Our foreign policy is an extension of our domestic policy. Our domestic policy is based upon consumerism and the continual growth of business. Not only the growth of business but an accelerating rate of growth. This type of growth can only be managed by consuming increasingly large amounts of resources, whether energy or raw materials.

But the days of seemingly unlimited supplies are drawing to a close. The world population is slated to go from 6.5 to 9 billion by mid-century. Backward countries like China and India are rapidly improving their standards of living and this, and the increased population, is making the strain on resources more severe.

The US (and the rest of the industrialized world) has had several hundred years as the ones who set the terms for how these resources are to be obtained and at what cost. They are now starting to lose this exclusive power. China, for example, is busy locking up oil deals in Africa and the middle east.

Our response to date has been to "send in the Marines", but this no longer works well. South America is now ignoring us and Iraq shows that control of the middle east is also doubtful. The neo-cons want to disguise our self-serving resource needs under a cover of "democratization". The neo-liberals want, instead, to use soft power through "negotiation" and spoon feed "democratization" rather than the force-fed variety.

What nobody wants to talk about is what is driving the demands - consumerism (or materialism, if you prefer). Attempts to continue to command 40% of the resources by 4% of the world population can only run into stiffer push back as time goes on. You can sugar coat it anyway you wish, but the situation can only get worse.

Instead of playing with relabeling our self-serving international demands, how about focusing on restructuring the way our economy is organized. There has been lots of work on developing a sustainable or steady-state economic model. One source I frequently cite is Herman Daly.

I've also got my 2 cents here. Daly focuses on the mathematical impossibility of continuing on our present path, I deal with the issues that capitalism which depends upon repaying investment via growth will no longer be viable under a steady-state economic system. I might just note that until the industrial revolution most societies were steady-state so this is not breaking new ground.

--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape

Any thoughtful analysis of Mr. Bush's Farce Upon terror needs to look at his hypocritical defense of democracy, most notably his unprincipled alliance with Pakistan, and its dictator Musharraf, as well as his Faustian pacts with the nepotic kleptocracies of the Central Asian Steppes. The several year alliance with Uzbekistan is especially obscene, given its leader, Islam Karimov, the Butcher of Andijon.

The effects of Bush's Central Asian Policies have been egregiously overlooked by most US analysts and tanks with the exception of The Jamestown Foundation. Because of US policies in Central Asia, Hizb ut-Tahrir has been able to acquire significant credence, and more activist radical Muslim organisations have been able to recruit there. Moreover, Bush's claim of a right to unilateral preemption against terrorists has provided cover for unjust acts committed by these central Asian states, as well as Russia, and China. A counterproductive miserable failure.

 Currently, and for several decades, the US foreign policy has been focused on what makes the most money for US corporations.  That has to cease.  No successful foreign policy can be based on making money for the powerful, very rich upper class in this country.  Such a foreign  policy was workable, but immoral, when most of the world lived in total poverty compared to the US and Europe.  But, it will be completely unworkable when China, India, Vietnam, and other former poverty stricken countries move up economically.

A factor that has been totally ignored in the push for "free trade" is that really free trade must lower the standard of living in the very well off countries, such as ours, just as it raises the standard of living in the poorer countries.  When jobs and investments move to where there is more money to be made, our country must suffer.  Our new foreign policy needs to account for this and work with it instead of using devious methods to fight it.

Many of our citizens, and most of our politicians like to claim that we are a "Christian" nation.  But, in doing that, they prefer not to have to live up to that claim.  I don't buy that we are a "Christian" or any other type of religious nation.  But, application of the principles of Christianity to foreign policy would be a good foundation.  And, a first for our nation. 

Hoppy in Sacramento

My own view is that the concert of democracies proposal is inherently divisive, and that despite the best intentions of its backers will almost certainly lead to a new Cold War of sorts among increasingly competing and polarized power blocs.

But one must also consider whether the thought partners of this Democratic Multinationalism really are interested in their assigned role. Australia and the European Union seem also be more for engaging constructively with problematic nations rather than to wait for them to become democracies.

Maybe many of them don't even think of America as sufficiently democratic to be a member of such a club, let alone to regard oneself as its "leader".

My own guess is that the door to such a Democratic Multinationalism already is closed. Its success would presume that the events from the impeachment of Clinton to the "re-definition" of torture would soon be forgotten.

