Modeling scenarios are based in the imperial objective to project Americanness onto the world, thus preserve the power of the elite classes within America

‘Neo’ means new and different. And ‘imperialism’ has long meant the geopolitical expansion of national power. By ‘neo-imperialism’, however, I mean something different from, say, the British, French and other European imperialisms of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the nineteenth century, the aim of imperialism was territorial conquest, including permanent, physical occupation of foreign spaces, with strict control over their peoples exercised by colonial state authorities directed from London, Paris and the other capitals in Europe. American neo-imperialism of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries certainly uses overwhelming physical might to conquer territories, and militaristic terror to control reluctant peoples, as with the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and the occupation of Iraq in 2003. But the long-term aim of US neo-imperialism does not envision long-run, direct control by the State Department in quite the same way as the British did through their Colonial Office. Rather the aim is control of spaces, resources and peoples indirectly via multinational corporations, global governance institutions, policy imposition and foreign investment. American neo-imperialism has the confidence to control, in the long term, after the shock and awe of the bombing, by setting the ideals that people strive for, rather than controlling bodies through violent intimidation. Control the way people think, control their economic, political and cultural objectives, and there is no need for direct control over people physically. The aim of US neo-imperialism is to control global space by conquering the political and economic imaginaries of the world’s peoples … by having them ‘share the American dream’. Neo-imperialism takes the form of the expansion of American ideals like freedom, democracy, equality of opportunity, consumption. Neo-imperialism American-style makes the excuses for British imperialism (‘bringing civilization to the world’) look utterly out of date and hopelessly deficient. American neo-imperialism means spreading consumption, lifestyle, media, voting and all the good things that people everywhere have already shown that they urgently, deeply want! Neo-imperialism is cast as the latest act in a continuing drama of human liberation. Neo-imperialism as sociocultural and political control is justified as right, and defended as good, by rationalizations so sophisticated that their perpetrators do not know that they speak in ideological tongues. As I have explained, ideology basically entails spreading persuasive ideas in the interests of dominant institutions of power. That power is usually accumulated geographically, in a hegemonic country, such as Britain previously, or the USA today, and concentrated socially, in a class of people, an ethnic group or a gender – such as white, rich, Anglo-American males. Putting the case bluntly, my argument is that US neo-imperialism is supported by ideologies of democracy, freedom and consumptive happiness in the interests of what I have called ‘global finance capital’. Obviously the case is more complicated than this – for example, pension funds are now heavily involved in global investment, black Americans willingly participate, women occasionally head up state agencies like the US State Department. Even so, I think I have shown, convincingly except for those who have too much to lose from realizing the truth, that the spread of Americanism, geopolitically, geo-economically, geoculturally, is not some innocent or inevitable diffusion of the technically superior or the inherently good. Instead, the spread of sophisticated ideologies during neo-imperialistic expansion is in the interests of concentrated, committed and coercive power – and by ‘concentrated’ we mean a few hundred thousand people at most, living in a tiny fraction of world space, and within this group a few thousand super-rich ‘investors’.