United States: all-powerful but powerless: ‘…Bush and his retainers want to fight nations; they don’t understand

21st century threats. The US has now demanded that all nations decide if

they are “with us or against us”. And Bush is getting the funding and

authority from Congress to spend ever more on military and spy

superstructure; US civil liberties will be curtailed; Bush will change our

lives to pursue an enemy he can’t find. Bin Laden should be pursued, as

should his collaborators and protectors. But the real target of our energy

should be to change the underlying conditions; to get smart, be modern.

The cold war is over.

The costs of not realising that will rise until the US comes to terms with

the new reality.’ Le Monde Diplomatique Essentially, the argument is that the US is stuck in an outmoded empire-maintenance mode. In contrast, Oxford historian Neil Ferguson argues in the Guardian that “the US must make the transition from informal to formal empire… Indeed the best way to understand this is not as Islam or fascism, but as Islamo-Bolshevism. What it represents is a challenge to a particular kind of power, namely the informal imperialism that the US has preferred to rely on since 1945… There is no excuse for the relative weakness of the US as a quasi-imperial power. The transition to formal empire from informal empire is an affordable one. But it does not come very naturally to the US – partly because of its history and partly because of Vietnam – to act as a self-confident imperial power. The US has the resources: but does it have the guts to act as a global hegemon and make the world a more stable place?”