Many supporters of the Democrat Party seem to believe that America is conceptually so pure and good that the only rehabilitation needed would be a 51%-49% victory in the next elections. They do not only forget those 49%, they also forget how very few of the Democrats that in the last years have voiced any audible opposition and appeared as house-trained advocates of Democracy and/or international peace.

Maybe it will be forgotten in America.
- But elsewhere? That can be seriously doubted.

I'll only comment on one of your points:

...if it was so dominant the U.S. would never have allow the Saudis to raise oil prices in the 70's...

You are making an assumption that there is a common interest in the US. This is false. There are competing interests. Raising oil prices helped one sector (the oil majors and their owners - like the Bush family) while hurting another (the man in the street). One of the reasons for discontent in the US these days is that the group whose interests are being promoted has shrunk down to be primarily the top 1%. There is enough spillover to the top 20% that (so far) we haven't had riots in the streets, but don't assume that government policies are the result of the popular will.

--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape

Interesting thoughts, Hoppy. Clearly, the failed neocon projects in Iraq and Afganistan demonstrate the limits of what can be achieved with military force in the Muslim world. So I think your instinct towards globalization is the right one.

Capitalism, for all its warts, has been the most transformative "movement" of the last 100 years. In particular, capitalism presents perhaps the best antidote to Islamic fundamentalist we have left. For all of its evils, capitalism forces modernity upon cultures. In the case of harmless native cultures, forced modernity can be unfortunate. I don't think anyone would argue, however, that transforming the economies of countries like Afganistan and Pakistan so they look more like those of Turkey and Malaysia would be bad for the world. Such a change would require these nations to invest in their workers. Education, training, technology, and some good old capitalistic greed would help drain the swamp of jihad and replace it with something more predictable and consistent with western values.

The tougher nuts to crack are oil-cursed countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia. There is no incentive for the leaders of these countries to turn their workers into individual GDP-factories a la China and India, since oil provides all the money they need. Globalization won't penetrate these cultures effectively as long as they have oil revenues to rely on.

Finally, there is the issue of the environment. How can we reform globalization so that it doesn't create the pollution backlashes we see in India and China all over the world? I think a strong argument can be made that global warming and/or peak oil present dangers equal to any conventional enemy. So your national strategy will need to address this as well.

At some point, oil independence has to come up. Our burning of fossil fuels facilitates both greenhouse gases and radical Islam, so oil independence must sit at the center of any national strategy. If you can ween the world off of oil, you can start to penetrate the Middle East with globalization to "infect" the Muslim world with modernity...all while saving the planet from environmental catastrophe.

Here's my question: can the US and Western Europe reform the existing international institutions (UN, IMF, WTO) to make them effective tools in a progressive foreign policy that stresses markets in the Islamic world and oil independence across the globe?

(Please note, I'm really not a free market guy. My argument is actually quite pessimistic. It basically boils down to: capitalism is the only tool we have left. And criticisms aside, no one can deny its raw power...)

"The administration's strategy has been based, instead, upon four ideas:

1. the primacy of force;

2. the preservation of a unipolar order;

3. the unbridled exercise of U.S. power;

4. the right to initiate preventive war in the absence of immediate threats."

I think what was clear to many of us outside of the official policy circles was that the US while much stronger than every other nation militarily, fitting in many instances into the profile of a hegemon; was not strong enough to dominate the entire world- or even unwilling remote parts of it.

Having the ability to "pull the plug", as we have since the 1960's does not translate to total control, for while we have enormous strength, the leadership structures of this society inherently limit the amount of intelligence that can be placed behind that strength.

Our failures in Iraq translate entirely to this lack of organizational intelligence which I and many others feel is an inherent limitation in authoritarian or quasi-dictatorial control structures. As I have pointed out in other places the strongest advocates for the war, organization wise, also were the strongest groups for destroying any efforts to plan or execute Phase IV successfully- a requirement for a "successful" outcome.

To truly see what first principles failed we must start by examining all of the forces behind the failure of Phase IV and work backward toward the advocacy and desire for the war itself. Those who wanted it got exactly what they wanted to almost precise specifications. That many branches of our internal governing structures could predict the scope of the failure if not is shape and size from the moment the executive branch made clear its intention, speaks more to the problems inherent in trying to lead by authoritarianism in the complex, directly connected, and widely educated modern era.

