ABSTRACT
The nature of the US empire has long defied tidy classification, fostering among Americans that ambivalence conveyed by Kennan in this chapter's epigraph. Indeed, nothing remotely like a consensus among Americans, or other peoples, can be said to have existed in the immediate post-World War II years, or subsequently, about the character and aims of the US Empire. How long into the future the United States will retain this top position is, naturally, impossible to know, as are the factors that will bring about that condition which no empire has escaped: reduction. Perhaps accelerating environmental decline will spawn such calamities that the United States will suffer irremediably, along with other portions of the globe: scorching temperatures, droughts, desertification, rising seas, unbreathable air and undrinkable water. Regarding anti-communist fundamentalists, Bunche felt even more constrained than on civil rights questions in publicly showing dismay.
