Author Topic: The end of "America's" Superpower  (Read 2086 times)

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Offline Crazy Horse

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The end of "America's" Superpower
« on: January 27, 2008, 03:10:48 PM »
I always love the American loving NYT and their faithful minions the primitives.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2773812

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BurtWorm  (1000+ posts)       Sun Jan-27-08 01:16 PM
Original message
The End of America's "Superpower" 
 Edited on Sun Jan-27-08 01:37 PM by BurtWorm
This is what happens to "the greatest country on the planet" when dumbasses on the right are permitted to hold power illegitimately for eight years. (But note that this trend toward American impotence has roots in the end of the cold war.)

From today's NY Times Magazine's cover story by Parag Khanna:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/magazine/27world-t.ht...

The more we appreciate the differences among the American, European and Chinese worldviews, the more we will see the planetary stakes of the new global game. Previous eras of balance of power have been among European powers sharing a common culture. The cold war, too, was not truly an “East-West” struggle; it remained essentially a contest over Europe. What we have today, for the first time in history, is a global, multicivilizational, multipolar battle.

In Europe’s capital, Brussels, technocrats, strategists and legislators increasingly see their role as being the global balancer between America and China. Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, a German member of the European Parliament, calls it “European patriotism.” The Europeans play both sides, and if they do it well, they profit handsomely. It’s a trend that will outlast both President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, the self-described “friend of America,” and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, regardless of her visiting the Crawford ranch. It may comfort American conservatives to point out that Europe still lacks a common army; the only problem is that it doesn’t really need one. Europeans use intelligence and the police to apprehend radical Islamists, social policy to try to integrate restive Muslim populations and economic strength to incorporate the former Soviet Union and gradually subdue Russia. Each year European investment in Turkey grows as well, binding it closer to the E.U. even if it never becomes a member. And each year a new pipeline route opens transporting oil and gas from Libya, Algeria or Azerbaijan to Europe. What other superpower grows by an average of one country per year, with others waiting in line and begging to join?

Robert Kagan famously said that America hails from Mars and Europe from Venus, but in reality, Europe is more like Mercury — carrying a big wallet. The E.U.’s market is the world’s largest, European technologies more and more set the global standard and European countries give the most development assistance. And if America and China fight, the world’s money will be safely invested in European banks. Many Americans scoffed at the introduction of the euro, claiming it was an overreach that would bring the collapse of the European project. Yet today, Persian Gulf oil exporters are diversifying their currency holdings into euros, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has proposed that OPEC no longer price its oil in “worthless” dollars. President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela went on to suggest euros. It doesn’t help that Congress revealed its true protectionist colors by essentially blocking the Dubai ports deal in 2006. With London taking over (again) as the world’s financial capital for stock listing, it’s no surprise that China’s new state investment fund intends to locate its main Western offices there instead of New York. Meanwhile, America’s share of global exchange reserves has dropped to 65 percent. Gisele Bündchen demands to be paid in euros, while Jay-Z drowns in 500 euro notes in a recent video. American soft power seems on the wane even at home.

And Europe’s influence grows at America’s expense. While America fumbles at nation-building, Europe spends its money and political capital on locking peripheral countries into its orbit. Many poor regions of the world have realized that they want the European dream, not the American dream. Africa wants a real African Union like the E.U.; we offer no equivalent. Activists in the Middle East want parliamentary democracy like Europe’s, not American-style presidential strongman rule. Many of the foreign students we shunned after 9/11 are now in London and Berlin: twice as many Chinese study in Europe as in the U.S. We didn’t educate them, so we have no claims on their brains or loyalties as we have in decades past. More broadly, America controls legacy institutions few seem to want — like the International Monetary Fund — while Europe excels at building new and sophisticated ones modeled on itself. The U.S. has a hard time getting its way even when it dominates summit meetings — consider the ill-fated Free Trade Area of the Americas — let alone when it’s not even invited, as with the new East Asian Community, the region’s answer to America’s Apec.

