Pakistan expels the NGOs. So, soft power looks like it is not doing too well in Syria, Libya, Sudan, the Philippines, Hungary, and Pakistan.

The NGOs are the foot soldiers of the US State Department, and, as the the internal cohesion of the state continues to collapse, act like a plague of locusts. The empire dissolves into a horde of mobile bandits. Gigantic amounts of money were poured into Haiti, and spread famine and disease.

The official press demonizes Chinese soft power, calling it “sharp power“. When the State Department does this sort of thing, it is called Soft Power, and is supposedly holy and good, but when other nations do this sort of thing, supposedly evil, unholy, and heretical, requiring us to kill people and blow stuff up. Supposedly, grounds for holy war.

Which brings me to hard power and the Red Empire of the Bases (though since Obama placed feminists and transexual commissars all over it, no longer all that red).

How is the affirmative action Navy doing?

The affirmative action Navy seems to be having a spot of difficulty operating all that complicated machinery created by evil white males, especially now that they have stopped those evil white males from engaging in the evil white male microaggression of mansplaining. Lot of crashes lately. Which problem has been solved, or at least substantially reduced, by the simple expedient of staying in port and operating as a floating brothel and a jobs program for people who profile as Democratic voters.

An empire can long survive the decline of its military power, continuing to rule by habit, custom, and institutional inertia. When, however, you get people agitating for holy war against the insufficiently holy at the same time as military power is collapsing, probably will not survive all that long. Let us hope that the collapse does not involve nuclear weapons. Because it is looking as if our nuclear weapons have not had proper maintenance for quite some time.

I repeat: I favor American Empire. I also favor formal, open, official, and explicit Empire, with arrangements to ensure that American colonialists have an incentive to rule well, which incentive was conspicuously lacking in Haiti.

Relations between competing empires should be conducted on the basis of the peace of Westphalia, so that conflicts are dealt with in ways that mostly avoid killing people and breaking stuff. In particular, and especially, when your empire is pursuing its interests, and the other empire also pursuing its interests, not allowed to declare the other ruler unholy and his doings heretical. That was dangerous back then, and more dangerous today when people have nuclear weapons. And extra dangerous when your empire is in decline.