American Imperialism: Dangerous??

I don't pretend to be an expert on all this -- economics is far from my forte. Nor do I know precisely why I'm reading this (John Bellamy Foster's Naked Imperialism) for my Masters in Teaching (beyond becoming a better critical thinker myself). Thus, take from this what you will. I wrote it. I like it. :)

A relative stranger to economics, my worldview was never constructed around the idea that several world countries functioned as peripheries of the United States. Maps I studied and colored in K-12 certainly did not show this. “Economies of the periphery are structured to meet the external needs of the United States and the other core capitalist countries rather than their own internal needs. This has resulted (with a few notable exceptions) in conditions of unending dependency and debt peonage in the poorer regions of the world” (p. 4). Like children indebted to an uncaring, abusive, and supremely Eurocentric United States, some countries in the world are so kept. Again, this was a large epiphany to me – and a context I had not used to consider the world. Keeping this context at forefront slightly overwhelms me, particularly when remembering the sheer military strength enforcing the United States’ role. After all, countries dare not mount serious opposition when our president declares, “Any society that rejected the guidance of that model [United States capitalism] was destined to fail—and would, it was implied, be declared a security threat to the United States” (p. 2). This to me explains why other nations have not successfully risen-up against American imperialist domination.

Global resistance to American Imperialism thus becomes an interesting context to examine. Was 9/11 merely a chance for those enslaved by U.S. domination to strike back at their oppressors? Are the Iraqis resisting U.S. forces in their country well-justified in doing so? These questions become quite haunting to ask and most certainly this extreme perspective pulls me out of my comfort zone.