Agree w your whole post but ref this bit specifically …
What’s funny is except for some nods to locally fashionable terminology that’s exactly the Chinese plan of the last ~40 years.
Right down to the patronizing racism ref the lesser humans not of The Middle Kingdom.
This was a decree, not a provision of the Mexican Constitution as you stated. And the exemption for Texas was explicitly a temporary measure – as your own cites state – that was removed within a year.
I don’t care what it “seems like,” it “wasn’t” an army. It’s absurd to suggest that she could have had her guard (not army, guard) fire on US Marines, killing US soldiers, and had that result in anything less than a massacre of her citizens. Come on now.
As for the rest of your points? Come on now. I can hardly credit them as being offered with thought and care.
The USS Boston could lob 8” shells over seven miles. Iolani Palace is five blocks from Honolulu Harbor
The only date I can justify is July 2, 1776. This marks the definitive break with what went before. The French and Indian War was the occasion for people from different colonies to meet and compare notes, leading to a nascent awareness of Americans as a single people. After the F&IW, King George decreed no settlement of the West; it was made the Indian Reserve. The independent United States proceeded to immediately settle the West. I know this because I’m descended from a Revolutionary War veteran who pioneered west of the Alleghenies after the Revolution.
Rome was an imperialistic republic until Octavius changed it into an imperialistic monarchy a.k.a. empire.
If you’re going to split that hair, then the US is also an imperialist republic and not an empire. At least so far.
Yes, of course it is. Obviously. The difference between a republic and a monarchy isn’t a split hair but a crucial difference.
But IIRC it was used to justify the Westward Expansion.
Remember that 37 years after the Monroe Doctrine, the Royal Navy defended its Honduran colony from filibuster William Walker by turning him over to Nicaragua for execution.
Not germaine to the topic if we’re sure Walker was always intent on setting himself up as an independent dictator, and not as a (slavery-based) exclave of the US.
To the dominant power, yes. I suspect the dominatees didn’t notice much difference between the occupying republican legions and the occupying imperial legions.
It’s those damn British whose messed everything up. Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (six volumes, the first published in 1776) both spooked and inspired the Brits and through them the Americans. Wiki provides a convenient quotation (from Piers Brendon’s The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781–1997):
Gibbon’s work “became the essential guide for Britons anxious to plot their own imperial trajectory. They found the key to understanding the British Empire in the ruins of Rome.”
The Brits did not follow the Roman model, of course; outright conquest with all the manpower and cost involved proved unnecessary when superior technology taking down individual monarchs could provide the same results. Americans learned that lesson and applied it after WWII: hegemony worked even better than imperialism. Being the world’s sole superpower - economically and culturally more than militarily perhaps - is an enviable position (as evidenced by the world’s envy, some of it distinctly unhealthy).
Actions speak louder than words: nobody truly cares whether America is an empire, a hegemonic republic, an imperialist, or a superpower.
If it quacks like a duck …
Though between the 1900s and 1930s they switched to the method of intervening, “pacifying” and setting up a loyal client to hand it over to — Panama, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, etc. before switching to just backing and arming an already existing local faction.
Shhh. Don’t tell anyone that the CIA kept on doing it into the 50s. They’re the good guys, remember.
50’s? Really?
AFAIK they’re still at it :
:cough: Ukraine 2014 :cough:
The US did not cause revolution in Ukraine. That is an excuse the Russians manufactured to invade.
Also, the Orange Revolution happened in 2004, not 2014
While I certainly understand criticism of US hegemony and the way it chooses to wield it, I do have one question.
If the US was not a hegemon, is the idea that we’d have a bunch of free and prosperous countries happily singing hand in hand around the whole world?
Or would some other Great Power, or collection of Great Powers, be out there forming its own hegemony?
Moderating
Absolutely take this to a new thread, do not continue it here.
If you are responding to something in a thread that is basically off-topic or likely to lead to a hijack, try this:
How to Reply as a linked Topic:
Click Reply, in the upper left corner of the reply window is the reply type button, looks like a curving arrow point to the right.
Choose Reply as linked topic and it starts a new thread. As an example, you can choose GD, IMHO or The Pit for it.
That is actually the best method.
You completely missed my point.
First, can you actually make the case that a non-polar world is inherently better than either a multipolar world with a handful of great powers or a unipolar world, led by the US or by someone else?
Second, can a non-polar world actually exist? If it cannot, which multipolar or unipolar combination of superpowers do you propose would do better than the US?
It’s like the argument about third party voters in the US. OK, you wish Luxembourg ruled the world, or that we had a loose confederation of Nations who respect each other’s borders, whatever. You’re voting third party.
Meanwhile, the Democrats (US) and Republicans (China, Russia) are the only two parties that actually have a shot at winning, so do you throw your vote away or vote for the one you slightly prefer?