It
is the Unlimited Imperialists along the lines of Alexander, Rome,
Napoleon and Hitler who are now in charge of conducting American foreign
policy. The factual circumstances surrounding the outbreaks of both the
First World War and the Second World War currently hover like twin
Swords of Damocles over the heads of all humanity.
Historically, this
latest eruption of American militarism at the start of the 21st Century
is akin to that of America opening the 20th Century by means of the
U.S.-instigated Spanish-American War in 1898. Then the Republican
administration of President William McKinley stole their colonial
empire from Spain in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines;
inflicted a near genocidal war against the Filipino people; while at the
same time illegally annexing the Kingdom of Hawaii and subjecting the
Native Hawaiian people (who call themselves the Kanaka Maoli) to near
genocidal conditions. Additionally, McKinley’s military and colonial
expansion into the Pacific was also designed to secure America’s
economic exploitation of China pursuant to the euphemistic rubric of the
“open door” policy.
But over the next four
decades America’s aggressive presence, policies, and practices in the
“Pacific” would ineluctably pave the way for Japan’s attack at Pearl
Harbor on Dec. 7, 194l, and thus America’s precipitation into the
ongoing Second World War. Today a century later the serial imperial
aggressions launched and menaced by the Republican Bush Jr.
administration and now the Democratic Obama administration are
threatening to set off World War III.
By
shamelessly exploiting the terrible tragedy of 11 September 2001, the
Bush Jr. administration set forth to steal a hydrocarbon empire from the
Muslim states and peoples living in Central Asia and the Persian Gulf
and Africa under the bogus pretexts of
(1) fighting a war against international terrorism; and/or
(2) eliminating weapons of mass destruction; and/or
(3) the promotion of democracy; and/or
(4) self-styled “humanitarian intervention”/responsibility to protect.
Only this time the
geopolitical stakes are infinitely greater than they were a century
ago: control and domination of two-thirds of the world’s hydrocarbon
resources and thus the very fundament and energizer of the global
economic system – oil and gas.
The Bush Jr./ Obama
administrations have already targeted the remaining hydrocarbon
reserves of Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia for further
conquest or domination, together with the strategic choke-points at sea
and on land required for their transportation. In this regard, the Bush
Jr. administration announced the establishment of the U.S. Pentagon’s
Africa Command (AFRICOM) in order to better control, dominate, and
exploit both the natural resources and the variegated peoples of the
continent of Africa, the very cradle of our human species. Libya and
the Libyans became the first victims to succumb to AFRICOM under the
Obama administration. They will not be the last.
This current bout of
U.S. imperialism is what my teacher, mentor and friend Hans Morgenthau
denominated “unlimited imperialism” in his seminal work Politics Among
Nations (4th ed. 1968, at 52-53):
“The outstanding historic examples of unlimited imperialism are the expansionist policies of Alexander the Great, Rome, the Arabs in the seventh and eighth centuries, Napoleon I, and Hitler. They all have in common an urge toward expansion which knows no rational limits, feeds on its own successes and, if not stopped by a superior force, will go on to the confines of the political world. This urge will not be satisfied so long as there remains anywhere a possible object of domination–a politically organized group of men which by its very independence challenges the conqueror’s lust for power. It is, as we shall see, exactly the lack of moderation, the aspiration to conquer all that lends itself to conquest, characteristic of unlimited imperialism, which in the past has been the undoing of the imperialistic policies of this kind… “
It
is the Unlimited Imperialists along the lines of Alexander, Rome,
Napoleon and Hitler who are now in charge of conducting American foreign
policy. The factual circumstances surrounding the outbreaks of both the
First World War and the Second World War currently hover like twin
Swords of Damocles over the heads of all humanity.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario