming distinct interests within the state, would deform republican institutions by acquiring an exaggerated importance. What they warned against has, in fact, occurred. The development is not only anti-republican in disordering the working of our political institutions, but also anti-liberal in its attachment to coercive remedies and its readiness to compromise individual rights.
In his famous oration of July 4, 1821, when Secretary of State John Quincy Adams warned against going abroad in search of monsters to destroy, he prophesied that were America to enlist “under other banners than her own . . . the fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.” In Adams’s ornate telling of the consequences, “The frontlet upon her brow would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but instead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power.” This classic understanding of the antagonism between liberty and force suggests, in turn, an understanding of the relationship between liberalism and force. The traditional view of this relationship, in keeping with Adams’s own, held the maxims of each to be in collision with the other. In the words of Oswald Garrison Villard, writing in the aftermath of Woodrow Wilson’s crusade to make the world safe for democracy, “For war and liberalism to lie down together anywhere, at any time, with any excuse, means only one thing—disaster to liberalism.”
