The Dictionary of Human Geography

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2004) or uncritically expound (e.g. Steel,

1967) the argument that US global domin-

ance makes the world safe for long-distance

trade, communication and democracy.

Most recently, it has been put forward by the

National Intelligence Council (NIC; the US

government’s ‘strategic intelligence’ planning

body) as one of four extraordinary scenarios

for what the world map ofgeopoliticswill

look like in the year 2020 (National

Intelligence Council, 2005). ‘Mapping the

global future’ with a keen attention to what

the strategic planners view as the long term

‘mega-trend’ ofglobalization, the NIC envi-

sionsPax Americanaas a benign extension of

contemporary US military dominance along-

side a faltering but still extant American ability

to dominate the institutions of globalgovern-

ance. The NIC contrasts this vision of 2020

with three others:Davos World,which is also

imagined as a relatively utopian scenario,

albeit with US economic authority increas-

ingly overshadowed by rising Asian influence;

The New Caliphate,a very different and dis-

tinctively dystopian vision of a world rendered

unstable by what is depicted (using the

imaginative geographiesoforientalism)as

tradition-bound Muslim resistance to global-

ization and American influence; and, finally,

the unremittingly bleak dystopia of a so-called

Cycle of Fear, in which weapons of mass

destruction circulate through globalized terror

networks (seeterrorism), in turn envisioned

as spurring an authoritarian governmental

backlash of which – most fearfully of all for

the NIC’s futurists – ‘globalization may be the

real victim’ (NIC, 2005, p. 104).

WhilePax Americanais imagined as a fairly

unexceptional continuation of the current

global order (relative to the three other 2020

scenarios), it is useful to consider what the

alternative scenarios tell us about what has to

be repressed by the NIC to continue with its

exceptionalist imagining of America as a

uniquely freedom-loving and anti-imperial

nation-state. Cycle of Fear, for example,

imagines authoritarianism and the future vic-

timization of globalization, but all the while it

obscures the already existing victims of the

CIA’s own programmes of torture in Black

Sites and other spaces of exception (seeexcep-

tion, spaces of).The New Caliphatelikewise

dissembles the huge role of the US intelligence

agencies in helping to start, arm and even train

many of the key leaders of the more violent

and territorially ambitious jihadist movements

in Central Asia and the Arabian Peninsula.

AndDavos Worldmeanwhile betrays the still

deeper contradictions that at once underlie

and undermine the exceptionalist American

idea that the spread of freedom and the spread

of free enterprise are one and the same thing.

If the rapid development of cadrecapitalism

in China has not made this completely clear

for the NIC, then the fiasco in Iraq that has

continued unabated since the publication of

the 2020 report most certainly must. Here, in

what was announced by many war promoters

as the inaugural battle for a new and more

peaceful American century, the brutality,

death and destruction of a terribly unpeaceful

Pax Americanahas been writ large on the

landscape.

Even ifPaxmeans peace, the more import-

ant aspect of the reference toPax Romanahas

always been to the violence of the ancient

empire and the punitive approach that the

Roman army took to subduing and incorpor-

ating the periphery into a unipolar world dom-

inated by Rome. In 1963, President Kennedy

acknowledged as much when he said that the

world peace that the US sought was ‘not aPax

Americanaenforced on the world by American

weapons of war’ (quoted in Foster and

McChesney, 2004). However, by the new mil-

lennium this return to the Roman model was

exactly what the administration of President

Bush was openly advocating as the rationale

of the Iraq war. Given the hubris of some of

the advocates of this neo-conservative foreign

policy, it is not surprising that their identities

often remain anonymous, but the following is

reporter Ron Suskind’s (2004) account of one

Bushaide’scomments:

The aide said that guys like me were ‘in

what we call the reality-based community’,

which he defined as people who ‘believe that

solutions emerge from your judicious study

of discernible reality’. I nodded and mur-

mured something about enlightenment

principles and empiricism. He cut me off.

‘That’s not the way the world really works

anymore’, he continued. ‘We’re an empire

now, and when we act, we create our own

reality. And while you’re studying that real-

ity – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again,

creating other new realities, which you can

study too, and that’s how things will sort

out. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of

you, will be left to just study what we do’

This sort of attitude clearly put the US

intelligence agencies in a difficult situation –

in which they had to help invent realities that

helped justify the policy of attacking Iraq

(Rich, 2006). The subsequent turn to scenario

PAX AMERICANA

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