Is the Soviet Collapse Dragging the United States Down?
The mix of old and new in the United States's role as world leader creates ambiguity and confusion. The United States is looking for ways to regain its lost economic punch and to consolidate its world hegemony. At present, however, with no true enemy on the horizon, it is being dragged down by the Soviet collapse. The twentieth century was a period of transition but not from capitalism to socialism. The nonmarket alternative or challenge represented by the Soviet Union gave capitalism the means to overcome many obstacles to its reproduction and raise profits to new levels. The United States occupied a privileged position in that process. However, the twenty-first century demands new solutions for capitalism's inherent contradictions, and as a result the United States is apparently still trying to invent a new Soviet Union.
The United States and imperialism
Introduction. 1. Imperialism and National Identity in the 1890s. 2. Failed Expectations: The Civilizing Mission in the Philippines. 3. America's Caribbean Empire. 4. The Modernization of China and the Diplomacy of Imperialism. 5. Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism in America's World Policies. Conclusion: Beyond Imperialism: The Empire of Modernity. Index.
United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation: Implications for the Origins of American Imperialism
An examination of United States Indian policy during the nineteenth century reveals a clear pattern of colonialism toward Native Americans. This essay will suggest that this policy served as a precedent for imperialist domination over the Philippines and other islands occupied during the Spanish-American War. Historians are divided over the origins of United States imperialist sentiment-whether the nation "stumbled" into empire, followed manifest destiny policies from the Mexican War, or annexed islands in a search for commercial markets. However, there seems to be a mistaken consensus, at least among many diplomatic historians, that the United States did not have a tradition of holding alien peoples as colonial subjects before 1898. That the Indian precedent has been ignored is perhaps testimony to the treatment Native Americans have received from historians. Rather than being considered as independent peoples, Indians have been so closely associated with the early frontier that they have been largely ignored as a factor in later American diplomatic history. There has been a tendency to stereotype Indians as a "vanishing race," especially after the passing of the frontier. 1 On the contrary, the demographic reality is that American Indian population has continued to grow during every decade since 1890 and in specific ethnic groups the population rebound occurred even earlier.2 This fact perplexed American policy-makers, who were supposed to oversee the continual decline of their I"vanishing" charges and who had to decide what status these peoples would