Superpower Vulnerability

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In foreign policy, the US has been operating on the basis that its national values have been validated by triumph in the Cold War and that its resultant sole-superpower status now earns it both the moral right and the military means to spread such values over the whole world. Resistance to such self-righteous values is nowdeemed evil by US moral imperialism, in need of elimination not by persuasion but by force. This new approach has made the world less safe than it was during the Cold War, the end of which briefly entertained a false hope for a new age in which a world with only one superpower could thereafter live without war, hot or cold. Instead, the world has been plunged into successive holy wars of imperialistic moral conquest by the sole remaining superpower, bringing escalating terrorist attacks on to the US homeland. The impact on domestic policy from terrorist threats has in turn been the wholesale suspension of civil liberties in the name of homeland security.

Such holy wars of moral imperialism cannot be blamed entirely on neo-conservatives in the second Bush administration. While the two wars on Iraq were initiated by the two pere et cie Bush administrations that sandwiched eight years of Clinton rule, the Bosnia and Kosovo wars were the handiwork of Clinton administration neo-liberals. The faith-based foreign policy of George W Bush echoes the value-based interests of the foreign policy of Bill Clinton, such as the grandiose aim of enlarging democracy by force
around the world and preventing mass starvation and ethnic genocide by spilling more blood.
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