America still America?

[thegodfather]

I would say attempting to define a 350 year old global hegemony the likes of which the world has never before experienced in human history is a bit hard to pin down. It'd be much easier to ask this question about former empires and European/Asian states. Is China still China? Is England still England?

The closest thing we have for a comparison is Rome, but only to a certain point. What do I mean? Rome was a 'global' power of its time (if you take into account the modern known world at the time). Additionally, anyone could become a Roman citizen, there was no uniform Roman identity/gender. Can you move to China and become Chinese? Can you become a Japanese citizen and ever be anything more than a gajin? Of course not, but anyone can become American.

The other drastic difference, is that no country on Earth has ever been able to project power globally, to the extent at which the United States can. It cannot even be compared with the other large powers in the world, the UK, France, Russia, and China. That is because while they do have global reach through ICBMs, they do not have the ability to project conventional power on any meaningful scale, for any meaningful period of time. It's really a very interesting time to be alive, mostly because history tells us that all countries end at some point, all empires crumble.

America is not so much an empire as a global hegemony, making up the rules as it goes, and doing what is necessary to advance the interests of its citizens globally. Does Nigeria unilaterally send its military forces into Mexico to rescue a captive citizen? No, but America goes into Somalia and other far away countries at will. People always say that totalitarianism and dictatorships are an outdated antiquated ideology. I argue in the opposite, it's the idea of freedom and human rights which are new to the world, only emerging around the 1600s (and I might remind you they were still burning people at the stake for heresy in those days, so I say rights with some degree of caution).

Whats interesting is that I don't think states restrict rights out of some evil nefarious intent, but rather for simple self preservation. Even in the United States, our history has been plagued by justification after justification on why an inalienable right must be suspended, we create fancy verbiage like illegal combatant so that we waterboard and rectally feed you to our hearts content, absence any evidence or reasonable suspicion that a court would find meritorious. Look at Russia's brief experiment with what could best be described as a Democracy in name only, now having fully regressed into an autocratic police state once again. You must understand, leaders do not do this out of any purely evil intent, they do it because they believe with 100% of their being that their existence as a state is under threat, whether its from Islamic extremists or the encroachment of NATO into CIS countries that it formally promised to stay out of. States have interests to protect, be they in the 'near abroad,' or the abroad abroad. People have these vast conspiracies that the US foreign policy is a shadowy cabal of reptiles, but the truth is that these are just human beings, making some really poor decisions based on a lack of understanding of 'intent.' You cannot discern meaningful intelligence without a human source. Troop movements do not tell you intent, but being a fly on the wall in a meeting between Putin, Lavrov, and Dugin does.

Is America still America? I'd ask you to define it first, and then point to a time in history when it EVER adhered to all of the stated points contained in your definition.

[Euroholic]

Is America Still America?

[Euroholic]

So what your saying is like with rome american demographics are changing and with it its foreign policy changes?

[j3374]

That post kicked some ass. I'll have to read it again when I get some time to just ingest everything.

Did you start a separate but similarly titles thread to keep from hijacking the original? If so, that was tactful too.

[Metalject]

Good post.
In some way we are a hegemony, but not entirely in the traditional sense of the word.
As far as the definition of America, that's a tough one because you cannot use comparisons to other countries to support it directly - Rome somewhat, but even it falls short.
But if I can define America, from there I think I can make arguments with your post. I'll take a little time to formulate my thoughts so that they're not scatter brained. But that's the great question, Define America? And when did the definition fade? I'll will check back in soon.

[thegodfather]

So what your saying is like with rome american demographics are changing and with it its foreign policy changes?

No not really, the demographics have nothing to do with it. I'm just pointing out that very few nation states in human history have allowed people from other large ethnic groups to become fully included citizens with all of the respective rights that being a citizen entails, and therefore Rome was the most analogous culture for that, and several other reasons. Rome wanted to spread the 'Roman model' of life, evidenced by the fact that wherever they went they built massive public works (sewage, running water, and of course the quintessential bath house), as well as exported their technology. Much in the same way that Rome exported their public infrastructure initiatives by force, the United States attempts to export its ideology of Democracy via force and coercion (economic sanctions are a tool of warfare). History will ultimately be the judge of whether these endeavors were successful or not, but if we look to the Roman conquests it gives us a good idea of where we'll end up in the history books. Attempting to resist Roman occupation resulted in massive death and suffering, for instance after the defeat of Vercingetterix in Roman Gaul (modern day France), the Romans went on a murder&rape orgy resulting in the deaths of 1 million Gauls in about 1 month (if you think of the ability of killing that many people with swords&spears, the scale becomes more apparent). In contrast, there are few examples of America successfully exporting its model of democracy anywhere by force, but they are much more successful in doing it via economics. There is an enormously strong correlation of high GDP, to high levels of democratization.

In so far as America's foreign policy is concerned, I was only making the point that when viewing it's rather 'hypocritical' foreign policy, it's much easier to understand this inherent hypocrisy when you view it as a rational actor only seeking to protect its vital interests around the world, mostly for the benefit of its citizens and the continuity of government. It's interesting actually with regards to bureaucracies, because research demonstrates that even after a bureaucracy has fulfilled its mission, it evolves in ways in which its sole purpose is to continue to be a bureaucracy, it's interesting how human institutions have a way of taking on a mind of their own. So if we consider 'rogue states' like Iran, we can see that they are in fact just a rational actor, trying to protect their sovereignty despite US sponsored coup d'tats and installations of brutal dictators for the benefit of oil revenues, for instance. They also are surrounded by Sunni governments (until we threw them a bone, by turning Iraq into a Shia dominated government) who would love to destroy them. I'm going to end my thoughts there, I could write about these things for hours, but I would need to start pulling in charts, graphs, and peer reviewed evidence, which would turn this into a dissertation rather than a friendly discussion.