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Tomgram: Jonathan Schell on Bush's Failed Empire

Jonathan Schell, who ended his Nation magazine column, "Letter from Ground Zero," last February, now takes up "The Crisis of the Republic" in what will be a series of periodic, longer essays appearing in the Nation under that rubric.

For all its wealth, its power, its dreams of military domination over the last half-century-plus, the United States, Schell argues in this introduction to his new series, has misunderstood the nature of power in our time and so has become "the fool of history." Our tale, as he tells it, is not one of imperial success followed by crisis, but of a deep and abiding kind of failure; nor is it a tale of a successful empire now in crisis, but of a failed empire now in a state of disarray.

In his seminal book, The Unconquerable World, he suggested just why this was so by tracing the way, from the late eighteenth century on, the globe experienced an ever-upward ratcheting of the means of destruction and of the imperial violence that went with it until, with the coming of nuclear weapons, we reached beyond the limits of power, even of the planet itself. At the same time, what also ratcheted ever upward was a kind of "people power," deeply connected to the idea of national sovereignty and independence, that simply would not (and still will not) give way. It is in this context that the United States is "too late for empire."

Thanks to the kindness of the editors of the Nation magazine Tomdispatch posts this important essay. Tom

posted by Annamarie at 11:42 PM