Longtime readers of my column know that I don’t buy much of the America-as-Empire rhetoric out there. In terms of motives and actions we just don’t behave like any other empire in human history. However, lately I’ve been contemplating abandoning my opposition to the word, if for no other reason than many conservatives have accepted that we are in fact an empire. And if both sides of the larger argument about American foreign policy agree to the use of a word, it becomes exceedingly difficult to join the argument at all. But it was John Derbyshire’s outstanding essay in the current issue of NR that put me over the top. He eloquently compares the US “Empire” to the British Empire and finds the meaningful similarities few and far between. But he is still willing to call America an empire.