nin.’s Reviews > American Imperatives: The Cold War and Other Matters > Status Update

nin.
nin. is 54% done
“Yet the very same axioms can result in quite the opposite stance: when the Calvinist trope is fused, as it easily was, with a vibrantly secular and republican ideology, conceived around a spatiotemporal opposition between the New and the Old World, there opens up the possibility of a kind of interventionism drastically to redo the outside, to purify and clear it so to speak.” …
Aug 03, 2025 06:13AM
American Imperatives: The Cold War and Other Matters

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nin.
nin. is 56% done
“When historical time has ceased to develop qualitatively on the inside and only pertains, as a series of stages, to the outside, it follows, critically, that outside opposition is irrational, if not downright criminal, while political quarrels on the inside can only take the form of an appeal to the principles and promise of the timeless, universal truth of the Origin.” … 1/5
Aug 03, 2025 06:42AM
American Imperatives: The Cold War and Other Matters


nin.
nin. is 52% done
“Arguments along these lines would seem to land me in the diffuse debate about American exceptionalism. However, I do not want to go through all the preliminaries and caveats necessary to say anything substantial in that context.“

y’all don’t get, it’s not clocking to you, not only he’s standing on business, he is so fucking funny
Aug 03, 2025 06:00AM
American Imperatives: The Cold War and Other Matters


nin.
nin. is 52% done
“Ideologically, the US way of being toward the world has been at once massively traditional and strikingly arbitrary. On the one hand there is the inclination to invoke master narratives about the nation’s place in world history; on the other there is the tendency to abrupt changes and arbitrary action in actual policy.” …
Aug 03, 2025 05:53AM
American Imperatives: The Cold War and Other Matters


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nin. is 51% done
“The US attitude toward the European system of international relations had always been problematic: surface acceptance amid relative geopolitical seclusion, punctuated by erratic and limited participation. One reason for this variance was that the United States, far more than the Soviet Union, was (and is) a world empire.” …
Aug 03, 2025 05:37AM
American Imperatives: The Cold War and Other Matters


nin.
nin. is 49% done
“For what drives diplomatic history in the United States is political controversy. Without it, the field has no direction, no character, no shape or form, no vivacity. This central feature is ultimately grounded in the fact that any analysis of the relationship to the outside world puts into question the very identity of the United States as an entity and a project.” …
Aug 03, 2025 05:17AM
American Imperatives: The Cold War and Other Matters


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nin. is 4% done
“Yet beyond the conjuncture here, my attempts were really informed by the alarming fact, true then as it is true today, regrettable then as it is regrettable today, that everyone on this earth has an enormous stake in how the United States chooses to be and act in the world.”

bar.
Aug 01, 2025 02:07AM
American Imperatives: The Cold War and Other Matters


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nin. …. “In the nineteenth century, this solution to what the United States ought to be about in the world remains largely an obscurity; but it would begin to come to the fore in the imperialist moment at the turn of the century and, later, differently, in the figure of Woodrow Wilson and by extension what we know as Wilsonianism. Originally products of the same conceptual frame, the two opposing postures have since remained central reference points for all domestic controversies about the general US role abroad.”


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