Latin
Lines 1.34-1.36
Imperialisms, Ancient and Modern, Cumings, Bruce, "Is America an Imperial Power?," Current History (November 2003). 1.34-36
Not analysed yet
The Bush family history reflects a microcosm of ways to bring the party's Eastern and Western wings together. The father, George H. W, exemplifies a thoroughly Eastern Republicanborn in Greenwich, Connecticut, combining internationalist foreign policy with great wealth and aristocmtic privilege. His Texas credentials, honed since he moved there in the 1950s, never fooled anyone: he was as persuasive at a tent revival as Dick Cheney at a labor rally. The elder Bush served in government as a charter member of the internationalist consensus. George W, on the other hand, went Texan with a vengeance. He is the first president fully to embody the Republican right's foreign policy views on a host of issues: arms eontrol, the emimnment, the United Nations, post-Soviet Russia, China, North Korea, Iraq, and the presumed failings of America's traditional Eumpean allies. His preemptive doctrine post 9-11 embodies phrases and nuances that had been the stock in trade of right-wing pundits such as William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, who have long called for a new American imperialism. And in its implementation the Bush doctrine has become frankly imperialist, with the old archipelago. of relatively quiescent military bases expanded into the equivalent of distant Roman legions.
THE LIMITS OF POWER
Any administration would have responded forcefully to the attacks of September 11, but Bush and his allies have vastly distended the Pentagon budget (from $265 billion In 2000 to $400 billion in 2003), added another zone of military containment (Central Asia), created an American West Bank the size of California in Iraq, and poured yet more billions into "Homeland Defense" while showing a callous disregard for civil liberties, the rights of the accused, and the views of America's traditional allies. Bush always begins his account of "the war on terrorism" with September11, as if that watershed event convinced him to give up on the tested doctrine of containment and deterrence and to move instead to a new strategy of preemptive attack. The 9-11 attacks did indeed come from an implacable and diabolical enemy: nothing will deter it, and it passionately loves suicide. Containment would not scam Osama bin Laden even if he could be found. But the United States can do little about that threat, the past year of the "war on terrorism" notwithstanding.