Why isn’t the quasi-empire going to go away? Because it is going to be defended by all those people who insist that dismantling it is irresponsible and we need someone to manage it responsibly, which is what Ross is implying here. He doesn’t need to say that he thinks the quasi-empire is basically a good thing. Even if I didn’t know his views from other sources, his stated preference in this post for the realist-internationalist perspective already tells me that he thinks this. It’s as if I wrote a post arguing that non-interventionists should direct the future of the foreign policy debate on the right, but never said explicitly that I think the empire needs to be scrapped. You would conclude from what I did say that this is what I think, and you would be right.