Latin
Lines 1.18-1.21
Imperialisms, Ancient and Modern, Cumings, Bruce, "Is America an Imperial Power?," Current History (November 2003). 1.18-21
Not analysed yet
The realm of this hegemonic "grand area" is bounded by the reach of the world market. As Polanyi emphasized, "market" means "world market": the market continuously expands, carrying before it settled societies, national boundaries, even the formerly impervious structures of the communist bloc. Or as Marx put it in "The Communist Manifesto," the world market "knocks down all Chinese walls." The limit on the market is society: human collectivities that strive ceaselessly to subordinate the rational imperatives and the cruel up-and-down cycles of the market to human control. Society often acts through the state, which is the gatekeeper between domestic society and the backwash of the world market. Thus the fundamental global dynamic is production for profit in a world market, limited and constrained by human collectivities.
THE LIBERAL MOMENT
For most of the postwar era, Republican centrists like John Foster Dulles, Henry Kissinger, and George Herbert Walker Bush agreed with cold war liberals in the Democratic Party on all of this, and just about everything else beyond the water's edge. A seamless consensus prevailed inside the Washington Beltway on containment, internationalism, the NATO and US-Japan alliances, and the iron necessity to consult with American allies at the UN, IMF, or World Bank. Sometimes the result was unilateralism disguised as multilateralism (Korea, Vietnam). But everyone bespoke the internationalist mantras, and everyone knew that a consensual partnership, with the United States as first among (would-be) equals, offered the only lasting, sustainable hegemony.
The Clinton administration appeared to understand this American role better than any admintration since the Truman and Roosevelt presidencies. The Clinton years incorporated an active foreign economic policy under the leadership of Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, a seemingly omniscient central bank under Alan Greenspan, and a president who consulted every ally and friend to the point of (their) exhaustion in his search for multilateral consent and first-among-equals leadershipa charismatic figure received like a rock star in places as diverse as New Delhi, Beijing, Hanoi, Berlin, and the editorial offices of The New Yorker (where editor Tina Brown swooned over him). This leadership combined to achieve the full measure of what the 1940s founding fathers had imagined for the American role in the world, before the cold war dashed their hopes.