This professor has a gloomy prediction. Then again, academics have more or less made an entire cottage industry out of predicting doom and gloom and the end of America and the rise of everything not-America. (I remember a few years ago, an academic said with a straight face that the EU would soon rise to awesome power and throw the US down into the shadows. Yeah, right.)
Of course, Professor Layne's current moping about the end of the Pax Americana (foreign policy apocalypse-o-mania!) might possibly have a bit more traction due to the Obama Administration's completely feckless and all-but-criminally clueless foreign policy (what there is of it other than snubbing all the right people and kissing up to all the wrong ones).
My personal opinion: when all is said and done, you'd be hard-pressed to argue that not having the Pax Americana is better than having it. Oh, sure, global elites whine and pewl about American power and "hegemony" and "empire" and all that, but when push comes to shove, it's been better to have it than not. Just wait for the next foreign natural disaster, for instance, and see who goes charging to the rescue with men and supplies. I could go on, but I have to get ready for school. Anyway, the president isn't called "the leader of the free world" for nothing, even if the current occupant of the Big Chair seems not to realize what this actually means (beyond making insubstantial but pretty speeches).
MM, unrepentant imperialist and warmongering hegemonster, signing off to go oppress some more hapless victims with the iron fist of her gradebook and standards that do not account for "self-esteem."
1 comment:
I've never understood how the Roman Peace became conflated with the Roman empire, and I (being neither a Roman historian nor a historian of Rome) have always found it a bizarre and humorous paradox that anti-war demonstrators used the term 'American Peace' so derisively.
Any MM thoughts on that cultural phenomenon?
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