Nuclear Pyramids

Gene Lyons: Tied down by our empire

Almost regardless of who wins the presidential nomination, there's small likelihood of serious debate about the most crucial long-term foreign-policy question facing the American people: Do we or do we not want to maintain a global empire by force of arms? Or, to put it another way, what's in it for us, as individual citizens, for the United States to maintain 800 military bases around the world? Does the word "superpower" actually mean anything in today's world?

Hardly anybody in the foreign-policy establishment likes having it put that way. It strikes them as vulgar and reductive. Hence anybody who questions, for example, whether the United States really needs to spend almost twice as much on wars and weaponry as the rest of the world combined gets caricatured as a crackpot isolationist - the kind of person who, in the usual formulation, would have ignored Hitler's military buildup in the 1930s.

Lately, I’ve been having a few conversations about foreign policy and American Empire. The more I talk to pro-Empire types, the more I am convinced that these people live in a world of pure fantasy. Moreover, I am convinced that it gives them some sort of primal satisfaction to be able to identify with a State that is powerful enough to obliterate all life on the planet, many times over.

To them, the State is a God. And like all Gods, it is a receptacle to place all of one’s anxieties and phobias about the known, and mostly uncontrollable, universe. This faith will transcend any and all rational argument and evidence that the road to empire is the surest way to the destruction of society.

Feeling good is more important that prudence, responsibility, and rationality.