USA - Broken Criminal Justice System. Democratic Decline. The End of the American Era. THE UNITED States has been the dominant world power since 1945, and U.S. leaders have long sought to preserve that privileged position. They understood, as did most Americans, that primacy brought important benefits. It made other states less likely to threaten America or its vital interests directly. By dampening great-power competition and giving Washington the capacity to shape regional balances of power, primacy contributed to a more tranquil international environment. That tranquility fostered global prosperity; investors and traders operate with greater confidence when there is less danger of war. After America - by Zbigniew Brzezinski. Not so long ago, a high-ranking Chinese official, who obviously had concluded that America's decline and China's rise were both inevitable, noted in a burst of candor to a senior U.S. official: "But, please, let America not decline too quickly.
" Although the inevitability of the Chinese leader's expectation is still far from certain, he was right to be cautious when looking forward to America's demise. For if America falters, the world is unlikely to be dominated by a single preeminent successor -- not even China. International uncertainty, increased tension among global competitors, and even outright chaos would be far more likely outcomes. The leaders of the world's second-rank powers, among them India, Japan, Russia, and some European countries, are already assessing the potential impact of U.S. decline on their respective national interests. At some stage, however, a more assertive Chinese nationalism could arise and damage China's international interests. Redefining American Power | The Majalla. Between You and Me Considering the some trillion dollars per year spent on defense related activities, an overhaul of the budget is long overdue.
Yet, before voicing support for Obama’s proposed military strategy, it is imperative that American politicians engage the public in a serious discussion on America’s increasing reliance on extra-judicial killings and drone attacks. President Obama is seeking to reshape America's defense policy US President, Barack Obama, unveiled last week the US Department of Defense’s January 2012 defense strategy, Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense. To achieve these goals, the US will exploit “the growing capabilities of allies and partners, as demonstrated in the successful mission to protect the Libyan people,” which “create new opportunities for burden-sharing,” reduce the number of troops stationed in Europe, and halt “long-term nation-building with large military footprints.”
The Rise or Fall of the American Empire - By Robert Kagan, Gideon Rachman, and Daniel W. Drezner. Dan Drezner: Dear Bob and Gideon, It's an honor to be moderating this discussion between the two of you. You have both managed to author interesting and cogently argued books that are nevertheless at odds with each other on the future of world order. Gideon, you are of the belief that the Age of Anxiety is upon us, due in no small part to the waning of American power and the Western model of political economy more generally. Bob, you rebut arguments about American decline by pointing out the ways in which current commentators have wildly exaggerated American power in the past and the ways in which current U.S. power resources are still quite robust.
Where you both seem to agree is on the necessity of American power to ensure global order and prosperity. Gideon, you asserted in Zero-Sum Future that "a strong, successful, and confident America remains the best hope for a stable and prosperous world. " To get the ball rolling, let me start with a few queries for Gideon. Cheers, Dan Dear Dan, Welcome to the New World Disorder - By Ian Bremmer. As leaders of the G-8 industrialized countries gather at Camp David later this week, there will be much talk of global leadership -- and of its importance for our crisis-prone world.
In a world where so many challenges transcend borders -- threats to the stability of the global economy, climate change, cyberconflict, terrorism, and risks to reliable supplies of food and water, to name just a few -- the need for international cooperation has never been greater. Yet, cooperation depends on leadership. Only global leaders have the leverage to coordinate multinational responses to transnational problems, as well as the wealth and power to persuade other governments to take actions they would not otherwise take.
They provide services no one else will pay for and resources that others cannot afford. On issue after issue, leaders set the agenda. Unfortunately, for the first time in seven decades, the world lacks leadership. A generation ago, these were the world's powerhouses. By placing U.S. "America’s G-Zero Moment" by Ian Bremmer. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space NEW YORK – The 2008 financial crisis marked the end of the global order as we knew it. In advance of the upcoming G-8 summit, it is impossible to overlook the fact that, for the first time in seven decades, the United States cannot drive the international agenda or provide global leadership on all of today’s most pressing problems. Indeed, the US has trimmed its presence abroad by refusing to contribute to a eurozone bailout, intervene in Syria, or use force to contain Iran’s nuclear breakout (despite strong Israeli support).
In short, US foreign policy may be as active as ever, but it is downsizing and becoming more exacting about its priorities. Welcome to the G-Zero world, a more turbulent, uncertain environment in which coordination on global policy issues falls by the wayside. Likewise, the US continues to lead in entrepreneurship, research and development, higher education, and technological innovation.
Noam Chomsky: The Decline of American Empire (Part 2) | World. February 15, 2012 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here. In the years of conscious, self-inflicted decline at home, “losses” continued to mount elsewhere.
Even more serious would be the loss of the MENA countries -- Middle East/North Africa -- which have been regarded by planners since the 1940s as “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.” To be sure, if the projections of a century of U.S. energy independence based on North American energy resources turn out to be realistic, the significance of controlling MENA would decline somewhat, though probably not by much: the main concern has always been control more than access.
