I posted some of my thoughts on North Korea's nuclear test here, but the salient point is the last, so here:

This isn't just a failure for the United States, but also for China, which supplies the North Koreans with fuel oil and other necessities to prevent a flood of North Korean refugees into their northern territories. North Korea used to be considered a Chinese proxy state (like East Germany in Cold War days), but no longer; China's desperate drive to be the regional economic powerhouse depends on trade. If the White House can get China to understand that an unstable Pacific means a lack of commerce and growth, they could turn out to be our strongest ally; but if Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney push the morality card, and appear to be moving towards a confrontation one way or another, China will almost certainly take sides against its biggest economic rival.

The irony of China and the United States is at least for now both need each other. In order for China to keep its economy growing fast enough for the government to keep its side of the bargin the United State economy has to grow fast enough for U.S. consumers to keep buying Chinese goods. For the U.S. governmetn to keep priming the pump by running enormous budget deficitis the Chinese must be willing to buy U.S. Tresuries. An interesting pas de deux.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

And unlike China, the United States is indeed "forcefully exporting" our model, that is the very point of our current "democracy promotion" campaign in Iraq. But, through threats of economic embargo (through the IMF & World Bank) that is also how we've tried to export our model under the umbrella of "globalization" for two decades. What's new, from a non-US perspective, is that we are now willing to use troops to export our concept of democracy. Few Americans are willing to own up to the fact that we were "forcefully exporting" our model throughout the Cold War just as strongly as the Soviets were. We won the Cold War in part because we used different tools and we were better at it than they were.

In his "Can Asians Think" Kishore Mahbubani disputes one of our most cherished notions, that liberal democracy produces prosperity. He argues that our much prized notions of things like a free press and universal franchise are not the cause of prosperity, but the result of prosperity. He argues that democracy is one of the ways that the middle class participates in the distribution of wealth. The example of the "Asian Tigers" supports his thesis. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore built their industrial juggernauts during decades of one party rule where the ruling party was basically little more than a tool of industrial  concerns (AKA "national socialism"). The resulting prosperity then lead to pluralistic democracy.

I assume that Jentleson's comment "how we’ve so damaged our own appeal" refers to our current attempt to promote democracy as a "take it or die" proposition at the end of a gun. True enough, if it has to be done at the end of a gun instead of through seduction, it's called rape. But it goes much deeper than that. What do we offer as a model? An economy where more and more of the wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer families? Latin America already has THAT! They don't want more of it!

I sell my own brand of software over the internet with customers in 56 nations.  Good customer support is the best R&D department a small software company can have. I've therefore built numerous close relations with customers that extend beyond just their features wish lists. On our private developer's forum a comment by a customer in China rang true for customers in Latin America and Africa - "Show me a democracy that works. Show me a democracy that promotes national purpose, harmony, and cohesion instead of animosity between it's citizens as they fight over the scraps left by the elites. Show me a democracy that does not avoid civil war by bribing it's electorate with wealth borrowed from it's grandchildren."  Guess who got the most votes on the forum. It wasn't the US of A. It was South Africa!?! It is entirely irrelevant that we can argue about the accurracy of that perspective if we cannot, and do not, project a different image - actions speak louder than words.

There's an old truism that a dysfunctional family is the last to know just how dysfunctional it's become because of all the things the family's done to compensate.  If we want to seduce the world into being more like Kansas we first need to answer the question, "Who in hell would WANT to be more like Kansas?"