America as Ubiquitous

This post takes the place of one during the week we did not have class. I was intrigued in the previous class by the idea someone raised that American manifest destiny only exists when a political actor exists to oppose America. Manifest destiny can be defined as a habit of reading the world, thinking of world politics as integral to America’s mission to promote democracy. In a world fully ‘democratized’ in the American sense, in the absence of a real enemy to the American worldview, what role is there for manifest destiny? The end goal of manifest destiny will have been achieved.

As discussed in class, America is and perhaps never will fall because it is everywhere - it is ubiquitous – in the Starbucks around the world and the capitalist system prevalent in most countries around the world. We are almost there – in the absence of a formidable ideological enemy, save terrorism, the world is America’s oyster.

Yet will America always remain influential? How did Rome lose its influence? Perhaps it was due to the lack of control over its domain. Maybe in the span of time and great distances America’s ability to control the global ideological discourse will wane. That is perhaps the future which Grass lays out for humanity. Maybe Grass, which I am in the middle of reading, is the future of a universe where America is and remains dominant for a long time, yet what happens is America can no longer supervise everyone and the philosophical integrity breaks down.

Or maybe Terra is present day America with all the glaring inequities still prevalent in our country, and the other worlds are the rest of Earth, each slightly resenting the US but bending over backwards for them because of their superior military power.