The East Asian Community is but one example of how China is also too busy restoring its place as the world’s “Middle Kingdom” to be distracted by the Middle Eastern disturbances that so preoccupy the United States. In America’s own hemisphere, from Canada to Cuba to Chávez’s Venezuela, China is cutting massive resource and investment deals. Across the globe, it is deploying tens of thousands of its own engineers, aid workers, dam-builders and covert military personnel. In Africa, China is not only securing energy supplies; it is also making major strategic investments in the financial sector. The whole world is abetting China’s spectacular rise as evidenced by the ballooning share of trade in its gross domestic product — and China is exporting weapons at a rate reminiscent of the Soviet Union during the cold war, pinning America down while filling whatever power vacuums it can find. Every country in the world currently considered a rogue state by the U.S. now enjoys a diplomatic, economic or strategic lifeline from China, Iran being the most prominent example.

Without firing a shot, China is doing on its southern and western peripheries what Europe is achieving to its east and south...

Feel the socialist love..............embrace it. This just further shows that our allies are "allies" of convenience.  Amazing how quickly some of them forget.

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mac2  (1000+ posts)     Sun Jan-27-08 01:21 PM
Response to Original message
1. China became a Super Power with the help of our Congress
 Some are in power today. Some are running for President. Good grief.
 

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thunder rising  (992 posts)       Sun Jan-27-08 01:28 PM
Response to Original message
2. Funny, whod'a thunk that threatening the world with unilateral intervention, would drive them away.
 But we are the good guys.


Alas................you primitives don't understand and probably never will understand what we are doing in the world today.

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Tierra_y_Libertad  (1000+ posts)       Sun Jan-27-08 01:33 PM
Response to Original message
3. Good. Now, maybe, we can become a "2nd" rate power and get civilized.
 But, I have my doubts that we'll go gracefully into the inevitable collapse.
 

Please move to these places that you think are so much better............PLEASE!!!!

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BurtWorm  (1000+ posts)       Sun Jan-27-08 01:45 PM
Response to Original message
4. Two challenges to American power in the Americas: China and Chavez 
 The Big Three dynamic is not just some distant contest by which America ensures its ability to dictate affairs on the other side of the globe. Globalization has brought the geopolitical marketplace straight to America’s backyard, rapidly eroding the two-centuries-old Monroe Doctrine in the process. In truth, America called the shots in Latin America only when its southern neighbors lacked any vision of their own. Now they have at least two non-American challengers: China and Chávez. It was Simón Bolívar who fought ferociously for South America’s independence from Spanish rule, and today it is the newly renamed Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela that has inspired an entire continent to bootstrap its way into the global balance of power on its own terms. Hugo Chávez, the country’s clownish colonel, may last for decades to come or may die by the gun, but either way, he has called America’s bluff and won, changing the rules of North-South relations in the Western hemisphere. He has emboldened and bankrolled leftist leaders across the continent, helped Argentina and others pay back and boot out the I.M.F. and sponsored a continentwide bartering scheme of oil, cattle, wheat and civil servants, reminding even those who despise him that they can stand up to the great Northern power. Chávez stands not only on the ladder of high oil prices. He relies on tacit support from Europe and hardheaded intrusion from China, the former still the country’s largest investor and the latter feverishly repairing Venezuela’s dilapidated oil rigs while building its own refineries.

But Chávez’s challenge to the United States is, in inspiration, ideological, whereas the second-world shift is really structural. Even with Chávez still in power, it is Brazil that is reappearing as South America’s natural leader. Alongside India and South Africa, Brazil has led the charge in global trade negotiations, sticking it to the U.S. on its steel tariffs and to Europe on its agricultural subsidies. Geographically, Brazil is nearly as close to Europe as to America and is as keen to build cars and airplanes for Europe as it is to export soy to the U.S. Furthermore, Brazil, although a loyal American ally in the cold war, wasted little time before declaring a “strategic alliance” with China. Their economies are remarkably complementary, with Brazil shipping iron ore, timber, zinc, beef, milk and soybeans to China and China investing in Brazil’s hydroelectric dams, steel mills and shoe factories. Both China and Brazil’s ambitions may soon alter the very geography of their relations, with Brazil leading an effort to construct a Trans-Oceanic Highway from the Amazon through Peru to the Pacific Coast, facilitating access for Chinese shipping tankers. Latin America has mostly been a geopolitical afterthought over the centuries, but in the 21st century, all resources will be competed for, and none are too far away.
 

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libbygurl (1000+ posts)     Sun Jan-27-08 01:49 PM
Response to Original message
5. Not surprising at all. There's a lot of progress in Europe that never gets written up ...
 Edited on Sun Jan-27-08 01:50 PM by libbygurl
...on this side of the pond. Many Americans still believe that the USA is the best in everything. Just one example putting the lie to this is the vastly more efficient highway, road and train systems in, say, Germany, compared to the inefficient and wasteful ones here.


