Heartland spans a continent and comprises

[samiaseo75]

Apart from China, Indonesia is in reality a Javanese Empire, one still in its militant expansionist phase, albeit quietly engaged in colonising conquered provinces for now. One day Malaysians and even Australians may look for trouble from that quarter, as may we all when China puts forth her full reborn might. But America is the greatest and one of the oddest. Empire it certainly is. Its almost every nation and ethnos on Earth - no doubt even the odd Australian aborigine has a US passport somewhere! And its military bases girdle the globe, a globe its economic system largely owns and which sits mesmerised by its consumerist culture (if that is the word for the most vapid drivel ever to characterise any human cultural entity - any tribe of neolithic New Guinea cannibals is at a higher level of art and creativity than Hollywood and Motown).


It also shares the Imperial vision of itself as the heart and fount of all civilization, yet it lacks anything which could really be said to comprise its corenation. It is a Roman Empire without Romans. There is no such thing as an American nation. There could be, or have been, nations in America - the Confederate South is one, the Mid-West another - but phone number list they are potential rather than actual. The centres of power in America, political, cultural, economic, Capitol Hill, Hollywood, Wall Street, are deracinated and cosmopolitan. It was said of America that she went from barbarism to decadence without the intervening civilization, and in the sense that this happened to Empires such as Rome this is true. New York today is like Rome in the Second Century AD, and culturally and intellectually America is as barren as the Rome of Commodus, and, probably, as doomed.

For previous Empires have been built militarily, around the steelcore of the Imperial nation. A steel core which inevitably, it seems, rusts away if it is engulfed by a large enough foreign subject mass, but which while it lasts holds the structure together. America's global hegemony was largely built up economically, without fighting, fortunately for Americans, since the evidence, from the Bulge to Vietnam to Somalia, is that by and large they cannot, or will not, fight.