The Monroe Doctrine of American overlordship in the western hemisphere is a similar story. In 1819, the British proposed a joint declaration to oppose Spanish recolonisation of South America. In the event, John Quincy Adams, as Secretary of State, insisted on its being in America's name alone. But there was no question of its applying to Britain's subsequent seizure of the Falkland Islands - the usa did not then have the power to prevent it. By the early twenti-eth century its power had greatly increased, and the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine was used in justifying numerous American military inter-ventions in Latin America throughout that century. By the early twenty-?rst, what I have called the ‘Dubya Addendum' (Mennell 2007: 211-12), propounded in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States, declared that the usa had the right to intervene against its opponents anywhere in the globe, and came very close to claiming for the American government a monopoly of the legitimate use of force throughout the world. In other words, in terms of Max Weber's de?nition of a state, the present regime has come close to declaring the usa a world state. In some ways, indeed, the usa does now act as a world  government (Mandelbaum 2006). It claims extra-territorial jurisdiction for its own laws in many ?elds, while itself refusing to be bound by the corpus of international law that most other countries accept. Its military expenditure is now as large as that of all the other countries in the world combined. It has in effect garrisoned the planet, dividing the entire globe into us military commands.8 It now has military bases in two-thirds of the countries of the world, including much of the former Soviet Union.