The United States Empire

The article below is a fitting piece that shows the
strength, power and extent of the United States.
And as people of color we should recgognize the
extent of our power in this matrix.


It is fitting that today is a Sunday because I would like to speak this afternoon about what the Church should be saying about war and foreign policy. This war, like all of the other foreign wars the United States has been involved in, is a consequence of our interventionist foreign policy.
Although the foreign policy of the current administration has been referred to as "the Bush Doctrine" and "this great mission," it is not much different from the foreign policy of most previous administrations.

Gunboat diplomacy may have given way to cowboy diplomacy, but U.S. foreign policy is still aggressive, reckless, belligerent, and meddling. The history of U.S. foreign policy is the history of hegemony, nation building, regime change, and jingoism. In a word, it is a history of interventionism, with its stepchildren imperialism and empire.

Although Donald Rumsfeld claims that "we don’t seek empires" and "we’re not imperialistic," I don’t hesitate to use the terms. Not only did the 9/11 Commission Report conclude that "the American homeland is the planet," it referred to the Department of Defense as "the behemoth among federal agencies. With an annual budget larger than the gross domestic product of Russia, it is an empire." The extent of the U.S. global empire is almost incalculable.

The Department of Defense’s "Base Structure Report" states that the Department’s physical assets consist of "more than 600,000 individual buildings and structures, at more than 6,000 locations, on more than 30 million acres." There are over 700 U.S. military bases on foreign soil. There are U.S. troops stationed in 159 different regions of the world in every corner of the globe. There are 285,000 U.S. troops stationed in foreign countries, not counting the 200,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are 100,000 U.S. soldiers in Europe to face a non-existent Soviet Union.

The United States has commitments to provide security to over 35 countries. The United States still maintains 64,000 troops in Germany, 33,000 troops in Japan, and 10,000 troops in Italy – sixty years after we defeated them in World War II. We have, in fact, never stopped mobilizing for war since World War II, manufacturing enemies where we could find none. In addition to military personnel, the Department of Defense employs 675,000 people worldwide, including thousands of foreign nationals. But instead of all of this being an example of imperialism and empire, we are told by neoconservative intellectuals that the United States is merely exercising "benevolent hegemony."





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