Today Dan Drezner posits and interesting question, Is the United States the worst empire ever?
His basic argument is recycled from an earlier article, basically saying that US intervention abroad is hardly ever successful. Overall I think he is correct, but only from a particular viewpoint. Drezner, like a good realist, only views profit from the prospective of the state, or state actors.
This is the wrong way to conceive the United States empire. It is far more revealing to view it from the standpoint of an empire dedicated to private profit. United States economic policy is decidedly neo-liberal is style. As I stated earlier the goal of neo-liberalism is to take public resources and us them for private profit. If we apply this viewpoint to the United States empire a new picture emerges. It doesn't matter that Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan are military failures, because large amounts of public money were funneled to private contractors. For example the no bid contracts that were given to Halliburton and other contractors in Iraq. Similar stories have emerged from other US conflicts. In addition to direct subsidies to contractors, wars subsidize military production, which, in the United States is private industry. Overall war is an extremely effective method of funneling state funds to private individuals. So it doesn't matter if every occupation from now till the collapse of the United States is a failure, from the view of private business they will all be a payday.
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