The Limits of American Military Power in a One-Superpower World
The human race will never devise a weapon which overcomes the likely perception of a person in a land occupied by force, that he is being ruled against his will, in accordance with values he does not share. The same ethnocentrism which leads American policymakers to chronically underestimate the likelihood that they will engender this perception abroad, works in subjected populations to make the perception more likely. It is nothing more than the cultural and political expression of the universal inordinate self-preference which is one of our defining characteristics as human beings. This is the limit to the potential benefits which accrue to the United States by virtue of its ability to project military power in a one-superpower world. I suspect that it is a limit which most field officers in the United States Army understand much more clearly than most American politicians.