The true failures of the Bush policy were in its lack of organizational intelligence, this bodes ill for the long term health and relevance of the many corporate bodies and other organized interests that planned and backed this venture, looking at strength as a primacy, rather than the intelligence needed to guide it.

The 21st century will be not about stockpiling arms, but rather stockpiling minds and helping them to work together efficiently. That China has seen this 3 decades before the US and that even now in the face of the first demonstrations of the obvious limitations of our physical power the ruling class has still not learned the lesson, focusing rather on the empty tenets of religions that failed to bring their followers any lasting legacy. I speak of course about those Hegellian fantasies that were repackaged by the wars salesman to make the above 4 quoted tenets to appear to be more than empty tautologies.

Perhaps we should have a separate discussion on alternative fuels, but if you are interested in the topic there have been many such discussion on the European Tribune blog. To oversimplify: wind, solar and tide will only provide a small fraction (say 20%) of energy needs. None provide liquid fuels either. That leaves nuclear and coal for electricity and the unproven coal to oil technology for liquid fuel.

A much more workable (and less polluting) approach is conservation. Notice that the US has done nothing about improving vehicle mileage. Using existing technology in place in Europe we can halve our automobile gasoline consumption.

Another thing that could be done without abandoning capitalism would be to change the laws that manage corporations. Rather than having maximizing profit for stockholders as the only goal, consideration of working conditions and pollution and resource use could be added. What the exact form this would take could make another good topic for discussion.

We are also responsible for the rapacious actions of corporations. We, as investors in mutual funds and 401k plans, want the highest returns. People think that 10-15% return per year is reasonable and punish firms which don't reach this level. Actual returns over the long term are more like 8% which means firms are being driven to act in unsustainable ways - maximizing returns now at the expense of what can be done later.

If we had a better retirement system people wouldn't be so desperate for high returns.

--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape

The Myth of HyperPower

Sometimes it makes me wanna blow my top! Just because America has the most sophisticated, well-stocked arsenal of killing devices ever assembled on God's sorry-assed earth does not mean America is powerful, unless we look at power as simply the ability to kill adversaries.

Real power is the ability to get one's adversaries to negotiate mutually beneficial agreeements, something that will never happen through the blunt use of military force. Bush and the neocons use military force as a substitute for the tough gritty work of actually negotiating with disagreeable, fractious nations that nonetheless have some measure of power to affect us. The ultimate weakness of the neocon ideal (now foolishly adopted by much of the American public) is the playground bully approach to international affairs. If you don't agree to our terms, we'll beat you up.

The important lesson of the Iraq war, for all its failed noble objectives, is that our war leaves America in a much worse position than we were in before we went in. While Saddam may have been a terrible adversary, untrustworthy and unsavory, the challenge for the US was to find a way to negotiate with or around him. Now that we have cleared him out we find we are still faced with an almost impossible negotiating task, and under far worse circumstances than Saddam ever posed. There may well be a place where application of our military might would be effective, but this is not it.

Iraq is the wind that blows the curtain of OZ open, it exposes the myth of American hyperpower. With all our technical wizardry and our power to kill, we wish we could simply skip over the rough and tumble human aspect of power, operate the levers of power, charm the world into believing our power to be inviolable, have them simply bow down before us, throwing flowers and sweets. It is a childish wish. It is an utterly mistaken idea. While some might bow before us as our tanks rumble through their streets and our jets roar overhead and our shock and awe bombs crackle on the night sky, most will find a way to fight back. Eventually it always boils down to negotiation, finding a way to coexist amid competing interests.

Making war on Iraq has done nothing to resolve issues, it has merely rearranged conditions. And they are demonstrably worse as a direct result of making war.

War is the problem. Not Iraqi intransigence. Not failed strategies. Not bad intelligence. War. War waged by an American public intoxicated with the Myth of Hyperpower. What good is war?

You said:

Furthermore, corporate interests are just part of the public will.

