OMNI WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, #212, JANUARY 15, 2025.

 

OMNI WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, #212, JANUARY 15, 2025.   Compiled by Dick Bennett

 

Claude Julien. America’s Empire.  Pantheon/Random House, 1971.  Vintage, 1973.   Not in Mullins Library.

Wikipedia’s description 1971.
Reacting against a common preconception, he publishes the stand out book L'Empire Américain (America's Empire) in 1968, which received the French literary award of the Prix Aujourd'hui.^[7] The book argues that, despite the USA not possessing colonies, they do, regardless, constitute an "Empire without borders".^[8] "It is nowadays the most powerful that history has ever known, by its manufacturing capacity (with 6% of the world's population, the USA account for 43% of the non-communist world's production), by its military power, by its catching dynamism and by the extension of its influence."^[8] The book will be updated in 1973 for the occasion of its republication in a Pocket edition. Very well documented, the book will remain for a long time as "the indispensable instrument to the understanding of contemporary international politics".^{[8]  Wikipedia}

[I agree, this buried book, had it been widely read and followed, would have saved our nation from the reckless arrogance that has inspired so many wars, killings, and displacements.  It explains, directly in the Introduction, “Ambiguities of the Empire,” a reality that has puzzled me.  How can so violent a nation be simultaneously so idealistically internationalist?   One paragraph condenses the chapter: “American idealism is not…incompatible with the American empire.  On the contrary, it serves it, supplies it with justification…promotes its expansion, until the day when idealism, gangrened by the unspeakable methods of imperialism, runs the risk of dying under the ruins of the empire” (5).  Chapter 2, “An Empire without Frontiers,” describes US expansionism as “a continuous impulse in American history.  Land hunger, power hunger, newness hunger, and bigness hunger, have proved wants that feed themselves.”  And at the heart of it all is the pursuit of raw materials.   The American empire has “grown through necessity, in answer to its internal needs of which the most pressing is the procurem ent of raw materials” (15).   “Thoughtless exploitation and enormous waste have appreciably reduced its known reserves.  But , above all, constantly increasing consumption has compelled the United States to seek beyond its borders raw materials.”  Subsequent chapters provide arguments and evidence for this and complementing theses.   –Dick

Read Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World by David Vine (Metropolitan Books, 2015) and The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World by Noam Chomsky and Nathan Robinson (Penguin, 2024).