I disagree that any major party presidential candidate who doesn't tow the imperial line is unelectable.

I find that position untenable, and cowardly in a way that props up status quo thinking.

I'm not saying that a US president will ever come out and apologize for the US' imperial militarism of the last couple of centuries. We shouldn't leave the imperial wars against the North American native peoples and the enslavement of Africans brought to the US in this either.

But one day in the not too distant future, we will have a US president who will be faced with either maintaining the military industrial complex, or maintaining the nation itself.

And in a strange, ironic way, we do have George W Bush to thank by potentially speeding that process up. The increases in military spending, and busting of the US government's budget for maintaining it's own infrastructures, will have an impact for generations to come.

Which makes the likelihood of a US president being elected in my lifetime (ie, within the next 30-40 years) that so drastically reduces US military adventurism and the military budget, that the nation is no longer any more of a military 'superpower' than any European nation, Russia, or China.

Our governments (Europe, China, Russia, US) have created a military industrial complex that financially is unsustainable. Just like with the energy crisis staring us in the face, we are soon to face the same crisis in military sustainability. Don't forget what fuel the military runs on, and what fuels are used to build all that hardware and move it around the globe.