I think you will find many people who disagree with you on this point. People don't get to express their will on corporate behavior. The closest they come is the ability to sell the stock (if they own any) in a company which they don't like. We don't elect the managers of corporations. Even the boards are essentially self-perpetuating. The number of times a board is replaced by the stockholders can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Corporations do get to buy politicians and then get them to put policies in place which provide direct benefit. Perhaps this latest election will lead to more people being elected without major corporate backing, but that still remains to be seen. As long as elections are as expensive as they are only big business will be able to fund them. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

Over 40% of workers polled say they would join a union if they were given the chance. How is this public will being expressed?

--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape

Excellent point, Hoppy:
"Many of our citizens, and most of our politicians like to claim that we are a "Christian" nation. But, in doing that, they prefer not to have to live up to that claim. I don't buy that we are a "Christian" or any other type of religious nation. But, application of the principles of Christianity to foreign policy would be a good foundation. And, a first for our nation."

As a poet, I'm reminded of what Joseph Campbell wrote back in 1949 in his classic, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In the following quote, Campbell addresses this very point. He's discussing the effect of rites of initiation. He emphasizes the ingroup/outgroup dichotomy, with particular reference to Christianity. Upon the completion of the rite,

"....A new and larger paradise is thus established. But this paradise does not include the traditional enemy tribes, or races, against whom aggression is still systematically projected. All of the "good" father-mother content is saved for home, while the "bad" is flung abroad and about: 'for who is this uncircumcise'd Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?' [ I Samuel, 17:26]. 'And slacken not in following up the enemy: if ye are suffering hardships, they are suffering similar hardships; but ye have hope from Allah, while they have none.' [Koran 4:104]

"Totem, tribal, racial, and aggressively missionizing cults represent only partial solutions of the psychological problem of sub¬duing hate by love; they only partially initiate. Ego is not annihilated in them; rather, it is enlarged; instead of thinking only of himself, the individual becomes dedicated to the whole of his society. The rest of the world meanwhile (that is to say, by far the greater portion of mankind) is left outside the sphere of his sympathy and protection because outside the sphere of the protection of his god. And there takes place, then, that dramatic divorce of the two principles of love and hate which the pages of history so bountifully illustrate. Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world. The laws of the City of God are applied only to his in-group (tribe, church, nation, class, or what not) while the fire of a perpetual holy war is hurled (with good conscience, and indeed a sense of pious service) against whatever uncircumcised, barbarian, heathen, "native," or alien people happens to occupy the position of neighbor.['For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love, this is an old rule' (from the Buddhist Dhammapada, 1:5; “Sacred Books of the East," Vol. X, Part I, p. 5; translation by Max Müller)].

"The world is full of the resultant mutually contending bands; totem-, flag-, and party-worshipers. Even the so-called Christian nations—-which are supposed to be following a "World" Redeemer-—are better known to history for their colonial and internecine strife than for any practical display of that unconditioned love, synonymous with the effective conquest of ego's world, and ego's tribal god, which was taught by their professed supreme Lord: 'I say unto you, Love your enemies; do good to them which hate you. Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you" [ Luke, 6:27-36]' (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 2nd edition, pp. 156-157).

Wasn't it Fleischman, the doctor on the TV show Northern Exposure, who said, "C'mon, people! Have we forgotten our comparative mythology?" I'm afraid so.

As Campbell never tired of saying, a myth is not a lie, it's a metaphor: a vehicle for going from ignorance to understanding. The present dominant American myth, Manifest Destiny by name, would have us believe that the slave ships of old actually were pleasure cruises. The Bush Administration would have us believe that anyone who dares question them, like Helen Thomas, is in league with the terrorists, if not the devil himself.

I think the comic genius of Colbert and Stewart comes from their showing us that our leaders actually are grotesque parodies of the real thing. Stewart and Colbert are faithfully discharging the duty Campbell explicitly gave to artists of all kinds: to "render to us an experience of the transcendent in terms of the world in which we're living" [from the film Sukhavati: Place of Bliss]. Their comedy serves as a potent antidote to propaganda.

Oddly enough, physics and Christ's message have a lot in common. He was crucified for preaching that "I and the Father are one." Ever since Einstein's dramatic revelation of relativity, which spurred the claim that "God is dead," we've known that there really is no absolute, eternal divide one thing from another. So Divinity is not dead, only the mistaken belief that it is always 'out there,' never 'in here.'

