From that commie lefty pinko rag, the Financial Times:
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http://www.mydd.com/story/2005/1/25/191022/863
"In a second inaugural address tinged with evangelical zeal, George W.
Bush declared: "Today, America speaks anew to the peoples of the
world." The peoples of the world, however, do not seem to be
listening. A new world order is indeed emerging - but its architecture
is being drafted in Asia and Europe, at meetings to which Americans
have not been invited.
Consider Asean Plus Three (APT), which unites the member countries of
the Association of Southeast Asia Nations with China, Japan and South
Korea. This group has the potential to be the world's largest trade
bloc, dwarfing the European Union and North American Free Trade
Association. The deepening ties of the APT member states represent a
major diplomatic defeat for the US, which hoped to use the
Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum to limit the growth of Asian
economic regionalism at American expense. In the same way, recent
moves by South American countries to bolster an economic community
represent a clear rejection of US aims to dominate a
western-hemisphere free trade zone.
Consider, as well, the EU's rapid progress toward military
independence. American protests failed to prevent the EU establishing
its own military planning agency, independent of the Nato alliance
(and thus of Washington). Europe is building up its own rapid reaction
force. And despite US resistance, the EU is developing Galileo, its
own satellite network, which will break the monopoly of the US global
positioning satellite system.
The participation of China in Europe's Galileo project has alarmed the
US military. But China shares an interest with other aspiring space
powers in preventing American control of space for military and
commercial uses. Even while collaborating with Europe on Galileo,
China is partnering Brazil to launch satellites. And in an
unprecedented move, China recently agreed to host Russian forces for
joint Russo-Chinese military exercises.
The US is being sidelined even in the area that Mr Bush identified in
last week's address as America's mission: the promotion of democracy
and human rights. The EU has devoted far more resources to
consolidating democracy in post-communist Europe than has the US. By
contrast, under Mr Bush, the US hypocritically uses the promotion of
democracy as the rationale for campaigns against states it opposes for
strategic reasons. Washington denounces tyranny in Iran but tolerates
it in Pakistan. In Iraq, the goal of democratisation was invoked only
after the invasion, which was justified earlier by claims that Saddam
Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was collaborating with
al-Qaeda.
Nor is American democracy a shining example to mankind. The present
one-party rule in the US has been produced in part by the artificial
redrawing of political districts to favour Republicans, reinforcing
the domination of money in American politics. America's judges -- many
of whom will be appointed by Mr Bush -- increasingly behave as
partisan political activists in black robes. America's antiquated
winner-take-all electoral system has been abandoned by most other
democracies for more inclusive versions of proportional
representation.
In other areas of global moral and institutional reform, the US today
is a follower rather than a leader. Human rights? Europe has banned
the death penalty and torture, while the US is a leading practitioner
of execution. Under Mr Bush, the US has constructed an international
military gulag in which the torture of suspects has frequently
occurred. The international rule of law? For generations, promoting
international law in collaboration with other nations was a US goal.
But the neoconservatives who dominate Washington today mock the very
idea of international law. The next US attorney general will be the
White House counsel who scorned the Geneva Conventions as obsolete.
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."
In recent memory, nothing could be done without the US. Today,
however, practically all new international institution-building of any
long-term importance in global diplomacy and trade occurs without
American participation.
In 1998 Madeleine Albright, then US secretary of state, said of the
U.S.: "We are the indispensable nation." By backfiring, the
unilateralism of Mr Bush has proven her wrong. The US, it turns out,
is a dispensable nation.
Europe, China, Russia, Latin America and other regions and nations are
quietly taking measures whose effect if not sole purpose will be to
cut America down to size.
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.
But that was a different America, led by wise and constructive
statesmen like Dean Acheson, the secretary of state who wrote of being
"present at the creation." The bullying approach of the Bush
administration has ensured that the US will not be invited to take
part in designing the international architecture of Europe and Asia in
the 21st century. This time, the US is absent at the creation."
-Michael Lind, Former NeoCon
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Yang
a.a. #28
AthD (h.c.) conferred by the regents of the LCL
a.a. pastor #-273.15, the most frigid church of Celcius nee Kelvin
EAC Econometric Forecast and Sorcery Division
Proudly plonked by Lani Girl and Crazyalec (aka aka Yang's little poltregeist *****)
The Bush 'balanced' budget: 1.6 trillion and worsening
The Bush 'economic' policy: 12 million FEWER jobs than Clinton and counting
The Bush Iraq lie: -1417 GIs, one friend's co-worker's son and mounting
Having Bush ***** up my country: Worthless
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