US superpower status is shaken

[dr.umer]

US superpower status is shaken ​

By Paul Reynolds
World affairs correspondent, BBC News website.

The financial crisis is likely to diminish the status of the United States as the world's only superpower.

On the practical level, the US is already stretched militarily, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and is now stretched financially.

On the philosophical level, it will be harder for it to argue in favour of its free market ideas, if its own markets have collapsed.

Pivotal moment?

Some see this as a pivotal moment.

The political philosopher John Gray, who recently retired as a professor at the London School of Economics, wrote in the London paper The Observer: "Here is a historic geopolitical shift, in which the balance of power in the world is being altered irrevocably.

"The era of American global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War, is over... The American free-market creed has self-destructed while countries that retained overall control of markets have been vindicated."

"In a change as far-reaching in its implications as the fall of the Soviet Union, an entire model of government and the economy has collapsed.

"How symbolic that Chinese astronauts take a spacewalk while the US Treasury Secretary is on his knees."

No apocalypse now

Not all would agree that an American apocalypse has arrived. After all, the system has been tested before.
John Bolton gives rumours of US hegemony's demise short shrift

In 1987 the Dow Jones share index fell by more than 20% in one day. In 2000, the dot-com bubble burst. Yet both times, the US picked itself up, as it did post Vietnam.

Prof Gray's comments certainly did not impress one of the more hawkish figures who served in the Bush administration, the former UN ambassador John Bolton.

When I put them to him, he replied only: "If Professor Gray believes this, can he assure us that he is selling his US assets short?

"If so, where is he placing his money instead? And if he has no US assets, why should we be paying any attention to him?"

Nevertheless, it does seem that the concept of the single superpower left bestriding the world after the collapse of communism (and the supposed end of history) is no longer valid.

Multi-polar world

Even leading neo-conservative thinkers accept that a more multi-polar world is emerging, though one in which they want the American position to be the leading one.

Robert Kagan, co-founder in 1997 of the "Project for the New American Century" that called for "American global leadership", wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine this autumn: "Those who today proclaim that the United States is in decline often imagine a past in which the world danced to an Olympian America's tune. That is an illusion.

"The world today looks more like that of the 19th Century than like that of the late 20th.

"Those who imagine this is good news should recall that the 19th Century order did not end as well as the Cold War did."

"To avoid such a fate, the United States and other democratic nations will need to take a more enlightened and generous view of their interests than they did even during the Cold War. The United States, as the strongest democracy, should not oppose but welcome a world of pooled and diminished national sovereignty.

"At the same time, the democracies of Asia and Europe need to rediscover that progress toward this more perfect liberal order depends not only on law and popular will but also on powerful nations that can support and defend it."

New scepticism

The director of a leading British think-tank Chatham House, Dr Robin Niblett, who has worked on both sides of the Atlantic, remarked that, at a recent conference he attended in Berlin, an American who called for continued US leadership was met with a new scepticism.

"The US is seen as declining relatively and there has been an enormous acceleration in this perfect storm of perception in the waning days of the Bush administration. The rise of new powers, the increase in oil wealth among some countries and the spread of economic power around the world adds to this," he said.

"But we must separate the immediate moment from the structural. There is no doubt that President Bush has created some of his own problems. The overstretch of military power and the economic crisis can be laid at the door of the administration.

"Its tax cuts were not matched by the hammer of spending cuts. The combined effect of events like the failures in Iraq, the difficulties in Afghanistan, the thumbing of its nose by Russia in Georgia and elsewhere, all these lead to a sense of an end of an era.

The longer term

Dr Niblett argues that we should wait a bit before coming to a judgment and that structurally the United States is still strong.

"America is still immensely attractive to skilled immigrants and is still capable of producing a Microsoft or a Google," he went on.

"Even its debt can be overcome. It has enormous resilience economically at a local and entrepreneurial level.

"And one must ask, decline relative to who? China is in a desperate race for growth to feed its population and avert unrest in 15 to 20 years. Russia is not exactly a paper tiger but it is stretching its own limits with a new strategy built on a flimsy base. India has huge internal contradictions. Europe has usually proved unable to jump out of the doldrums as dynamically as the US.

"But the US must regain its financial footing and the extent to which it does so will also determine its military capacity. If it has less money, it will have fewer forces."

With the US presidential election looming, it will be worth returning to this subject in a year's time to see how the world, and the American place in it, looks then.

 

[pkpatriotic]

U.S. grapples with power dive amid financial crisis | Special Coverage | Reuters
Thu Oct 2, 2008 1:25pm EDT
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - It may be too soon to write off U.S. economic clout as Germany's finance minister did last month, but experts say a power realignment is taking place in any event with U.S. credibility and popularity at a low.

The notion of America's status as a global superpower has been dented by the financial meltdown but foreign and economic policy experts say U.S. omnipotence had been exaggerated.

"The U.S. remains the dominant global power in military terms but the growing economic clout of nations like Russia, China, India and Brazil is changing that dynamic," said Stephen Flanagan of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think-tank.

"The global nature of the economy inevitably means that the United States can't be as dominant as it once was," he said.

How fast the financial fallout, kicked off by a credit crunch, will further diminish U.S. influence is unclear but experts say Washington's response, including a proposed $700 billion bailout plan, will reverberate for decades to come.