But one reads every day of the calamitous effects of an adamant belief in this divide, e.g., the "chasm" between Shia and Sunni in Iraq, "cracks" in the system, gaps of all kinds we must somehow bridge. We believe in a fractured universe in which spurious divides actually exist. We see the universe as if looking through a windshield infinitely cracked.

Unity, not division, is the basis of existence, making compassion, not competition, the proper basis for human relations.

An insoluble belief that, somehow, somewhere, 'I' stop and 'you' start is at the root of all conflict. According to this belief, since 'I' am not 'you,' then 'your' pain is not 'mine.' Christ was crucified for denying this divide. In the 9th century, Halaj was crucified by Islam for saying the same thing. The poet Rumi most eloquently expresses the same insight.

Bush is described as being in a "bubble." So as a dutiful poet, I submit the following knock-knock joke in the effort to burst it:

KNOCK-KNOCK!
(who's there???)
DIVINITY!
(divinity who?)
KNOW! DIVINITY YOU!

It wouldn't be nice to rob you of your hope.

But consider what kind of purification those nations have gone through, and how long time it's still has taken to get forgiven - let alone be considered equally good.

The Germans are on their way. The Russians not so. The perception of the Italians remain that of an immature nation. And that despite them all, back then, being ruled by dictators.

France and Britain would be the counterexamples, but they did their purification, and they had the good taste to be nicer to culturally kindred nations.

My point may be that it's not the Bush-administration's sinns that will cause most long-term disadvantage on U.S. goodwill and standing in the world, but the spineless institutional and political opposition and the appearance that the American constitutional system didn't stand the test.

By the way:
States have interests, not friends.

Nations, on the other hand, have a collective memory.

I do not at all disagree with you with regard to other empires.

However, very few democratic nations, major or not, have a track record as bad, and the alienating aspect is exactly the steps away from the tradition of democracy.

Any new, successful, foreign policy will have to be based on acknowledging and working towards rectifying the legitimate grievances of those exploited and marginalized by past policy, whether intended, such as interventions supporting private capital ( Im thinking United Fruit throughout the Carribean,Phillipines, minerals in S America, oil development all over,you get the picture) or "liberal"in nature, such as development loans, or ideological like "democracy building" in Chile and Guatemala and Iraq and Nicaragua and present day Colombia.

Reparations must include elimination of all odious dept coupled with development grants paid for by a Tobin tax on all financial transactions and a return to a progressive tax code.We must normalize relations with Cuba and Iran and place primary emphasis on a just settlement and viable state for Palestinians. Next in importance would be nuclear disarmament,including Israel and India and then serious commitment to reducing CO2. Thats a start.

While on the subject of the Americas south of the USA, it is also relevant to ponder how an American President managed to be such a miserable failure in our own back-yard. A miserable failure indeed, for how else can one describe an administration so incompetent it lost, and continues to lose a class-based dialectic debate to a South American socialist politician in the Post-Soviet reality?

Mexico has been a BuShambles also. After Vincente Fox's won against the PRI, Bush started out well, engaging in a dialogue regarding cross border issues, including immigrant workers, but Post-911, he seemed to ignore Fox's overtures, and play pure pro politics, pandering to the prejudiced GOP base. It left Fox's hind-end waving in the breeze, and caused the Mexican citizenry to quickly become disenchanted with the first political party change in Mexico for 70 years. In Mexico, as in most of the Countries South of the USA, Bush's foreign policies have caused a heavy political shift to the hard left, as well as a great loss of esteem for America.

It is not hard to understand one of the main underlaying causes for the ill wind of political change: it is the Return of the Iran/Contra Racketeers, who just happen to also be NeoConnivers. Negroponte, and Abrams should have never been allowed to hold prominent positions in any US Administration again.

Another failure is policy towards Cuba, For the large majority of my life, America has caused great pain and suffering to the people of Cuba, because of Fidel Castro. I firmly believe that it is these counterproductive sanctions which has enabled Castro to remain in control. Any and all of Cuba's woes, are not the result of discredited ideologies, you see; but are instead the fault of the USA's imperialist policies. After the fall of the Soviet, we should have opened up free trade avenues with Cuba. Let them sell their Sugar and Rum, freely upon the open market, in a process antithetical to Communist Ideals. Let them receive a fair price in hard currencies for the exchange. When the Cuban people realise how little of this windfall had managed to trickle down into their pockets, their dissatisfaction would have begun to increase. Instead, Fidel approaches his death, and there looks to be an almost nil change of political regime change after it occurs.

