<P> Andrew Bacevich argues that the U.S. did not fundamentally change its foreign policy after the Cold War, and remains focused on an effort to expand its control across the world . As the surviving superpower at the end of the Cold War, the U.S. could focus its assets in new directions, the future being "up for grabs" according to former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz in 1991 . Head of the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University, Stephen Peter Rosen, maintains: </P> <P> A political unit that has overwhelming superiority in military power, and uses that power to influence the internal behavior of other states, is called an empire . Because the United States does not seek to control territory or govern the overseas citizens of the empire, we are an indirect empire, to be sure, but an empire nonetheless . If this is correct, our goal is not combating a rival, but maintaining our imperial position, and maintaining imperial order . </P> <P> In Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, the political activist Noam Chomsky argues that exceptionalism and the denials of imperialism are the result of a systematic strategy of propaganda, to "manufacture opinion" as the process has long been described in other countries . </P> <P> Thorton wrote that "(...) imperialism is more often the name of the emotion that reacts to a series of events than a definition of the events themselves . Where colonization finds analysts and analogies, imperialism must contend with crusaders for and against ." Political theorist Michael Walzer argues that the term hegemony is better than empire to describe the US's role in the world; political scientist Robert Keohane agrees saying, a "balanced and nuanced analysis is not aided...by the use of the phrase' empire' to describe United States hegemony, since' empire' obscures rather than illuminates the differences in form of rule between the United States and other Great Powers, such as Great Britain in the 19th century or the Soviet Union in the twentieth .". </P>

When did the us become an imperial power