"The United States will lose its superpower status in the world financial system. The ... system will become more multi-polar," said German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck.

So-called U.S. objective or "hard power" -- military and economic might -- are unlikely to take an immediate hit as it will take a while for U.S. military and other budgets to be affected, said Thomas Carothers, a vice president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The immediate impact is more likely to be on Washington's "soft power" as nations no longer look to the United States as a political or economic model.

"Throughout this decade there has been greater questioning of America's political model and now you add to this the sudden crash and there is a deep questioning of America's economic model too," Carothers said.

Academic Francis Fukuyama said with the rise of China, Russia and others, the world was no longer seen in a "unipolar" way where the United States was dominant.

"There will be a generally more multipolar world where you don't have superpowers like in the Cold War," said Fukuyama, a professor at Johns Hopkins University.

One area where the United States would likely lose out in the years to come, he said, was in the "realm of ideas" and innovation, an area where the United States had been dominant but where others are now surging ahead.

Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations said there was an exaggerated view of U.S. power in the 1980s and 1990s and predictions of a U.S. demise were overblown. "The pendulum has swung and now people have an exaggerated view of how it has declined," he said.

CREDIBILITY GAP

Outgoing U.S. administrations usually suffer from a lack of leverage in their waning months and the financial crisis coincides with the Bush administration's attempts to wrap up key issues such as the North Korean nuclear program and to get an elusive Palestinian statehood deal.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has insisted her ability to "do diplomacy" has not been affected by the financial crisis, but the meltdown was a dominant theme during her time at the U.N. General Assembly last week.

Even before the crisis erupted, opinion polls had shown U.S. credibility and popularity down, especially following the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 and topple Saddam Hussein.

The opening of Guantanamo Bay detention center for al Qaeda and Taliban suspects and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal tarnished the image of Washington as champion of human rights.

The Bush administration's democracy agenda has become a source of suspicion, particularly in the Arab world where it is seen as a cover for trying to overthrow governments not seen as toeing the U.S. line.

"The United States is perceived in many countries as almost a rogue state, one that is using unparalleled power to create 'freedom'," Flanagan said.

A U.S. diplomat said he had noticed a difference in how other countries viewed the United States and it made "doing diplomacy" more difficult.

"We have been pursuing a foreign policy which is so arrogant that people don't want to engage us, except for those allies who want to shape our views ... or those who are frightened of us," said the diplomat, who asked not to be identified because his comments were sensitive.

The next U.S. administration -- whether led by Republican Sen. John McCain or Democratic Sen. Barack Obama -- will have to take concrete gestures early on to turn a tide of suspicion, several analysts said.

Foreign policy expert Jon Alterman of the CSIS, said the United States was still the country that mattered most in world affairs even if its power had diminished.

"While the United States is less in control, no one else is in control either," he said.

(Editing by Kristin Roberts and Howard Goller)

 

[pkpatriotic]

Putin turns on US 'irresponsibility'
By Anne Penketh, Diplomatic Editor
Thursday, 2 October 2008

Vladimir Putin has accused the United States of "irresponsibility" as he criticised its primary role in the economic and financial turmoil that has undermined the foundations of global capitalism across the world.

The Russian Prime Minister's remarks yesterday came after several European leaders, including the French President Nicolas Sarkozy and the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, said the spiralling crisis started by toxic housing debts in the US raised questions about the "Anglo-Saxon" way of doing business.

"Everything that is happening in the economic and financial sphere has started in the US," Mr Putin told a government meeting in Moscow. "This is a real crisis that all of us are facing. And what is really sad is that we see an inability to take appropriate decisions. This is no longer irresponsibility on the part of some individuals, but irresponsibility of the whole system, which as you know, had pretensions to [global] leadership."

The Russian stock market has collapsed by 50 per cent from its peak last May as a result of the global uncertainty, coupled with investor nervousness following the Georgian crisis.

M. Sarkozy, speaking in Toulon a week ago, said: "A certain idea of globalisation is drawing to a close with the end of a financial capitalism that had imposed its logic on the whole economy and contributed to perverting it. The idea of the absolute power of the markets that should not be constrained by any rule, by any political intervention, was a mad idea. The idea that markets are always right was a mad idea." The German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück said "the US will lose its superpower status in the world financial system". He hesitated to predict the long-term consequences of the upheaval, which he described as "above all a US problem" but said: "The world financial system is becoming multipolar."

Leaders of developing countries have also lashed out at the US over what Gordon Brown called the first crisis of globalisation, in the light of the Bush administration's failure to swiftly put an end to the bloodletting in the financial markets. "The managers of big business took huge risks out of greed," said the Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, whose economy is highly dependent on US trade. "What happens in the United States will affect the entire world and, above all, small countries like ours."

Another ally of Mr Bush, the Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, criticised Washington's failure to deal with the uncontrolled financial speculation. "The whole world has financed the United States, and I believe that they have a reciprocal debt with the planet," he said.

France and Germany are calling for greater EU intervention to regulate the markets, while Britain is wary of such a move. But Mr Brown used his UN speech last Friday to press for international regulators to set up "colleges" overseeing the megabanks with branches across the world.