This article is a much expanded version of a plenary address delivered to the Fifth Colloquium of Latin American Political Economists in Mexico City on October 27. Parts of this argument were also presented in talks sponsored by Black Sun Books in Eugene, Oregon on November 16 and at the Stop the War Conference at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles on November 19.

Today’s imperial ideology proclaims that the United States is the new city on the hill, the capital of an empire dominating the globe. Yet the U.S. global empire, we are nonetheless told, is not an empire of capital; it has nothing to do with economic imperialism as classically defined by Marxists and others. The question then arises: How is this new imperial age conceived by those promoting it?

The answer, I am convinced, is to be found in the dramatic resurrection of geopolitics as an imperial philosophy. What Michael Klare has called in these pages “The New Geopolitics” has become a pragmatic means of integrating U.S. imperial goals in the post-Cold War world while avoiding all direct allusions to the “economic taproot of imperialism.”1

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