Professor Manan Ahmed (Pakistani-American, now at Heidelberg) has an article about lack of expertise in the American empire: http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksd....html#comments

The point about expertise or lack of it is interesting and worth discussing, but professor Manan (like most left-liberal academics) likes to use the term "empire" a lot...of course, some right-liberal academics use it too (Niall Ferguson?)..I wrote a comment about the usage of this term (you can see it at the above link) because I thought "empire" is not the best description of what the US does in the world today. Descriptions are maps of reality and are necessarily simplified and so on, but even as an oversimplified map, I thought this was not accurate. I dont think Obama wakes up every morning thinking about his far flung empire AS AN EMPIRE. But being a naive amateur, I am doing what I usually do in such circumstances, I am going to go ahead and ask: is "empire" a useful/good way to describe what the US does in the world?