America is losing the free world

[bijou]

Ever since 1945, the US has regarded itself as the leader of the “free world”. But the Obama administration is facing an unexpected and unwelcome development in global politics. Four of the biggest and most strategically important democracies in the developing world – Brazil, India, South Africa and Turkey – are increasingly at odds with American foreign policy. Rather than siding with the US on the big international issues, they are just as likely to line up with authoritarian powers such as China and Iran.

The US has been slow to pick up on this development, perhaps because it seems so surprising and unnatural. Most Americans assume that fellow democracies will share their values and opinions on international affairs. During the last presidential election campaign, John McCain, the Republican candidate, called for the formation of a global alliance of democracies to push back against authoritarian powers. Some of President Barack Obama’s senior advisers have also written enthusiastically about an international league of democracies.

But the assumption that the world’s democracies will naturally stick together is proving unfounded. The latest example came during the Copenhagen climate summit. On the last day of the talks, the Americans tried to fix up one-to-one meetings between Mr Obama and the leaders of South Africa, Brazil and India – but failed each time. The Indians even said that their prime minister, Manmohan Singh, had already left for the airport.  ...

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3ef8f012-f969-11de-8085-00144feab49a.html

The main bit of the story has already been posted here, but Gideon Rachman takes the analysis a little further.

[SSG Snuggle Bunny]

You can't lose what you throw away.

[DumbAss Tanker]

It's a fundamentally stupid idea really, whether you look at the Bush/Rumsfeld, Obama, or McCain variants of it.  Democracies are just as capable (Maybe even more capable) of making terrible and/or catastrophic decisions as any oligarchy or dictatorship.  History offers no support for it whatsoever, going back to the disastrous but democratically-decided ouster of Alcibiades by the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War.  Populist democracratic reforms in France in the 19th Century, and Germany in the 20th, led each into successions of disastrous wars, with and without detours through dictatorships or empire when the democracies failed to deliver even minimally-efficient government. 

Each of the powers in this story sees that it is the dominant economic force in its own region, and using and preserving that advantage is naturally far more important to them than proselytizing democracy.  Our political leadership across both parties is afflicted with a depressing inability to see that the rest of the world is not the USA, and really the fault is not a recent one, it goes back to at least the Wilson Presidency, and it's embedded in the academia that schools our so-called 'Best and brightest.'  The decision to try foreign terrorists in civilian criminal courts for acts of war, after capturing them in military operations overseas, is just another symptom of this lofty yet simplistically stupid viewpoint.