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"The Usher" <The_Money_Collector@Angel.coop
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Thus Spake: *G* *O* *D* *S* *C* *R* *E* *A* *T* *O* *R*


How the U.S. Became the World's Dispensable Nation


by Michael Lind

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.

The writer is senior fellow at the New America Foundation in
Washington, DC




God's Creator!
(Sorry... I don't forgive *****!)


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