"Imperialism is but a form of isolationism, in which the demand for absolute, undefiled security at home leads one to conquer the world, and in the process to become subject to all the world's anxieties."
Our empire is different from those in the past. "America's imperium was without colonies, suited to a jet-and-information age in which mass movements of people and capital diluted the meaning of sovereignty."
The world does not, however, passively reconcile itself to imperialism. "It is the revealed fact of empire itself that spurs those outside it to join forces in opposition." An empire by its nature creates and unifies its opposition.
Kaplan speaks admiringly of Rudyard Kipling, the poet laureate of British colonialism, and compares him to the US frontier painter Frederick Remington, who he sees as "the Kipling of early American imperialism, turning it from fact into heroic myth."
Kaplan sees his work in line with Kipling's and Remington's. He unabashedly glorifies and mythologizes the rugged imperial defender, then and now. He even sees US western expansion on the North American continent as the beginning of the American empire being maintained today.
"Following their initial settlement, and before their incorporation as states in the Union, the western territories were nothing less than imperial possessions of Washington DC."
He quotes Winston Churchill on Pashtuns in Afghanistan and compares this tough people to American Indians. Both, he says, "were capable of uniting against the stranger." He cites Custer's massacre as an example of this unity against a US imperial force.
In Afghanistan, he bonds with soldiers from a Florida panhandle national guard special forces unit and explains how elements like this are keeping up the "great southern military tradition that had produced the gleaming officer corps of the Confederacy."
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