[independentmind]

No empire has avoided the road to Caesarism unless, like the British Empire, it devolved its power before this process could develop," writes Henry Kissinger in his latest book, Does America Need a Foreign Policy? "As challenges grow more diffuse and increasingly remote from the historic domestic base, internal struggles become ever more bitter and in time violent. A deliberate quest for hegemony is the surest way to destroy the values that made the United States great."

Have you seen this?

[Askel5]

You know ... I call them useful idiots all the time but these fellahs than hang on the wisdom of Henry really blow my mind.

What do you think he is saying here? I'll bet they don't even know. I can't imagine why we'd take a page from the British Empire. Do we still have an opportunity to avoid Caesarism?

I don't understand how the division at home over remote interventions is a problem ... seems to me (just from observation) that such divisions stem strictly from our government's departure from its historical (read:Declaration, Constitional) base.

Americans have no problem fighting to hell and gone. It's not a conflict's being remote so much as it is being unjust or flim-flam that causes the division.

And if he's going to be throwing around words like Hegemon, why no mention ever of China? Considering the fact that this will boil down to an East-West cataclysm and the heat's already on in earnest, it seems pretty superficial and sorta sneaky to constantly avoid the dragon breathing fire so as to load up your assurances and stratagems with strictly Western references.

Devolve in advance like the Brits? What kind of advice is that? Given that he must have some "remote" concept of the mind of the enemy to all that is the "historical base" of American thinking as embodied in the universal human liberties and self-evident truths of our founding documents to which men the world over respond ... I find his counsel passing strange.