Is the US running an empire?

[Dayuhan]

Any hostile or potentially hostile country that could deploy a powerful navy.

It's been a long time since we were seriously worried about anybody's navy.

Why are they threats? If you are trying to maintain a perimeter, people will try to penetrate it at various places and you are going to end up playing whack-a-mole.

Is anyone, anywhere, trying to "penetrate our perimeter"? For that matter, what is our perimeter?

What is the role of the United States in this system? The weight of America's economic, political, and military power was used to force open the international system.

I'm not entirely sure that's true. The international system opened less because America forced it open than because people took advantage of opportunities that openness provided. Participation in that open system has been largely voluntary and largely driven by the desire to take advantage of opportunity. Others have taken advantage rather more effectively than we have. Certainly openness has been opposed in many places by vested interests that saw it as a threat to their dominance of the status quo, but the pressure to open has generally been internal and outbound rather than America forcing its way in.

But what is the future of the US central role in this process now that it's fragility has been exposed to the world? The deindustrialization was the first stage in this process, followed by its de-financialization, which has culminated in the situation we are facing now. Next, the material wealth of the US will be expropriated to pay off the public debts incurred in the first two stages. This is already occurring in Greece and Italy. The American people are paying for this process, and their wealth is ending up in the pockets of the global financial elite. This is the definition of empire.

Again I think the problem is being misconstrued. It's not so much that wealth is being transferred, it's more that imaginary wealth is being exposed as imaginary. If you look at the great losses of "wealth" that occurred in, say, the stock market crash in 2000/2001 and the recent real estate crash, you see pretty quickly that most of the "wealth" that was "lost" never really existed in the first place, other than through consensual delusion.

American Pride notes the changes taking place that started with the Cllinton - Rubin - Summers strong move to American economic as opposed to military hegemony, an effort that began rather slowly under Reagan and that George H.W. Bush continued.

Possibly that was the intention, but American economic hegemony has substantially declined since that time. Economic hegemony is seldom a product of conscious choice or intent: it emerges from superior economic performance.