The collapse of the dollar has gotten me thinking: is the US about to slip into a secondary power role? It seems like we have done everything possible to destroy our standing in the world-from launching a stupid, unnecessary war in Iraq (from which there is no escape), to insisting of keeping a globe-encircling military. To add to that, we have dismantled our industrial base, and shipped millions of jobs to Asia. Now, we are running huge deficits-and the world finance community is no longer willing to finance them. Personally, I hopw we do relinquish our superpower status-it has encouraged our adventurists to all kinds of foolhardy behavior. My question: will the EU take over in policing the world? Or will the Chinese?
I hope so.
The American People are culturally unsuitable for the role of global superpower, & very few of us wanted the job.
I hope to see isolationism as the dominant political policy in my generation.
Has any other country besides ours ever even attempted or shown interest in being the world’s policeman? I don’t really see the Chinese being interested in the role and can’t imagine why an economic union like the EU would be, either. A UN with teeth would be nice, though.
Britain did,
once.
Stop laughing.
China? Ugh. No chance there. Chinese world view is not suited for peacekeeping and intervention without long term consequences.
EU? Not a chance. There was a bit recently where one of their own people complained about how they have a million troops in hand, but somehow cannot deploy more than a few thousand at any given time.
Anyone else? Nope.
So it’s gotta be the USA. We get bashed when we intervene, we get bashed when we fail to intervene. We put up with the shit in ways that no other government on the planet would tolerate, and that’s generally a good thing. You insult, taunt and threaten any other power, and they’ll gladly smack you down, kill your people and occupy you for generations to be sure you got the lesson. Not us. We just roll our eyes and move on. (Sometimes there is a positive value in Hubris.)
The problem in Iraq is that we went in for bad reasons, with little more than zero planning, with no thought of the long term consequences or how to make things right.
Things are also very different in the Modern World in that you can’t simply occupy the alleged capital of a nation with one division, keep them holed up in a small zone of control and declare that you rule the entire region, like the Brits and other colonial powers used to do. You also cannot just roll out the cannons and blast entire tribes into ancestor dust without repercussions, like in the good old days of the British Empire, when the Ideas of Control and Empire were much more important than the abstract lives of a few darkies.
No, America will remain the single superpower in the world for at least another 10-20 years, until China catches up and decides to be more active, as they are currently doing. But they’ll have to learn a few lessons along the way, such as Dafur.
In regards to Peacekeeping and Intervention, I believe that the USA has this sewn up for at least another 20 years, unless the EU makes some serious changes and gets less upitty about the idea. Right now they have their own Hubris, which seems to think that the USA is too trigger happy and that their own course of non-intervention and profiteering is more enlightened. That’s bullshit of course, but then again, they are seriously weighed down with the legacy of hundreds of years of colonialism and conquest that hinder their ability to do positive things in third world countries.