| Mark
Danner: | Exactly. How do you
have a democratic empire, how do you have an imperial foreign
policy built on a democracy polity. It's like some sort of strange
mythical beast that's part lion, part dragon. You know at the
bottom is a democracy, and then it's an imperial power around the
world. And the problem is that the things demanded by
an empire, which is staying power, ruthlessness, the ability and
the willingness to use its power around the world, it's something
that democracies tend to be quite skeptical about. And this is a
political factor that looms obviously very large in [Obama's]
calculations. |
