The Twilight of American Power

For whatever reason, there have been a lot of good articles lately about the loss of American influence in the world.

First, there's this terrific pair of articles from Newsweek:

1) Bush’s World View: High Hopes, Hard Facts
The world’s a stage: His ideals are soaring, but now Bush must live and lead by his own code By Fareed Zakaria

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6857531/site/newsweek/

2) Dream On America: The U.S. Model: For years, much of the world did aspire to the American way of life. But today countries are finding more appealing systems in their own backyards by Andrew Moravcsik

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6857387/site/newsweek/

The second one isn't even available in the US edition - only in the international edition. Read it. It's simply fantastic.

3) Then there's this piece from that reliable left-wing rag The Financial Times of London, written by former Neocon Michael Lind and available on DailyKos:

http://www.dailykos.com/hotlist/remove/2005/1/26/144024/687/displaystory

Excerpt: A decade ago, American triumphalists mocked those who argued that the world was becoming multipolar, rather than unipolar. Where was the evidence of balancing against the US, they asked. Today the evidence of foreign co-operation to reduce American primacy is everywhere -- from the increasing importance of regional trade blocs that exclude the US to international space projects and military exercises in which the US is conspicuous by its absence.

It is true that the US remains the only country capable of projecting military power throughout the world. But unipolarity in the military sphere, narrowly defined, is not preventing the rapid development of multipolarity in the geopolitical and economic arenas -- far from it. And the other great powers are content to let the US waste blood and treasure on its doomed attempt to recreate the post-first world war British imperium in the Middle East.

That the rest of the world is building institutions and alliances that shut out the US should come as no surprise. The view that American leaders can be trusted to use a monopoly of military and economic power for the good of humanity has never been widely shared outside of the US. The trend toward multipolarity has probably been accelerated by the truculent unilateralism of the Bush administration, whose motto seems to be that of the Hollywood mogul: "Include me out."

... Ironically, the US, having won the cold war, is adopting the strategy that led the Soviet Union to lose it: hoping that raw military power will be sufficient to intimidate other great powers alienated by its belligerence. To compound the irony, these other great powers are drafting the blueprints for new international institutions and alliances. That is what the US did during and after the second world war.

4) An article from Slate Magazine about the new CIA Report on the World in 2020 which predicts that by 2020 we will be in a multipolar world:

http://www.slate.com/id/2112697/

Who will be the first politician brave enough to declare publicly that the United States is a declining power and that America's leaders must urgently discuss what to do about it? This prognosis of decline comes not (or not only) from leftist scribes rooting for imperialism's downfall, but from the National Intelligence Council—the "center of strategic thinking" inside the U.S. intelligence community.

The NIC's conclusions are starkly presented in a new 119-page document, "Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National Intelligence Council's 2020 Project." It is unclassified and available on the CIA's Web site. The report has received modest press attention the past couple weeks, mainly for its prediction that, in the year 2020, "political Islam" will still be "a potent force." Only a few stories or columns have taken note of its central conclusion:

The likely emergence of China and India ... as new major global players—similar to the advent of a united Germany in the 19th century and a powerful United States in the early 20th century—will transform the geopolitical landscape with impacts potentially as dramatic as those in the previous two centuries.

In this new world, a mere 15 years away, the United States will remain "an important shaper of the international order"—probably the single most powerful country—but its "relative power position" will have "eroded." The new "arriviste powers"—not only China and India, but also Brazil, Indonesia, and perhaps others—will accelerate this erosion by pursuing "strategies designed to exclude or isolate the United States" in order to "force or cajole" us into playing by their rules.

America's current foreign policy is encouraging this trend, the NIC concluded. "U.S. preoccupation with the war on terrorism is largely irrelevant to the security concerns of most Asians," the report states. The authors don't dismiss the importance of the terror war—far from it. But they do write that a "key question" for the future of America's power and influence is whether U.S. policy-makers "can offer Asian states an appealing vision of regional security and order that will rival and perhaps exceed that offered by China." If not, "U.S. disengagement from what matters to U.S. Asian allies would increase the likelihood that they will climb on Beijing's bandwagon and allow China to create its own regional security that excludes the United States."