You do realize that Europe is much smaller than the USA...........oh nevermind.

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gulliver  (1000+ posts)       Sun Jan-27-08 02:21 PM
Response to Original message
6. Bush and his Republicans lost America?
 All of the effort of previous administrations to build up America...gone and dust. Republicanism brought us Bush, and Bush brought us down.


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greyhound1966  (1000+ posts)       Sun Jan-27-08 02:34 PM
Response to Original message
7. And we still sit here, too fat to move and too stupid to look at where we're
 headed.

 :thatsright:

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IsItJustMe (1000+ posts)     Sun Jan-27-08 02:39 PM
Response to Original message
8. May be some truth to the post, and our leadership has had much to be desired when it comes to 
 strategy and/or intelligence. But we damn sure have some scary and hellacious weapon systems lying around.

The only problem with that is, when you have a hammer, everything looks like nails. And that my friend, is the problem of all problems.


I don't know what to say to the utter ignorance that is shown.
You got off your ass, now get your wife off her back.

Offline TheSarge

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Re: The end of "America's" Superpower
« Reply #1 on: January 27, 2008, 03:18:12 PM »
DUmmies think making the U.S. better means bringing us down to the level of the worlds socialist countries.
 :bird:

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The libs/dems of today are the Quislings of former years.  The cowards who would vote a fraud into office in exchange for handouts from the devil.

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Offline jukin

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Re: The end of "America's" Superpower
« Reply #2 on: January 28, 2008, 01:05:01 PM »
In terms of percent of GDP, europe is more in debt and has higher deficits. Hey europe how is that GPS system going?  Or how about the flying pig, the a380? The USA rules on just about every measurable standard compared to europe.
When you are the beneficiary of someone’s kindness and generosity, it produces a sense of gratitude and community.

When you are the beneficiary of a policy that steals from someone and gives it to you in return for your vote, it produces a sense of entitlement and dependency.

Offline ReardenSteel

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Re: The end of "America's" Superpower
« Reply #3 on: January 28, 2008, 06:22:48 PM »
Quote
greyhound1966  (1000+ posts)       Sun Jan-27-08 02:34 PM
Response to Original message
7. And we still sit here, too fat to move and too stupid to look at where we're
 headed.

Ah, the old "Bush made me fat and stupid" attack. How can one argue with that? Nevermind. Why would one argue with that?  :lmao:
"When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed."

- Ayn Rand
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=1826

Offline ReardenSteel

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Re: The end of "America's" Superpower
« Reply #4 on: January 28, 2008, 06:31:02 PM »
+1 for not hitting edit.

Forgot to add, some EU countries have growing economies and some area's of the Chinese economy are growing as well. Some parts of the US economy are shrinking as well. Here's the thing you DU half-wits... "they" are growing when and where they allow greater capitalism (economic freedom) and we are shrinking as an economic power where and when we allow socialism (economic regulation) to flurish.

"When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed."

- Ayn Rand
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=1826

Offline DumbAss Tanker

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Re: The end of "America's" Superpower
« Reply #5 on: January 28, 2008, 06:47:53 PM »
When America is on her knees....

...the rest of the world will be on its elbows!

 :naughty:
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That here, obedient to their law, we lie.

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Offline franksolich

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Re: The end of "America's" Superpower
« Reply #6 on: January 29, 2008, 07:29:12 AM »
DUmmies think making the U.S. better means bringing us down to the level of the worlds socialist countries.:bird:

Question.

How many times has America been headed towards the sundown?

Like, about four times the past fifty years.

That sundown just keeps on getting further and further away.

Historians generally consider 1968--yes, 1968--as the peak of American power and influence, after which we ostensibly began eroding away.

In 1968, the United States was 30.4% of all the world produced (income), and 1968 was when Japan and Germany slowly began emerging as great economic powers.

In 2002, the United States was 30.7% of the all world produced (income), and this was long after Japan and Germany had grown.....and in the meantime other economic powers (India, China, the oil-producing nations) came into being.

The "competition" gets tougher, what with all these new economic powers.....but some how, in some way, the United States just keeps gaining ground.
apres moi, le deluge