Jay Soloman and Siobhan Gorman have an interesting piece in today’s WSJ entitled, “Financial Crisis May Diminish American Sway.”
Your first reaction might be “Ya think?” followed by “What can we do about it?” I think a better reaction might be “So what?” Being the world’s only remaining superpower — and $3.75 — will get you a grande latte at most Starbucks nowadays.
Or put another way, a defense budget the size of the rest of the world’s put together (a point they make) and $3 – 5 trillion (Bilmes – Stiglitz estimate) get you a debacle in the Middle East. Why is this good for the average US citizen, not to mention those of the rest of the world?
Of course the timing of the Defense reform anthology edited by Mr. Winslow Wheeler of the Straus Reform Project could not be timed better (release on November 12, 2008). Please go back and read the article linked above from the Wall Street Journal. If you have not read Limits of Power by Andy Bacevich, it is worth a trip to Amazon.com to pick it up, but if you don’t like the truth, don’t buy it.
Don
Another truth-filled book is ‘The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” by Paul Kennedy. Of course the normal rules don’t apply to us.
Robert,
One of my first academic books, read as a teenager (yes I was a geek), but I remember it to this day, and have always asked questions the powers to be did not like referencing back to it.
Normal rules don’t apply is what we call American Exceptionalism, where the lessons of history don’t apply.
Don
I did often use the Luxembourg example to show others that a nation can live extremely well without being powerful and large.
“the Luxembourg example to show others that a nation can live extremely well without being powerful and large.”
Thanks for making that point, and alow me to present
a further example in illustration, and a lot closer to home
for most.
This comes full circle to the burgeoning crisis of the legitimacy of state. Once pepole become so dis-enfranchised enmass, with the bagadge of ‘the state’
as we recognise it, and start seriously thinking outside the box, for what ever motivation.
And even THIS, zero intensity conflict, many here will instantly recognise as a variation of 4GW.
There endeth the lesson.
M
http://www.vtcommons.org/
http://www.vermontrepublic.org/
Major, sir : Si, e poi cosa?