'To the people of poor nations; we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds and to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty; we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed and we must change with it". President Barack Obama inaugural speech January 20, 2009

Most Americans and millions of other people around the globe listened with baited breath to the words of America's new President as he outlined both his worldview and the policies he is likely to pursue in his recent inaugural address.

I took particular interest in the statement I cited at the ouset of this Commentary - especially with respect to America's consumption of the world's resources. For I am painfully aware that the United States, home to just 17 percent of the world's population or thereabouts, consumes fully 40 percent of the world's resources.

As I thought about that particular part of President Obama's inaugural address, I was prompted to ask the question: Will President Obama attempt to begin dismantling the American Empire?

I can well imagine many readers throwing their hands up and asking themselves: "What the hell is he talking about now? What American Empire? Since when was America an imperial power?"

And, to some extent, they have a point. It is quite true that the United States does not control an empire, at least in the way we understood the British Empire or, looking back in history, the Roman Empire.

But it is also true that since the emergence of the so-called Great Powers in the 19th century, the industrialised, wealthy super states that tend to view smaller countries as pawns to be manipulated (and sometimes simply discarded) on the global chessboard, we have never seen any such power use its influence in an entirely benevolent way, putting the interests of those less powerful above their own.

This even applies to the United States of America. As the US emerged as a nation in its own right based on sound constitutional principles, the newly fledged country made a point of not embarking on a quest of empire-building in the European tradition. But you must remember that the very creation of the early European colonies on the North American continent was an act of colonialism itself, a quite literal exercise in empire-building.

And those early settlers began the process of displacing the Native American inhabitants and wresting from them the control of a vast land which their ancestors lived upon for perhaps a millennium or more. This process went on for more than 200 years, from the 17th century to the end of the 19th century, as America fulfilled what became known as its "Manifest Destiny" to stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans, expanding to fill all of the land available to it.

While it could be argued that the European and, later American, consolidation of the lands that would come to form the lower 48 States of the USA could not be described as empire-building, at least in the strictest meaning of the term, that argument does not apply to later American take-overs of other territories. Think about the commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, the northern Marianas, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Wake Island, Mid-way Islands, Johnston Atoll, Baker Island, Howard Island, Jarvis Island, Kingman Reef, Navassa Island, Palmyra Island. These territories surely constitute possessions in an overseas American Empire.

American bought the territories of Louisiana and Alaska from the French and Russia respectively, but seized the territories of the south west of the United States from Mexico by military force.

That would include its largest state, California, and the US also ended the Spanish control of Florida. America, in fact, acted like it was empire-building in the early stages of its history, but something deterred it from becoming a full fledged empire-builder in its own right and that was the question of race.

American intervened militarily in former Spanish colonies like Cuba, the Philippines and even Mexico itself. Haiti. being the sole country in the Western hemisphere that had won its freedom and Independence from France, was nevertheless the subject of periodic American military interventions and long periods of American occupation.

After the Spanish/American War at the beginning of the 20th century when the US chased Spain out of the Phillipines, Puerto Rico and Cuba, it became a de facto imperial power (progressive voices were raised against this policy - including Mark Twain's: the writer, who lived in Bermuda for the final years of his life was a bitter opponent of American imperialism. See sidebar below). There was a long debate as to whether to make Cuba an American state. But in the end the idea was rejected for the same reason it as never considered practical for the US to absorb Mexico: namely, the presence in both countries of large, none-white populations which America's white majority considered would threaten their control of the nation.

The one exception to this was Hawaii, ironically President Obama's home state before he moved to the US mainland.

Hawaii did have a significant non-white population of native Hawaiians and descendents of Japanese labourers who began settling there in the 19th century to work in its agricultural industries. But Hawaii (once a British territory that the US transformed into a colony in all but name because of its significant agricultural and military interests in the Pacific island chain) became a centre for large-scale white American migration from the mainland beginning in the late 19th century.

America entered the period of World War One a debtor nation but emerged with the European countries it was allied to, those countries that fought the war without direct US military help from 1914 to 1917, owing them once the Armistice was declared in 1918.

And at the end of World War Two (1939-45), America became a global superpower, by far the greatest of the so-called Great Powers, and the richest nation on the planet.

America did not enter the post-World War Two period as an empire in the same way powerful nations and civilisations before it did. But it acted like the empires of old, with its power resting on its unparalleled wealth and military power and cultural influence.

Now its preeminence in the global pecking order is under threat with America's wealth feeding off its military power, both dependent on the other to maintain America's position in the world.

This is not to say that this is all that maintains America: its culture holds great influence in the world. It is still the land of great manufacturing and scientific innovations and discoveries and it maintains political stability and its people remain industrious and productive (although this current economic crisis may well undermine its fiscal clout).

I think this is what President Obama was referring to when he made mention in his speech of the fact: "We will not apologise for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defence" - America's essential decency, work ethic and democratic principles. Still, I don't think he'll ever be able to reconcile the fact the US consumes 40 percent of the world's resources with his vision of a new world order predicated on fairness. One wonders how President Obama is going to convince the American people in the face of the world's history and their own history, that they must share more with the rest of the world?

If he is successful, though, then America would have proved past precedent wrong. For humankind would then say here is an all-powerful civilisation but which has chosen to put the interests of the less powerful above its own.