Michael Mann also warns of a dangerous, and ultimately unsustainable, imperial turn in U. S. foreign policy. This "new imperialism," he argues in Incoherent Empire, is driven by a radical vision in which unilateral military power enforces U.S. rule and overcome global disorder.
Mann believes that this "imperial project" depends on a wildly inflated measure of American power; the United States may have awesome military muscle, but its political and economic capabilities are less overwhelming. This imbalance causes Washington to overemphasize the use of force, turning the quest for empire into "overconfident and hyperactive militarism." Such militarism generates what Mann calls "incoherent empire," which undermines U.S. leadership and creates more, not fewer, terrorists and rogue states.
Mann acknowledges that the United States is a central hub of the world economy and that the role of the dollar as the primary reserve currency confers significant advantages in economic matters. But the actual ability of Washington to use trade and aid as political leverage, he believes, is severely limited, as was evident in its failure to secure the support of countries such as Angola, Chile, Guinea, Mexico, and Pakistan in the Security Council before the war in Iraq. Moreover,
Washington’s client states are increasingly unreliable, and the populations of erstwhile allies are in- flamed with anti-Americanism. American culture and ideals, meanwhile, hold less appeal than they did in previous eras. Although the world still embraces the United States’ open society and basic freedoms, it increasingly complains about "cultural imperialism" and U.S. aggression. Nationalism and religious fundamentalism have forged deep cultures of resistance to an American imperial project.
Mann and Barber both make the important point that an empire built on military domination a- lone will not succeed. In their characterization, the United States offers security—acting as a global leviathan to control the problems of a Hobbesian world—in exchange for other countries’ acquiescence. Washington, in this imperial vision, refuses to play by the same roles as other governments and maintains that this is the price the world must pay for security. But this U. S. -imposed order cannot last. Barber points out that the United States has so much "business" with the rest of the world that it cannot rule the system without complex arrangements of cooperation. Mann, for his part, argues that military "shock and awe" merely increases resistance; he cites the sociologist Talcott Parsons, who long ago noted that raw power, unlike consensus authority, is "deflationary": the more it is used, the more rapidly it diminishes.
The author considered Michael Mann's theory as ().
A．enlightening.
B．reasonable.
C．objective.
D．impractical.
