Democracy or Empire

There will be little change in the U.S. until we break the chains of militarism that are strangling domestic reforms and alienating people around the globe. Any movement dedicated to progressive change must recognize that you can have democracy or empire but you can not have both.

The Pentagon blueprint called “Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership:Priorities for 21st Century Defense” advocates full spectrum dominance—on the land, on the sea, in the air, in cyberspace and in space. The expense of attempting to achieve global hegemony will drain our economic resources and entail cuts in education,health care,social security,and other social services. Even more distressing is the generation of young people who will fight and some will die in foreign lands and some will return with their bodies maimed and their minds unable to rationalize the horrors of war that they have experienced. What will they come home to? They will come home to a frayed safety net, unemployment, low wages and a dysfunctional system that lavishly rewards a small fraction of the U.S. population and urges austerity and sacrifice on the majority.

We are at a crossroads and we can not continue to pretend that we can separate what is happening domestically from the imperial aspirations expressed in the “Pentagon Blueprint”. And we must be cognizant of the fact that U.S.military power is our primary instrument for assuring access by multinational corporations to the global marketplace.

As progressives interested in structural reform,we will have to confront the reality of the interrelationship between U.S. imperial hegemonic aspirations and our endangered democracy. No analysis is complete without recognition of the deleterious effects that the increasing militarization of American society will have on our economy, on our culture and on our lives.

Don Torrence