Cheney has still yet to be publicly flogged for advancing the 'Salvador' option in Iraq during the '04 election:

"Twenty years ago we had a similar situation in El Salvador. We had -- guerrilla insurgency controlled roughly a third of the country, 75,000 people dead, and we held free elections. I was there as an observer on behalf of the Congress.

The human drive for freedom, the determination of these people to vote, was unbelievable. And the terrorists would come in and shoot up polling places; as soon as they left, the voters would come back and get in line and would not be denied the right to vote.

And today El Salvador is a whale of a lot better because we held free elections.

The power of that concept is enormous. And it will apply in Afghanistan, and it will apply as well in Iraq."

Dick Cheney, Vice Presidential Debate with John Edwards, October 5, 2004, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio

This was a rather terrorising proposition, but very few pundits have pointed it out.

Throughout the Bush presidency, there has been another miserable failure in his policies to the South. Bush's unconscionable unitary focus on a singularity; the assuagement of his deep-seated Oedipal neurosis by waging War Upon Iraq, and deposing Saddam Hussein, the evidence notwithstanding, enabled China to waltz into S. America, and contract with many nations for the future production of natural resources, as well as many future agricultural products, mostly soy beans. This occurred during Bush's first term, when manufacturing in the US had slowed down, creating slack in the supply lines from S. America to the North. Hu Jintao walked onto our home field, and literally kicked our asses playing our own game by our own rules. It also gives China an advantageous place to dump their excess of US dollars, and puts South America in an even more precarious position, should the dollar ever tumble. All the while China whispers into their ears;

"Little Brothers,
we are much gentler than the USofA
when we pillage and rape...
now say Che, not Cheney."

Most Americans are still unaware, and when they are rudely awakened from their arrogant naivete, and discover that Hu owns you, me, and every thee in between, and then realise that All Our Credit Are Belong to the PRC, they're gonna be mighty pissed, but I can guarantee you that the NeoCons will have already renounced their past ties, and will be on the other side, pointing their fingers of blame.

After Mr. Bush's reelection, in an effort to provide hope to his supporters, he promoted the very administration member who should have been watching out for our economic interests, US Trade Representative, Robert Zoellick, to be Deputy Secretary of State. Contemporary Conservatives breathed a collective sigh of relief, as Mr. Bush once again proved to them with his promotions, that the Peter Principle is nothing but an urban myth...people can be, and will be promoted past their level of incompetence.

---*---*---*---|

"I'm the master of low expectations.
I think we accomplished
what I hoped we would accomplish,
but I don't think we necessarily exceeded expectations.
I think 'met expectations' is a better way to put it."

GW Bush on Airforce One - 2003.06.04
quoted from:
"Bush Flying High in Air Force One"
LA Times - 2003.06.05

Re: Ever since Einstein's dramatic revelation of relativity, which spurred the claim that "God is dead,"

"God is dead" was stated by Nietzsche well before the Theory of Relativity came along. Einstein's theory, which is much misunderstood by those lacking a background in such things, has no theological ramifactions that I know of

Bush's unconscionable unitary focus on a singularity [...] enabled China to waltz into S. America, and contract with many nations for the future production of natural resources, as well as many future agricultural products, mostly soy beans. This occurred during Bush's first term, when manufacturing in the US had slowed down, creating slack in the supply lines from S. America to the North. Hu Jintao walked onto our home field, and literally kicked our asses playing our own game by our own rules.

This has been the blindspot in the media that only the foreign policy and foreign trade wonks seem to be aware of.This article from Political Affairs Magazinepointed out as early as February 2005 the many economic fronts on which the U.S. has lost ground to China in South America. It seems to me that the U.S., and especially the Bush Administration, have over-estimated the impact of the loss of the Soviet Union upon leftism, and under-estimated the ability of a power like China to resuscitate leftism by offering their own brand of socialist capitalism.

