This response to Pax Americana as empire by Benjamin Barber is interesting. A discusion of the book can be found here.
In his review of the Fear's Empire Terence Banks says:
"The American Empire attempts to assert the sovereignty of the center by pursuing a policy of unilateral military action. The justification for this policy is not humanitarian, or defensive, but preventive. Preventive war is the essence of Pax Americana, an instinctive conservative response to the sense of vulnerability and debilitation in the face of stateless, non-governmental predators like Al Qaeda."
'Exceptionalism remains the justification for America’s freedom to strike pre-emptively at any potentially hostile state, a right denied to any other sovereign power...the image of American exceptionalism continues to be projected outward to the wider world. It is a self-image of virtuous Americans, unbaggaged by the histories of the barbarian lands across the seas...Barber’s argument [is] that out of isolationism grew domination. Isolationism was a product of a sense of national virtue, and similarly more recent American foreign policy has approached the outside world with this same sense of virtue intact: The Cold War was a battle against an “Evil Empire” just as present U.S. policy is directed against the “Axis of Evil,” and Bush reminds us that the most serious threat to the “civilized world” are the “evildoers,” those terrorist cells that lurk in the dark beyond the talons of “Fears Empire.”'
Behind the doctrine of preventive war sits an interpretation of Thomas Hobbes, which suggests that the remedy for an anxious world of anarchy and fear is power. The solution is for a powerful America to stamp order upon a world of chaos and conflict.
However, the idealist conservatives, endeavour to project American power hegemonically, in a sovereign way, assume that we still lived in the nineteenth century rather than the 21st century. Their's is a false conception of empire because a sovereign and powerful United States is just not in a position to prevent American jobs from going offshore; firm from leaving America; nor is it able to govern the flows of capital around the world or their uses; nor is it able to use its sovereign military forces to govern the flow of crime and terrorism around the world.
Banks says that Barber’s argument is clear:
"These moralizing myths [of exceptionalism] may persuade a perplexed electorate to embark upon a “righteous war against evil,” but it does not sustain a serious political argument about long-term global prosperity and security. His alternative is to reject the moral fig leaf that unburdens both Isolationism and Imperialism from responsibility and also to reject the techno-military straightjacket that puts a strain on the national budget. Instead, America should forgo its futile quest for independence and institutionalize its interactions with the world community through cooperative organizations governed by international law."