I was getting excited drawing up this vivid and dramatic characterization of US imperialism as incredibly reckless - and it is certainly that, all things considered - but such a characterization misses a large part of what has also been achieved: there is a deftness and astuteness to modern imperialism that has to be addressed, especially for what it reveals.
As even anti-imperialist detractors admit, the US has been able to bend the will of nations more through financial chicanery, debt, and ideological persuasion, bypassing the brute force required to invade and militarily conquer a land (eh, usually), or even to establish a colony within it, giving its victims the illusion that they are a willing and autonomous partner in a business relationship with a wealthy power that only wants them to become a free democracy so they can become prosperous like itself.
Of course it does take terrible acts of violence and sabotage to establish regimes amenable to such relationships, but then once the deed is done, the real work can be done to manufacture consent and get the imperial exploitation running more quietly and less visibly, requiring less raw military violence once it gets going. It is like cooking with gas instead of woodfire: all that is needed is a spark and that stream of gas becomes a steady flame without the mess and smoke. But there is an important point I'll get to here: exploiting that gas requires specialized infrastructure built up over centuries and even millennia. And of course different political and economic situations called for different methods of domination.
You saw these gradations in the ancient world too. Rome was famous for incorporating conquered nations and assimilating them into its empire, which made for a more stable process of exploitation. But depending on how tortured a conflict was, and how they felt towards a certain enemy at a certain political period, they would have no compunction with razing the town or city, killing off all the male population, and selling all of the women and children into slavery.
But the really astute rulers would prefer the diplomatic route, particularly through economic means. If they could smooth the relations with their rivals and subjects with bribes and persuasion, it would sure beat the resources required to mobilize the military and do it the old-fashioned way. And it would keep one's enemies closer, so to speak. They were usually a bit sheepish about this in the ancient world: in Rome especially bribes and cloak and dagger politics were seen in the mythology as weak-willed and cowardly, with the need for bold and glorified battle to settle one's conflicts as a core part of their self-conception. Nevertheless, those rulers who knew how to hold power would only dream of having the avenues available that the United States had in its golden age.
But that is just the thing. Reflecting the fact that coinage and markets were still quite young in the ancient world, there was still a broad cultural uneasiness of them and a limited understanding of them. Aristotle would be scratching his head over how the commodity was even possible, in which so many disparate objects with profound differences could be reconciled to that single medium: money.
It took quite a bit of time for a modern understanding to develop of modernity itself, which is readily apparent if one surveys the thought of classical political economy, with thinkers wrestling over the nature of markets, capital, and value, much like the Christian mystics wrestling over the nature of their god centuries before. And someone who really understands modern imperialism like Michael Hudson likes to regularly remark that the US state was interested in his work because it helped them understand what it was that they were actually doing.
And if it took a lot of time and work for that understanding to develop, it also took a lot of time and work to develop the means and infrastructure for those processes themselves. Financial tools of control presuppose not only thousands of years of development of finance, but also developments of money and markets and capital and the very understandings that make those things work more efficiently. Ideological forms of control like PR and propaganda in general presuppose complex and stable social arrangements and long histories of the development of the semantics and the realities that make those semantics work.
That's where the recklessness of the whole thing comes in. The West is burning away all of that hard-earned manufactured consent just as it is burning away all of that gas and oil, all of those hundreds of millions of years of captured sunlight.
And I'll repeat this until I'm blue in the face: I'm one of those anti-imperialist detractors. My amazement at the power of the evolution of empire is well-mixed with horror and repulsion. But even I can look at what the late imperialists are doing and say, "eh that's not a good idea for you either."
