The New Geopolitics of Empire

[applegrove]

The New Geopolitics of Empire
by John Bellamy Foster
Monthly Review


"This article is a much expanded version of a plenary address delivered to the Fifth Colloquium of Latin American Political Economists in Mexico City on October 27. Parts of this argument were also presented in talks sponsored by Black Sun Books in Eugene, Oregon on November 16 and at the Stop the War Conference at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles on November 19.
Today’s imperial ideology proclaims that the United States is the new city on the hill, the capital of an empire dominating the globe. Yet the U.S. global empire, we are nonetheless told, is not an empire of capital; it has nothing to do with economic imperialism as classically defined by Marxists and others. The question then arises: How is this new imperial age conceived by those promoting it?

The answer, I am convinced, is to be found in the dramatic resurrection of geopolitics as an imperial philosophy. What Michael Klare has called in these pages “The New Geopolitics” has become a pragmatic means of integrating U.S. imperial goals in the post-Cold War world while avoiding all direct allusions to the “economic taproot of imperialism.”1

As Franz Neumann indicated in Behemoth, his classic 1942 critique of the Third Reich, “geopolitics is nothing but the ideology of imperialist expansion.”2 More precisely, it represents a specific way of organizing and advancing empire—one that arose with modern imperialism, but that contains its own peculiar history that is reverberating once again in our time.

Geopolitics is concerned with how geographical factors, including territory, population, strategic location, and natural resource endowments, as modified by economics and technology, affect the relations between states and the struggle for world domination. Classical geopolitics was a manifestation of interimperialist rivalry and emerged around the time of the Spanish–American War and the Boer War. It constituted the core ideology of U.S. overseas expansion articulated in Alfred Thayer Mahan’s Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890), Frederick Jackson Turner’s “The Frontier in American History” (1893), and Brooks Adams’s The New Empire (1902)—as well as in Theodore Roosevelt’s “Rough-Rider” policies.3 The term “geopolitics” itself was coined in 1899 by the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén, after which it quickly emerged as a systematic area of study. The three foremost geopolitical theorists in the key period from the Treaty of Versailles through the Second World War, were Halford Mackinder in Britain, Karl Haushofer in Germany, and Nicholas John Spykman in the United States.


....SNIP"

http://www.monthlyreview.org/0106jbf.htm

[400Years]

1. looks interesting

[applegrove]

2. Arts & Letters Daily is a great site for articles.

http://www.aldaily.com/

[teryang]

3. Interesting that delusions of world domination accompany...

...relative decline and the emergence of rivals. The idea that Russia or China cannot project power around the world is absurd. The absurdity of neo-con game theory in the so called "heartland" of Eurasia is that the archipelego of landlocked American bases are logistically unsustainable by any conventional military measure and can only survive in an unchallenged peaceful environment. They are little more than aerospace logistics subsidies for defense contractors and military advisory group sales personnel. Pakistan and Turkey in combination or Russia or China could drive us out of these areas merely by forming a resolute and applied desire to do so. The very fact that these bases are in the heartland and remote from the sea is why they are unsustainable. Russia or India could drive us out of Iraq or Iran if they chose to do so. Pakistan could drive us out of Afghanistan any time it desired to do so. It is better to watch a deluded fool in a hole keep digging.

The danger of the neo-cons lies in their doctrinaire adherence to quack ideological assumptions and extemporized game plans to subdue emerging power centers and build pipelines. The truth is that there is no central theme in world affairs and the will to impose one results in diaster. In fact, the very desire to do so suggests a cultural failure to deal with events as they are rather than as one would like them to be. The elites have exported our capital and manufacturing. They have exhausted to a large extent our natural resources and laid waste to our human resources with policies of neglect to pursue bizarre military strategies. Representing the interests of multinational corporate CEOs they have done extensive damage to our society and government. Our institutions including our constitutional institutions and traditions, have been gutted deliberately to destroy their balancing role in a pluralistic society. The greatest world hegemon is really a husk of its former self and in grave danger of collapsing. So radical belligerence, captured overseas markets, and a police state are the order of the day.

Madness.

[applegrove]

4. Yes - it is madness to gut all international institutions for the sole

purpose of hegemony. It is sick that neocons cannot image themselves in a world where US is not supreme. Especially because it has only been 15 years since the end of communism.

So the US may have dominated - but it was never in control of the planet.

It is counter intuitive. One would think imposing your stamp on the world would be to support the UN. But - the buying power the UN demonstrated with US drug companies when it came to the birth control pill - showed that alliances would, for once, not always favour the US corporation.

Thus the take-over. And the fear.

For sure in a more competitive world there will be a few huge corporations and many small businesses. Who will not compete with each other.

But the idea that WALMART was going to set up shop in Iraq is insane. Why on earth would Iraqis let that happen? For Walmart - an american corporation - to dominate their market and send all those profits home. Just as easy for some Iraqi to buy shit from China and sell it to his/her own countrymen.

So that is what scares me the most. Not that the world is more competitive but that hegemony will undo great policy and goal-setting by democracies. And that it is designed to "undo" the normal markets that would develop in a region or a country. And the mix of policies that will help balance horrid distribution of income. To keep control of markets they have no competitive advantage in. That's not liberalism. That is a form of totalitarianism. And the danger is we will head towards the dark ages so they can keep the power for themselves.

If it was simply intellectual property rights and America has an advantage in that - that would be fine. But it seems fortunes are supposed to be made in health care across the world - as all Western Democracies and poor countries are supposed to get rid of shared risk health care plans - which are more efficient.

I don't care if the USA dominates in defense or nanotechnology. But why would anyone who goes to the grocery store all over the world be sending money to the Walmart family in the Souther US. There is no need for that.

So too the competition with governance to get control of scientists and the like. I mean is anyone going to find a cure for AIDS? Except the UN, government health institution, philanthropy, etc. Cause there is not market in a cure.

And it is all so new this great big world. Easy to pull the wool over people's eyes and pretend outcomes that have not occurred are not allowable alternatives according to big business.

Business represents only themselves. That is how they are built. They should not be having control over policy. Especially of the whole planet. Seems erasing alternative visions is also part of the plan of dominance.

And the more aggressive they are, the more other aggressive or even non aggressive countries like Venezuela, become aggressive.

And the whole world deteriorates. And I think that is part of the plan.

As with business everywhere - the dream is monopoly power. But on what? The products they sell? Or how people think and what they can learn and talk about. Why the hell is business and a few isolated bow-ties deciding that for the world?

Always one set of rules for these guys, one set of rules for their opponents. It seems that is the mantra of the neocons. Highly narcissistic. They can act however they want inside a corporation - but outside a corporation there are suddenly limits on what people (growing rice in India that can then have saved seeds), governments (regulation - public good), countries (pick any one) can do? Using religion and hegemony. Moral suation & competitive forces?

I don't think so.