Posts Tagged ‘containment’
How did we get stuck with an empire?
Bill Maher, whose cynicism is usually a little dark for my taste, asks a good question:
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Quick – name one military base of any other nation that camps on foreign soil. One. Just one.
It is scarcely conceivable, as his Guatemalan example illustrates. Yet our nation supports one hundred fifty such bases, at hundreds of millions of dollars per year, each.
Perhaps the answer to Maher’s question springs from something like this:
“We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only about 6.3 percent of its population … our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.” – George Kennan, 1948 (architect of much Cold War U.S. foreign policy)
Does that sound like a force for good?
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