The Problem of Imperialism

The Question Asked: Clearly, a superpower that maintains bases and troops on foreign soil, wages war in faraway countries, provides others with arms worth $3 billion a year, and influences their foreign as well as domestic policies;

• a country, moreover, whose currency serves as monetary reserve for half of the world’s currencies, whose capital export and foreign trade are the main sources of new investment in underdeveloped areas, and whose corporations influence economic policies even on the most advanced continent;

• a country whose consumption of raw materials amounts to more than half of total exports from a number of other countries, and whose exports of manufactured articles and cultural goods determine and revolutionize the style of life in the rest of the world;

• finally, a country that defines its own foreign policy in terms of a historic world struggle with one or two other expansionist powers and on whose ambitions smaller countries rely for their own protection—clearly, such a power must be called imperialist by any definition of that term. Yet, to say this is not to say much. Any structure as big as the United States, the Soviet Union, the People’s Republ...