Finally, a speech today by Republican Ron Paul of Texas (actually, Libertarian - runs as a Republican b/c only way to get on the ballot) - http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2005/cr012605.htm

***

Not all of this is Bush's making. Many of these trends are historical and can't be done away with. No matter what a US president does, much of Asia for instance, will rise. But the animosity towards the US, our policies of America First that have come with Bush have accelerated these trends and turned what could have been a positive for us into a negative. There's nothing inherently wrong about other countries getting power. It's that they are doing so with the intention now of marginalizing the US. A President Gore or President Kerry wouldn't have been able to completely undo this but they understood this far better than the neocons.

Kerry was constantly mocked for his multilateralism and his internationalism. Pundits claimed he was being vague and unrealistic while Bush was supposedly being "realistic about the goals we face" and had "strong, firm beliefs." Even among many voters I talked to, there was a disconnect between what Kerry said about multilateralism and what they were willing to accept. Most of them supported multilateralism generally, but when Kerry talked of the need to cooperate with other countries and work with the international community even when we didn't necessarily have to (for instance, the Afghan war, which Kerry said should have involved NATO) their response was something along the lines of "we can't just do what's popular with the world," or "that's schoolyard behavior," and "we need to stand up for what's right for America." What that told me was that there was a fundamental misunderstanding of most Americans of the necessity of global support. The United States can't lead if no one is willing to follow. We can't be the most powerful nation if we're only feared, not respected.

and we haven't replenished it.

The aberrational prosperity we experienced from the end of WW2 to the 1970's now appears to be just that - aberrational. Began to unravel as we came out of (extricated ourselves from) VietNam, and as the FDR "Social Contract" began to unravel.

Reagan didn't replenish the "seed corn" or rebuild the "Social Contract" (remember when he broke the Air Traffic Controllers Union).

And - after the Dot.com boom - we had the energy bust and the dot.com bust and now the piratization of Social Security and the crashing of numerous private pension plans ---- the end of the aberrational prosperity and of the "Social Contract"

And Bush just fiddles while America melts.

This is the prize we get for all the years and decades of corporate-Republican think-tank studies on demographics, ad campaigns, psychological influence/media control and propaganda. They (neo-cons) are at once 1) effective at ridiculing and killing off opposition and 2) living in a delusional fantasy world. This is the only way it could have ended, a total disaster. Their single-minded obsession with destroying domestic programs and individual people, and silencing and exploiting the rest of the world, has led now to this horrible nightmare which may well be the end of us as a world influence. Their total control of the media, now, gives them such a monopolistic, single voice, that it is just assumed that their hysterical ravings are the way Americans think. This is the most depressing part: people don't just think that Bush is a fucking asshole--they think WE are....

It is "ironic," putting it mildly, that this anti-government, anti-law crowd of capitalists should come along and try to grab credit for all that made America great, since this is the last group in the world that had anything to do with it. The things that once made us the model for the world were our legal protections for workers, the environment, victims of crime, the poor, and all the rest of the structure that millions of people built up; and our shocking downfall has come so quickly, because this group of asshole capitalists running things now, are the very group of oppressors and obstructionists who have always been the threat. Up to this terrible point, they have had us largely bamboozled as to how to respond to these practiced attacks and phony characterizations of the issues, and their phony claims that they are the majority/the "normal people," and we are not. Any reference to the world stage--and this is why their media censors it here now--shows that people are appalled by them, and wonder whatever happened to us.

Because of the managed/corporate takeover of the Republican Party and the media, we now have to deal incessantly with a minutely inspected and controlled presentation of everything we say, how our facial muscles twitched or didn't when we said it, all this horror--excessively aware of judgment and attack at any moment. This is the ugliness that neo-cons and arch-cons have brought, because this is what they are. As soon as this crowd started shifting the emphasis from democracy and society, during the '80s, to markets around the world, and capital, you knew that our civilization was finished if this group got control. Now they have. This has been building up for a long time, and we face the huge and not at all certain task of getting rid of a real oppressor, now that all things are surely clear.

You can almost not even believe that these things are happening, Bush is such a complete and total fuckup. Beyond that even, a frightening traitor.

Welcome to DU!! :toast: