The global actions of the United States since September 11, 2001, are often seen as constituting a “new militarism” and a “new imperialism.” Yet, neither militarism nor imperialism is new to the United States, which has been an expansionist power—continental, hemispheric, and global—since its inception. What has changed is the nakedness with which this is being promoted, and the unlimited, planetary extent of U.S. ambitions.

Since September 11, 2001, the United States has waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, expanded the global reach of its military base system, and increased the level of its military spending to the point that it now spends about as much on the military as all other nations of the world combined. Glorying in the U.S. blitzkrieg in Iraq, journalist Greg Easterbrook proclaimed in the New York Times (April 27, 2003) that U.S. military forces are “the strongest the world has ever known...stronger than the Wehrmacht in 1940, stronger than the legions at the height of Roman power.”

Numerous critics on the U.S. left have responded by declaring, in effect, “Let’s throw the bastards out.” The U.S. government under the Bush administration, so the argument goes, has been taken over by a neoconservative cabal that has imposed a new policy of militarism and imperialism. For example, University of California at Los Angeles sociologist Michael Mann argues at the end of his Incoherent Empire (2003) that “a neoconservative chicken-hawk coup...seized the White House and the Department of Defense” with George W. Bush’s rise to the presidency. For Mann the end solution is simply to “throw the militarists out of office.”

http://www.monthlyreview.org/0905jbf.htm