{"id":101698,"date":"2026-07-20T01:00:07","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T05:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=101698"},"modified":"2026-07-19T10:09:59","modified_gmt":"2026-07-19T14:09:59","slug":"qotd-the-real-but-unacknowledged-global-american-empire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/07\/20\/qotd-the-real-but-unacknowledged-global-american-empire\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The real, but unacknowledged, Global American Empire"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>[…] Of course some of that is just wishcasting by folks like me, who long for the end of the GAE \u2014 that’s “Global American Empire” (someone asked this the other day), and is of course pronounced “Gay”.<\/p>\n

Not for sentimental reasons, I hasten to add. What am I, a Liberal, and \/ or a girl? I’m an Historian; I have no problem with Empires.<\/p>\n

What I do<\/em> have a problem with \u2014 an enormous problem, yuuuuuge, the biggest \u2014 is empires that don’t acknowledge themselves as such. A LOT of the 20th century would’ve gone very, very differently had the USA either acknowledged herself to be an Empire starting in 1898, or stuck to her anti-Imperial rhetoric and bowed out of the international power game. But \u2014 as we always do \u2014 we tried to have it both ways, acting like the most bellicose Empire on the planet while deliberately undermining the Imperial policies of everyone else. Woodrow Wilson, for example, tried to run the entire Western Hemisphere as an American satrapy while promising any micro-group with their own goulash recipe in the Balkans a State of their very own.<\/p>\n

Consider what all our Middle Eastern adventures, 1948-present, would look like if the American Empire declared itself to be such. We might still be bombing Iran, but the “exit strategy” is simple: They’ve made sufficient obeisance to the Imperial standard; we’ll be sailing away now. “Air policing” is still retarded \u2014 it’s the kind of idea only your best Old School Tie toff could come up with, over tea and crumpets at Eton \u2014 but it works ok as a publicity stunt. Things get fuzzy out there on The Fringes of Empire, and while you occasionally have to slap the wogs around, just to remind them that you can, it doesn’t have to be anything more than that.<\/p>\n

But alas.<\/p>\n

Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions<\/em><\/a>, 2026-04-03.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[…] Of course some of that is just wishcasting by folks like me, who long for the end of the GAE \u2014 that’s “Global American Empire” (someone asked this the other day), and is of course pronounced “Gay”. Not for sentimental reasons, I hasten to add. What am I, a Liberal, and \/ or a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,41,13],"tags":[1011,262,1462],"class_list":["post-101698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-colonialism","tag-culture","tag-severian"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-qsi","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101698"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101698\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103724,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101698\/revisions\/103724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}