You Can't Say We Haven't Been Warned

From Greg Gandin's Haper's review of Niall Fergusson's Colossus:

The point of Colossus is that the United States not only can match Britain's empire but can do empire better.  Hence Ferguson's calls for cuts in social spending to make for a more desperate and therefore more martial American citizenry.   But because this
hardened society has yet to be forged, Ferguson, who for hundreds of pages exhorts American leaders to show bold leadership, must settle for the role of court
flatterer, whispering into the emperor's ear to dissemble, to declare publicly his intentions to vacate Iraq while furtively staying.

From the NYT story Youths in Rural U.S. Are Drawn to Military:

Albert Deal, 25, had struggled for years to hold onto a job in this rural Virginia community of rolling hills and shuttered textile mills. So when the lanky high school graduate got his latest pink slip, from a modular-homes plant, he took a hard look at his life. Then he picked up the phone and dialed the steadiest employer he knew: the U.S. Army.

Two weeks later, on Oct. 27, Deal sat in his parents' living room and signed one enlistment document after another as his fiancee, Kimbery Easter, somberly looked on.

"This is the police check," said Sgt 1st Class Christopher A. Barber, a veteran Army recruiter, leading Deal through the stack of paperwork. "This is the sex-offender check . . ." Barber spoke in a monotone, sounding like a tour guide who had memorized every word.

Left adrift, young people such as Deal "are being pushed out of their communities. They want to get away from intolerable situations, and the military offers them something different," said Morten G. Ender, a sociologist at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

To be sure, some young people who need jobs or college money also seek adventure and a chance to serve their country. Others come from towns with large bases or populations of veterans interwoven with a military culture that helps keep enlistments high.  And a rising percentage of youth from wealthy areas is signing up, presumably for patriotic reasons.

But nationwide, data point above all to places such as Martinsville, where rural roads lined with pine and poplar trees snake through lonely, desolate towns, as the wellspring for the youth fighting America's wars.

"They are these untapped kids," Enders said "that nobody found."

Comments

[DavidByron]

Ferguson's easy acceptance of brutality in pursuit of
an elusive liberal empire bears more than a passing
resemblance to an earlier willingness of Soviet
apparatchiks to justify repression in the name of a
distant utopia.

This remark seems like more flattery. Unlike Latin America -- America's experiment in colonialism - the Eastern European countries that were part of the Soviet experiment improved themselves. America's health care is now about the same as Cuba's or Eastern Europe but it's certainly better than the Central American colonies of the American Empire.

America came to plunder and the Soviets to build.