Welcome to the United Empire of Stalemate
16th January 2019
Richard N. Haass is the President of the Council on Foreign Relations. Prior to that was he was Special Assistant to President George H.W. Bush and the National Security Council Senior Director for Near East and South Asian Affairs. For that, Bush 41 gave him the Presidential Citizens Medal for developing and explaining US policy during Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm.
In 2000 he called for a new “American Empire” to be designed and operated on the model of the British Empire of the 19th Century. He further said it would have to be “informal” because “American democracy could not underwrite an imperial order that required constant, costly applications of military power.” Now he has changed his tune a bit.
Since the French Revolution, radical democracies have succumbed to the temptation to spread the blessings of their particular flavor of government to all & sundry; America’s ‘neoconservative’ adventurers are only the most recent iteration of a very old story. John Quincy Adams is, of course, rolling in his grave.