The Arab Spring, another development of historic importance, might portend at least a partial “loss” of MENA. Israel and the Republican Party. Robert Kagan: Against The Myth Of American Decline. The myth of American decline. Before 2013 begins, catch up on the best of 2012. From now until the New Year, we will be re-posting some of The New Republic’s most thought-provoking pieces of the year. Enjoy. Note: At the State of the Union on January 26, President Barack Obama argued, "Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn't know what they're talking about. " According to a Foreign Policy report, the president had read and been influenced by the TNR article below, discussing it at length in an off-the-record meeting on the afternoon of the speech.
Is the United States in decline, as so many seem to believe these days? Or are Americans in danger of committing pre-emptive superpower suicide out of a misplaced fear of their own declining power? But how real is it? With this broad perception of decline as the backdrop, every failure of the United States to get its way in the world tends to reinforce the impression. The answer is no. Glory days: A pundit's rosy view of the Pax Americana—By Andrew J. Bacevich. We’re So Exceptional by Michael Ignatieff. All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals by David Scheffer Princeton University Press, 533 pp., $35.00 Affirming belief that America is an exceptional nation has become a test of patriotism in American politics. Standing up for America’s right to make its own rules and live its own unique destiny has become an obligatory part of campaign rhetoric at a time when China is on the rise and the American economy is struggling back to its feet.
Exceptionalist rhetoric is more than a language game for politicians trying to win support from an anxious electorate traversing the dark wood of possible imperial decline. Law, after all, constrains power, and the United States, like any great power, is likely to support a law-bound international order only if it ties up the power of its competitors more than it constrains its own. Although I’m not sure he’d see it this way, this is the story that David Scheffer tells in All the Missing Souls. Letters. Sorry, Mitt: It Won't Be an American Century - By Charles Kupchan. "This century must be an American century," Mitt Romney insisted in a recent speech on foreign policy. "In an American century," the former Massachusetts governor continued, "America leads the free world and the free world leads the entire world.
" Adhering to his party's traditional playbook, the likely Republican nominee went on to reaffirm that the United States is "an exceptional country with a unique destiny. " In an election season, such talk rolls easily off the tongue. But Romney's hackneyed rhetoric is woefully out of step -- both with an American electorate hungry for a less costly brand of foreign policy and with a world in the midst of tectonic change. A sharp economic downturn and expensive, inconclusive conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have left Americans ready for a focus on the home front.
President Barack Obama is on the correct path. Romney has already denigrated Obama's pragmatism, charging that "our president thinks America is in decline. " SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images. American Funk - Ian Buruma. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space NEW YORK – The eccentric Bengali intellectual Nirad C. Chaudhuri once explained the end of the British Raj in India as a case of “funk,” or loss of nerve. The British had stopped believing in their own empire. They simply lost the will, in Rudyard Kipling’s famous words, to fight “the savage wars of peace.” In fact, Kipling’s poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” which exhorted the white race to spread its values to the “new-caught sullen peoples, half devil and half child,” was not about the British Empire at all, but about the United States.
Subtitled “The United States and the Philippine Islands,” it was published in 1899, just as the US was waging a “savage war of peace” of its own. Chaudhuri had a point. Romney’s Kipling is the neo-conservative intellectual Robert Kagan, whose new book, The World America Made, argues against “the myth of American decline.” Like Chaudhuri, Kagan is an engaging writer. Rotting From the Inside Out - By Michael A. Cohen. Barack Obama and Mitt Romney don't generally agree on much. But these days they appear to have one area of surprising consensus -- they both believe that stories of American decline are greatly exaggerated. According to Foreign Policy's own Josh Rogin, Obama has been praising Robert Kagan's recent article in the New Republic on the myth of American decline -- a perhaps not unsurprising position to take for a candidate regularly accused of being insufficiently exceptionalist.
Romney -- author ofNo Apology: The Case for American Greatness -- also counts Kagan among his top foreign-policy advisors. Kagan's article, as well as his new book, The World America Made, is the most obvious recent example of pushback against the declinist meme, but others have also taken up the mantle.
In the recent issue of International Security, Michael Beckley wrote a widely cited piece that argues "America's Edge Will Endure" against potential rivals like China. Joe Raedle/Getty Images. Why the American Empire Was Destined to Collapse | World. Photo Credit: ShutterStock.com March 7, 2012 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Several years after the Wall Street-ignited crisis began, the nation’s top bank CEOs (who far out-accumulated their European and other international counterparts) continue to hobnob with the president at campaign dinners where each plate costs more than one out of four US households make in a year.
This is not the American Dream that says if you work hard you can be more comfortable than your parents; but rather, if you connive well, game the rules, and rule the game, your take from others is unlimited. In Why America Failed, noted historian and cultural critic Morris Berman’s brilliant, raw and unflinchingly accurate postmortem of America, he concludes that this hustling model, literally woven into the American DNA, doomed the country from the start, and led us inevitably to this dysfunctional point. So where does that leave us as a country?
