Risking our security, or securing our risk?

Abstract

"For those suspicious of the custodians of the ‘War on Terrorʼ, there is at least one question that presses itself to the fore: what is ‘newʼ about the somewhat innocuous, but increasingly bold, quasi-doctrine of neoimperialism? Conventional political wisdom has distinguished neoimperialism from the ‘oldʼ imperialism by inserting the adjective ‘economicʼ and/or ‘militaryʼ, thus softening the term politically and, at least ostensibly, immunizing it from democratic critique. Neoimperialism, on this account, is not a crusade of domination in the service of cultural or racial hegemony, but a conscientious, well-oiled, strategic machine of global, political and capital security. However, cloaked in the rhetoric of the Truth of free-market democracy, the United Statesʼ global-evangelical message has been progressively determined by policymakers who count among their heroes and mentors not Adam Smith or Thomas Jefferson, but the meticulous administrators and bureaucrats of the former British Empire. What was before conducted within the euphemistic idiom of ‘humanitarian nation-buildingʼ, has increasingly (post September 11) been infused with a grander, suprahistorical, moral validation. Echoing the expansionist tendencies of the former British empire, who viewed the ‘uncivilizedʼ world as putative child-like wards of patrifocal Europe, President George W. Bush has promised to hunt down, root out, defeat, and reform the barbarians of the twenty-first century: political terrorists of all stripes."