# Cumings, Bruce, "Is America an Imperial Power?," Current History (November 2003). 1.5-8

Imperialisms, Ancient and Modern, Cumings, Bruce, "Is America an Imperial Power?," Current History (November 2003)., Lines 1.5-1.8. Latin.

Canonical: https://interlinea.aeterna-institute.org/library/latin/imperialisms-ancient-and-modern/cumings-bruce-is-america-an-imperial-power-current-history-november-2003/1.5

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri dropped the term "imperialism" in their recent influential book Empire. They analyze current configurations of power in terms of "globalization," the phenomenon whose territorial realm knows no limit and whose mechanisms are driven by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), the United Nations, multinational corporations, and a multitude of NGOS dedicated to causes ranging from humanitarian intervention to the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction. All share a common agenda: to set the rules for a new globalized world. The United States plays a critical and often determining role in this rule-setting—China's WTO application had to wait 15 years for Washington to approve it—but America is not the sole seat of this empire.
A broad-brush definition that would equate empire with globalization fails because it accumulates everybody, everything, and every organization that traces its beginnings to post-World War II arrangements, such as the Bretton Woods conference of 1944. Therefore, we cannot determine what is in and what is out of this empire. (Did the Chinese become part of it when the United States allowed them to join the WTO?) Globalization is nothing new, except to 20-something protesters around the world. In fact, it represents the outcome and ultimate fulfillment of American planning going back six decades.
ACHESON'S CREATION
In the immediate aftermath of Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939, Dean Acheson first imagined the rules that would govern the postwar world. "Our vital interests do not permit us to be indifferent to the outcome" of the wars raging in Europe and Asia, the future secretary of state said in a speech at Yale. Nor could Americans remain isolated from such events—unless they wished a kind of eternal "internment on this continent." (Only an Atlanticist would liken North America to a concentration camp.) Achesen located the causes of the war and the global depression that preceded it in "the failure of some mechanisms of the Nineteenth Century world economy" that had led to "this break-up of the world into exclusive areas for armed exploitation administered along oriental lines." In its time, he said, "the economic and political system of the Nineteenth Century . . . produced an amazing increase in the production of wealth," but for many years it had been in an "obvious process of decline."

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Imperialisms, Ancient and Modern, Cumings, Bruce, "Is America an Imperial Power?," Current History (November 2003).. Text: The Latin Library (thelatinlibrary.com), used with permission. Changes: HTML markup removed and the text divided into reading sections by Interlinea.
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