A month off

As you can see from my lack of postings I've taken this past month off from posting. No apologies, but look for me to begin posting this upcoming november once again.

Since When Does America Care About It's Global Image?

Many people seem to complain that America's world image has been destroyed under the Bush Administration. But when has America ever cared about its world image before? We've always viewed ourselves as world policeman since the end of WWII. However in doing so the means always met the ends, and therefore there was only peace if we approved of it. How close is world policeman, to world dictator.

For many years we never cared about our global image. We had no problem using napalm in Vietnam, or enlisting puppet dictators in Greece, Iran, and Peru. We had no problem instilling "Democracy" in parts of the world where a democratically elected socialist government was not democratic enough.

As world policeman, our job was always to a) stop the spread of communism (not a bad thing) and b) spread democracy. When did our world image disappear? I would venture to say after the fall of the Soviet Union, when we became the sole Hegemon, and a new unipolar word was created. Once the Soviet Union collapsed who was there for us to paint as evil? Islamic Fundamentalists I suppose which is generally backed by the commoners of the region. Not to mention, that there is no Islamic Fundamentalist nation that holds a nuclear arsenal. Just look at that picture, AK-47's versus the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.

We heavily condemned the Soviets for their invasion of Afghanistan for many of the reasons we went into the war. Not fighting terror, but rather Spreading "Democracy." The only difference is that the Soviets were spreading communism. 

So what do we do once Soviet Russia has fallen? We invade the Middle East under the guise of spreading Democracy. This isn't so different from Soviet Russia now is it? We go in to spread "Democracy" (so long as it's not socialist) and the Soviets went in to spread communism. Are we any different? We are spreading our own interests in capitalism, and the soviets spread their own interests in communism.

Now that we are the unipolar hegemon of the world there is no one to point the blame at, and therefore not only the east, but the rest of the west is seeing beneath the guise of spreading democracy. That it is just away to spread American imperial interests.

Where did our Global Image go? It was never there, the United States just had someone to make look worse. Now that they're gone, the rest of the world sees that we were never so different from the Soviets, and therefore our foreign policy is now seen as what its always been. America's purported Global Image of man in the white hat has never existed, it was merely an illusion, which used a Soviet Scapegoat to distract its audience.