Is America an Empire or a superpower?

We, Americans, like to call our country a superpower, not Empire, since the word Empire suggests taking advantage of other nations for the benefit of the Empire itself which would not fit declared American values. Should we be frank and start calling the US an American Empire instead of a superpower?

Please read the article and express your point of view on the question. I don't know how much is true here, but many things seem to be a common knowledge. The article obviously brings to attention only bad things about the United States but nevertheless represents a valid point of view.
www.atimes.com...

Hyperpower. That's the phrase coined a few years back by I believe it was a french politician whose name escapes me. Empire as a word to describe the most powerful nation on earth has fallen out of favor, it is still true. An empire is what we are. Economically, and militarily, no one is even close. China only dreams that they are. Not to say they won't be in the future, but not yet. Should the US be so inclined, we could crush either economically or militarily any two or three nations on earth. Fortunatly for all concerned we generally aren't. Just remember what happened to the late, unlemented Soviet Union.

The article you sourced seemed to think it was bad for the US gov't to look out for its own best interests first and foremost. I would submit that that is precisely what a government is supposed to do. I suspect some here will disagree with me somewhat violently.

Reading back through my post, I see I neglected to mention the two countries whose economies seem to be headed to the sky, Brazil and India. These two bear watching.

Yes.

Next generation superpowers will refer to us as an empire. Our gov't would like to see future history books refer to the US as an empire. The only thing is, an empire is run by an emperor. Hell who knows, things could change...

The subtitle explains the basic misconcption:
"THE NAKED HEGEMON"
A hegemony is not an empire.

In plain English that means Uncle Sam runs a worldwide confidence racket with his self-made dollar based on the confidence that he has elicited and received from others around the world, and he is a also a deadbeat in that he does not honor and return the money he has received.

Nonsense, the dollar hasn't lost its value because of the debt ceiling.


This is interseting though:

A $2 toy leaving a US-owned factory in China is a $3 shipment arriving at San Diego. By the time a US consumer buys it for $10 at Wal-Mart, the US economy registers $10 in final sales, less $3 import cost, for a $7 addition to the US GDP

An empire is perhaps best illustrated by the roman empire and the way in which the city of rome related to the provinces. That is, the city and its ruling class sucked up as much wealth as possible from the provinces.
Normally this was accomplished by, first, conquering the area and looting it, and then by becoming a government official in it and ammasing a personal fortune. Much later in history, this idea was followed up by, for example, the british, who shipped via triangular trade goods from one colony to exchange for raw materials from another to be made into goods in another and then sold in the mother country and then used that to get the goods from the original colony to re-start the cycle. So in this way what the author is talking about in that extended quote above is, perhaps, 'more of the same'.

Uncle Sam absorbs the savings of others who themselves are often much poorer, particularly when their central banks put many of their reserves in world-currency dollars and hence into the hands of Uncle Sam in Washington, and some also in dollars at home. Their private investors send dollars to or buy dollar assets on Wall Street, all with the confidence that they are putting their wherewithal in the world's safest haven (and that, of course, is part of the above-mentioned confidence racket).

However, if this is an empire, its an accidental one. I don't see how its not mere capitalism.

Venezuela is a major oil supplier to Uncle Sam and also supplies some at preferential rates as non-dollar trade swaps to poor countries such as Cuba. So Uncle Sam sponsored and financed military commandos from its Plan Colombia next door, promoted an illegal coup and, when that failed, pushed a referendum in his attempt at yet another "regime change"; and now along with Brazil all three are being baptized as yet another "axis of evil").

This seems like shakier grounds. Its one thing to note that oil and economics were aided by these things, another tho show that they were the sole motivation.

and we would agree to keep the House of Saud in power as long as they did this, which we've done, which is one of the reasons we went to war with Iraq in the first place. And in Iraq we tried to implement the same policy that was so successful in Saudi Arabia, but Saddam Hussein didn't buy.

Same as above. This is the only reason that there were problems between the US and Iraq? Because hussein's government wouldn't invest in american securities like the saudis? Seems too facile.

the next step is what we call the jackals. Jackals are CIA-sanctioned people that come in and try to foment a coup or revolution. If that doesn't work, they perform assassinations. Or try to. In the case of Iraq, they weren't able to get through to Saddam Hussein. He had - his bodyguards were too good. He had doubles. They couldn't get through to him. So the third line of defense, if the economic hit men and the jackals fail, the next line of defense is our young men and women, who are sent in to die and kill, which is what we've obviously done in Iraq.

Nearly an entire generation later? And are we really going to beleive that they tried their darnedest to kill hussein but couldn't, and just had to go through an entire war to get rid of him???


[edit on 2-2-2006 by Nygdan]