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[achinhibitor]

The few times I read an analysis of the Ukraine War that mentions the repeated actions by Western powers (primarily the United States), my skin crawls, because I can never frame a refutation of the proposal: This war is aligned with the United States's neo-imperialist mission. I don't want to address that as a moral question. And my concept of "

Comments

[madman101]

Are you blithely arguing for USA neo-imperialism? Do you not see that this imperialism is not actually American but driven by super-national investors?

[achinhibitor]

Are you blithely arguing for USA neo-imperialism?

I'm not arguing for it, but I am pointing out that it's going on, and has been going on for quite a while and is likely to keep going on. More particularly, the Ukraine situation can't be assessed and dealt with without being aware of the bigger framework and what one wants to do with it.

Do you not see that this imperialism is not actually American but driven by super-national investors?

I'm not sure what you mean by "super-national" here, but my 401(k) is invested in a lot of big companies who own and invest in things around the world, not to mention engage in trade with almost all countries. So I'm sure that I qualify as a "super-national investor", whatever your definition is.

[achinhibitor]

I think you're running up against what I see repeatedly among people with conservative outlooks, a realization that if the U.S. was more isolated from other countries, social cohesion would be higher, social stresses would be less, and we'd not be constantly agitated by other countries' problems. That tends to bleed into a suspicion that all of our troublesome foreign entanglements are caused by various nefarious, un-American sorts.

But though much of that is true in fact, it's not relevant because the sacred quest of pursuing material prosperity constantly drives us to deal with the rest of the world. I mean, in colonial America a major source of wealth was smuggling against the trade rules of the British empire. Now because the US is unusually large, we could tolerate autarky (as it's called) better than a small colony like the Netherlands. But nobody's going to give up the cheap stuff that requires foreign trade (either in raw materials or finished goods) despite all of the discontents of globalization.