I recommend this thoughtful, if imperfect, historical article on the American “Empire of Liberty” — Jefferson’s term — and how the ideas of imperialism and liberty and the exercise of state power have evolved in our country:
Is America an Empire? By David C. Hendrickson AMONG THE commanding symbols of American civilization, none are more important than empire and liberty. From George Washington’s journey to the Monongahela River in 1754 to George W. Bush’s conquests in Mesopotamia in 2003, observers have puzzled...
nationalinterest.org
That's a good article- the one I posted, that no one wants to throuble them selves to read, adds financial explanation to the link you posted. But, apparently the commenters know all there is to know about everything there is to know about everything and can't imagine opening their narrow minds to anything new- knowledge, it seems to many, is static- no matter the fact that knowledge, undeniably, evolves rendering it dynamic. Too deep for many to grasp, especially narrow and shallow minded know it alls-
From the link-
Those who emphasize the anti-imperialism of the U.S. record in foreign policy especially fail to take adequate account of the phenomenon whereby the United States not only defeated and dismantled adversary empires but also acquired, in the act of defeating them, many of the characteristics once deemed obnoxious in these enemies—powerful standing military establishments, a pervasive apparatus for spying and surveillance, a propensity to rely on force as a preferred instrument of policy, and a disdain for popular opinion or legislative control in matters of force.
As George Washington observed
in his Farewell Address, “Overgrown military establishments” are “inauspicious to liberty” under any form of government and “are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.” Over the past quarter century, the overgrown military establishment and national-security apparatus maintained by the United States has become threatening to domestic liberty and international freedom—that is, to both the “liberties of individuals” and “the liberties of states.”
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What, then, is the relation between American empire and the liberal tradition? The national-security elite sees them in a tight alliance; I see them standing increasingly in mortal contradiction. The empire, I contend, threatens liberty, despite having been built on its foundation, recalling the history and predicament of Republican Rome. “The history of Roman historiography,”
notes J. G. A. Pocock, is the history of “the problem of
libertas et imperium, in which liberty is perceived as accumulating an empire by which it is itself threatened.” My argument is that this has become the central problem of American history, if not yet perhaps of American historiography. This was so even before the age of Trump; it seems a clear and present danger now.
THE EXISTENCE of this phenomenon in the United States should occasion no real surprise. It had been prophesied. The explanation was developed brilliantly in Joseph Schumpeter’s “
The Sociology of Imperialisms.” Drafted in 1918 in dire and tragic circumstances, on the eve of the collapse of his homeland, Austria-Hungary, Schumpeter supposed capitalism to be bereft of the imperialistic urge and treated imperialism as an “atavism” representing precapitalist forces that had survived into the bourgeois epoch. Across the ages, the key phenomenon was that the war machine, “
created by wars that required it, . . . now created the wars it required.” Schumpeter wrote that of ancient Egyptian imperialism, but he applied the insight widely. Schumpeter spoke of the Roman policy
***
“which pretends to aspire to peace but unerringly generates war, the policy of continual preparation for war, the policy of meddlesome interventionism. There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome’s allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest—why, then it was the national honor that had been insulted. The fight was always invested with the aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbors, always fighting for a breathing space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies.” ***
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Never, said Jefferson, had so much false arithmetic been deployed as in the calculation favoring the benefits of war and preparedness. That standing forces played a critical role in perpetuating Europe’s war system was widely credited in the early United States, whose thinkers explored the question systematically. A key purpose of the federal constitution is that it would enable America to largely dispense with the engines of despotism—i.e., standing armies—that had been the ruin of liberty in the old world. This danger formed the central justification for the union in the early numbers of
The Federalist. Insight into this security problem was the weighty substratum on which the federal government was built.
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In his famous oration of July 4, 1821, when Secretary of State John Quincy Adams warned against going abroad in search of monsters to destroy, he
prophesied that were America to enlist “under other banners than her own . . . the fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from
liberty to
force.” In Adams’s ornate telling of the consequences, “The frontlet upon her brow would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but instead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power.”