Why America Keeps Getting More Conservative - Politics. Even with the president’s approval rating showing signs of life and the Republicans busily bashing themselves over the head — “one is a practicing polygamist and he’s not even the Mormon,” retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor recently quipped about her party’s two frontrunners — America continues to track right, according to polling data released by the Gallup Organization last week. Americans at this political moment are significantly more likely to identify as conservative than as liberal: conservatives outnumber liberals by nearly two to one. Forty percent identify as conservative, 36 percent as moderate, and 21 percent liberal. The map above charts the ideological divide across America’s states. There are four states where conservatives make up more than half the population: Mississippi, Utah, Wyoming, and Alabama. Conservatives make up more than 40 percent in 20 more states. As before, conservative states are considerably more religious than liberal-leaning states.
The Romney Doctrine? Ibn Dawood Romney’s “American Century” is quite implausible upon closer examination, but the Republican candidate appears to not take it that seriously either. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is struggling to present a coherent foreign policy Few presidential candidates in recent American politics have articulated as few of words on foreign policy as the current Republican nominee-in-waiting, Mitt Romney. It’s largely reflective of the US 2012 presidential campaign’s focus on the economy, and Romney’s recognition that foreign policy, is not a particular strongpoint for the former Governor of Massachusetts. This choice of emphasis is reflective as well in opinion polls, where Obama has consistently outscored his rival in terms of perception as a suitable “commander-in-chief”, while faring less favourably in terms of the economy.
Romney asserted in his citadel speech last autumn, “This century must be an American Century. Andrew Bowen. Decline Watch: Is the U.S. Constitution going out of style? 5 Brave Religious Leaders Who Fought Christian Theocracy in America | Belief. How Santorum misunderstands Kennedy’s speech on religious freedom. God and Caesar in America. 5 Supreme Court Decisions Pandering to Christianity | Belief. Is America on the Verge of Theocracy? 4 Fundamentalist Ideologies Threatening U.S. Liberty. The Truth About America's Religious Heritage. Where are the normal Christians? Andrew Sullivan: Christianity in Crisis. Council for Secular Humanism.
Is Our Republic Lost? The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Rise of China. Balancing the East, Upgrading the West. The Second Gilded Age: Has America Become an Oligarchy? - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International. The Dark Money Shakedown. Not so super PACs. The Big-Lie Coup d'Etat) Citizens United: Justice David Souter’s dissent in the Supreme Court’s momentous campaign finance case.
How John Roberts Orchestrated Citizens United. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision has led to an explosion of campaign spending. AmericanPoverty.org. America: The Best Country in the World at Being Last -- How Can We Change That? America’s pill-popping capital. 5 Things That Put America to Shame | News & Politics.
Disgusting: 7 Million Kids and Mothers Suffer Extreme Poverty in the Richest Country in the World | Economy. Finding community in America's Appalachian region. How Joseph Stalin Invented 'American Exceptionalism' - Terrence McCoy - Politics. A Better Internationalism. The Enemy Within - By David Rothkopf. The Great American Novel. America's Spy State: How the Telecoms Sell Out Your Privacy | Civil Liberties. 'Ameritopia': How Dumb Can Political Philosophy Get? - The Chronicle Review. Morals: Our great moral decline. Civil Society Reconsidered.
The Difference Between Private and Public Morality) America’s bankrupt morality. Strip-Search Case Reflects Death of American Privacy. The Potential Killers All Around Us. Hi-Ho! The US is a Police State. A Nation of Spies and Snitches - By J.M. Berger. 150 Miles of Hell Reports Reveal Two New Scandals in the Pepper-Spraying at UC Davis - Conor Friedersdorf - Politics. How Obama Became a Civil Libertarian's Nightmare. No Taxes, No Travel: Why the IRS Wants the Right to Seize Your Passport - Jacoba Urist - Business.
Will a Militarized Police Force Facing Occupy Wall Street Lead to Another Kent State Massacre? Police Handcuff Ga. Kindergartner For Tantrum. Detained in the U.S.: Filmmaker Laura Poitras Held, Questioned Some 40 Times at U.S. Airports. TSA Agents Conduct ‘Full Monty’ Pat-Down On Henry Kissinger. 'Losing' the world: American decline in perspective. The imperial way: US decline in perspective. America the Possible: A Manifesto, Part I. $200 Oil and the Moscow-Beijing Alliance - Interview by Benjamin Pauker. How our election cycle screws up our foreign policy. "Foreign Policy Forgotten" by Christopher R Hill. More Than Just Remembering -- By Madeleine Albright and William Cohen. The Nerve of 'Do as We Say, Not as We Do' Foreign Policy - Wendy Kaminer - Politics.