From his website, one of the most reasonable analyses of our current world situation I have read.

THE DUTY OF EMPIRE: The one important and thoroughly welcome part of Michael Ignatieff's essay in yesterday's New York Times Magazine is its realism. Sure, I think he's being excessive in describing American global influence as an "empire." Empires, as I understand them, actually control territory, exploit it, and exercize sovereignty over it. The United States, with a few tiny exceptions, doesn't do that. It protects its allies; it trades; it polices the seas and skies. It's far more like the eighteenth century British Empire than the nineteenth, and even then, without actual colonies of any substance.



But Ignatieff is surely right to frame the real question as: do we actually have a choice any more? American trade alone makes some sort of international police work essential. The rise of weapons of mass destruction together with lethal terrorism and porous international borders all turn isolationism into a non-starter. The military abdication of most of the other Western countries also makes the United States the enforcer of last resort (remember Bosnia and Kosovo?). Allowing a genocidal nutcase access to nuclear weapons in the most oil-rich part of the globe is simply not something any responsible hegemon can allow - not only for its own security, but for that of the entire world.

The question then becomes one between an Empire Lite or an Empire Heavy. I'm more skeptical than some neoconservatives about the feasibility of having troops and civil servants all over the globe, ushering in a new era of democracy. But I'm even more skeptical of the left conservatives and reactionary leftists who believe inaction and retreat is a viable option. We have to find a way between both temptations - case by case, region by region, year by year. This is where the real debate should be: not in hysterical leftwing cries of imperial dictatorship or in paleocon nostalgia for withdrawal, but in the hard, day by day assessment of risks and benefits of specific actions.



I haven't read the NYT article yet...it's quite long. Am printing it out to take to bed.