United States: Will America Overcome or Become History?

As a major world power of the world today, if not the top power of the world, the United States has influences that stretch much further than the immediate borders of the mainland. The US holds many foreign interests in 3rd world countries around the globe and continues to spread its growing influence to numerous other countries. The US has become so powerful and influential so to have started being called a true empire, comparative to that of the Romans and the British. But is this new age of imperialism for the United States misleading? Are there underlying reasons as to why we may be trying to cultivate our interests in foreign countries? What are the different variables that factor into the US moving into a country and taking it over? Should the United States even be taking on this notion of imperialism, or will it ultimately end up crippling the giant power? Two viewpoints are presented by separate authors, Lance Selfa and Sebastian Mallaby, as to how they see the United States in relation to it's undertaking of imperialism around the world. In The Reluctant Imperialist by Sebastian Mallaby, he presents the view that United States imperialism is imperative. As a top world power, he says that we have a universal responsibility to intervene with a "failed state" and do what we can to restore order to that country. In contrast, Lance Selfa's article, A New Colonial Age of Empire, he presents a view that agrees to this position. According to Selfa, "The basic problem is obvious but is never publicly admitted: some states are not yet fit to govern themselves. There is a moral issue here: The civilized world has a mission to go out to these desperate places and govern." Both Selfa and Mallaby take different approaches as to how the intervention of a country should take place and what should be done to that country in particular. Selfa believes that, no matter what approach we take to overthrow a regime of a "failed state," whether through overt force or covert operations, the end result is always the same, "the forcible (and usually uninvited entry of Western military forces into a weaker country, the deposing of its government, and the setting up of a Western-backed caretaker regime. The difference between these imperial ventures and their 19th century cousins is of degree, not of kind." Selfa sees every United States' imperialistic effort as the same as every other imperialistic effort taken up by man, only on a larger scale.