The game of American intervention has been played in nearly one hundred countries across the southern span of the planet. In the Bush years, this swath of the globe was known as the “Arc of Instability.” Yet with the Bush administration long gone, the Obama White House has only only escalated the practice of neoconservative policy. Nick Turse takes a look at the how U.S. operations have led to further destabilization in the region.

Scott McConnell recalls an eclectic mix of conservatives and liberals rallying with hard-left activists, Code Pink, in pursuit of a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He says that the issue is increasingly becoming a tenant of the progressive movement while, “on the other hand, the number of conservatives ready to question aloud whether an alliance with a repressive right-wing ethnostate should be the linchpin of U.S. foreign policy remains abysmally small.”

Empire is a word not taken with enthusiasm among the American right. In a symposium at The University Bookman, TAC editor Daniel McCarthy claims America is an empire of sorts, no matter how uncomfortable of a truth this may be. Moreover, he says, Europe’s great conservatives, from Burke to Metternich to Salisbury, were indeed advocates of imperial policy… but of what kind? How has America’s empire been different? “The last decade has shown us what happens to our kind of empire. Full of rational and cheerful contempt for the ways of the people we subjugate, we are astonished when our armies are met not with garlands but with suicide bombers and improved explosive devices.”