>I mean, winding down empire is necessarily a messy process and
>nobody initiates it out of the kindness of their own heart.
>One area where we typically see eye to eye, even though it's
>always fun to talk about candidates, is that they're tools to
>be used and I think (and you may disagree here) that any
>theory of change that starts from the top is going to fail
>because the credentials that we require to get that job in the
>first place are a thirst for this sort of violence.
>
>BUT, as your question also aptly indicates - it's the one area
>where the President has immense, unchecked power. So I guess
>there's no good reason to discard the possibility. As long as
>we have a USA, we're going to have a president. One that is
>disinclined to pursue all this bloodshed can do a ton of good,
>and do it without many institutional obstacles. Or, at least,
>we have to believe that if we want democracy right? That at
>some point we can say, loudly, "stop blowing people up" and
>they ... will? Or maybe not. The end of the fourth republic in
>France was precipitated by (among other things) a large and
>violent public outcry about France's violence abroad - but the
>outcome was, uh, obviously a lot more ambiguous than "no more
>of that".
>
>I imagine we have too much invested in this imperial project.
>It feels like it would take an immense shift in culture to:
>
>a)pay attention to what we do abroad
>b)care
>c)move to stop it
>
>and even then, we're so good at rationalizing that the next
>colonial disaster would inevitably be treated as a different
>case, requiring a different standard, etc.
>
>So, I guess my answer is "no"