After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States was left as the world’s only superpower. But the “unipolar moment” did not last long. By the time Barack Obama entered the White House in January 2009, it was already clear that the era of untrammelled American confidence and power had come to a close. Two major events have undermined the swagger and self-confidence of US foreign policy. The first was the failure to secure clear victories in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The second was the financial and economic crisis that began with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September, 2008. These three new books all respond, in different ways, to this new environment:
Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, by Andrew Bacevich
How Wars End: Why We Always Fight the Last Battle, by Gideon Rose
The Frugal Superpower: America’s Global Leadership in a Cash-strapped Era, by Michael Mandelbaum….
Hmmm. What if US influence goes into retreat?
Well, maybe Europe will have to pay for their own defense for a change and we can stop subsidizing their socialism as we paid for their defense.
Europe will become the front line in the Islamic war against the West.
The US should have a real “peace dividend” and start paying down its debt.
China will continue to ascend in the East and pull all of East Asia and most likely Australia into their orbit.
We can concentrate on defending our borders from the invaders from the South.
We can start burning coal in clean power plants on a massive scale to produce electricity and defund the Islamic extremists.
We can quit giving foreign aid to everyone.
We can sit back and let the rest of the world take care of itself when a tsunami or earthquake hits, instead of digging our way further into debt to help those that hate us.
We can pull out of NAFTA and GATT, get our jobs back, and have
a renaissance of inovation and manufacturing rather than continuing to export our jobs and reduce our standard of living to a third world status.
Tax revenues will go up without increasing taxes and expenditures will go down without loss of service.
Where is the down side for the US?
Where is the down side? Well, for one thing, history suggests that nations that ignore the rest of the world and focus inwards stagnate technologically. In due course, some other, more vigorous, country comes and kicks down the walls and suggests that the now-backwards nation take up its rightful place as a subject province of its betters.
Two things…I didn’t say that we “focus inwards”. Not being a military empire is not the same at all. First, we should look to expand our markets into the rest of the world. Trade is good…just not the one sided destructive sort of trade that NAFTA and GATT give us. If these treaties are so wonderful, why have our jobs gone overseas and why have we continued to suffer a trade deficit year after year?
Second, we have nuclear weapons…enough to destroy every nation on earth several times over, and we have the means to deliver them. Any nation that “comes and kicks down the walls” of our nation will end up as a slag heap in short order. Things have changed a bit since 1945.
EXE Errors Fix is your complete one-stop resource for [url=http://www.exeerrorsfix.com/Fix-EXE-Files.html]EXE[/url] error-related information and solution. With the largest collection of Windows EXE errors and problems, EXE Errors Fix offers you the best solutions to fix any EXE errors.