Now that we are leaving Iraq, Jonah Goldberg wants to do away with the term:
[C]ontemporary America isn't an empire, at least not in any conventional or traditional sense. Your typical empire invades countries to seize their resources, impose political control and levy taxes. That was true of every empire from the ancient Romans to the Brits and the Soviets. That was never the case with Iraq. For all the blood-for-oil nonsense, if America wanted Iraq's oil it could have saved a lot of blood and simply bought it. Saddam Hussein would have been happy to cut a deal if we only lifted our sanctions. Indeed, the U.S. oil industry never lobbied for an invasion, but it did lobby for an end to sanctions. We never levied taxes in Iraq either.
Jacob Heilbrunn prefers "imperial behavior" rather than "empire" to describe our post-Cold War policy. Larison thinks the shoe fits:
When a government reserves the right to overthrow other governments that oppose its policy goals, it assumes that other states’ sovereignty is so limited that it can and should be violated when it suits the more powerful state. This is how many empires have acted in the past, and so it seems appropriate and accurate to refer to a contemporary American empire. If we call it hegemony instead, the substance of what we are talking about doesn’t change at all, and the criticism of hegemonist policies remains the same. Hegemonists who reject the label of empire really do protest too much.
How about neo-imperial: all the attitude and cost, and none of the alleged benefits?
(Image via Flickr user B MOR Creeeative)
The Dish 