It's a shame that Bush 41 and Bush 43 don't have an open dialog about current policy issues; if there is a front where the current administration could use the former's counsel, it is in developing a consistent, unitary stance vis-a-vis Mexico. The senior Bush's experience as CIA director should give him the ability to soberly assess the inauspicious inauguration he attended in Mexico City a couple days ago. Even though entering the halls of Congress to take the oath of office is a largely ceremonial act, one would imagine that GHWB must have been struck by the circus like manoevering necessary to carry out this ceremony. It's hard to acknowledge victory for a party that has to rely upon trickery and a swift exit for the appearance of rule of law. Can anyone imagine a U.S. president being sneaked in and out of the inauguration ceremony? Even post 9/11?

Maybe the ultimate reason the Shrubbery refuses to pull out of Iraq is that our presence there keeps the media focused on that front. Once the foreign affairs spotlight pulls back and casts an angle wider than even Fahreed Zakaria's, we're going to see just how much weaker the U.S. stands in the world after Bush.

Jew-haters like Mr. Murray can drop dead.

There are two relevant remarks that can be made to this.

1.
What do you consider as requirements for democracy?
When did Britain and the Netherlands become democratic nations?

The important point here is not that one view may be "right" or another "wrong," but that the answer may support Olofsson's initial statement that maybe many of them don't even think of America as sufficiently democratic to be a member of such a club, let alone to regard oneself as its "leader".

2.
The other point would be along the line of And why do you take note of the grain of dust in your brother's eye, but take no note of the bit of wood which is in your eye?

Any listing of comparable crimes against foreign nations would be long and bothersome, but it can hardly be imagined that democratic Britain, France or Holland comes anywhere close to the democratic United States in that disheartening competition.

What the Netherlands, France and Britain has done is dissassembling their colonial and/or imperial realms, and in my opinion not quite without honour.

The least honorable was probably France's Algerian War, and de Gaulle's Fifth Republic of France is if not exactly the kind of purification Olofsson refers to, an expression for the related state of commonly recognized need for radical change and re-focus.

- - - -

It's pretty obvious that heavyweights of the Democrat Party are not yet speaking in favor of any kind of purification that would come even close to the transition from France's Forth to Fifth Republics.

/Tuomas

The European Union do both!

Some people would find it hard to see a dichotomy between promoting democracy and working with problematic states. They would say it's exactly by engaging the less democratic countries, that the threats they present can be hoped to be defused. Promotion of democracy is not only by neoconservatives believed to be beneficial, but many others would stress it must be pursued delicately and indirectly rather than as a centerpiece of policy. [The aspiring members of the European Union may be seen as an exception, but it mustn't be forgotten that Democracy is only one of dozens of areas where new member states are required to harmonize with the community.]

It's promising if more and more American voices start to see democracy as a long process, not a state, concluding that many components are needed as a basis for sound democracy. Rule of Law and Equality before the law may be one of the most fundamental. Liberties, with regard to opinion, education, trade, and ownership are so too, and in many's opinion economic inequalities may be considered harmful for a democratic development.

- - -

I can't comment on the Far East that, unfortunately, is off my radar.

/Tuomas

Unless you are referring to some point of initiation in these studies, 2004 is a bit early. The House report carries the date April 6, 2005 and the Noriega statements come from that period as well. This all makes sense considering Hu Jintao's whirlwind tour of Latin America was November 2004. Chavez visited Beijing the next month.

I found this bit from Noriega's statment rather surprising:

China is not only importing more raw materials from the Western Hemisphere, but it is also making significant investments in the region. The Chinese Ministry of Commerce estimates the cumulative total of Chinese investment in Latin America as of the end of 2003 was US$4.62 billion, accounting for 14 percent of China's total cumulative realized outward investment. Preliminary Ministry figures estimate that 46 percent of China's 2004 foreign investment was in Latin America and the Caribbean, adding another $1.7 billion to the total.

No harm done. I'll readily acknowledge my own dilletantism and wear it as a badge to further indict this administration's gross negligence in conducting foreign policy beyond a very narrow set of objectives. If all one had to go by was this White House, one would think that all American foreign relations go through Asia. Even then, as we've been discussing, at some point they should come back to the Western Hemisphere to realize they have more to be concerned about than an ill-defined war on terror.

The thing that pisses me off the most is that Bush and Condi have been given a golden opportunity to set the table for a post-Fidel thaw in Cuban-American relations. Yet, because we're so bogged down in the Middle East militarily and in the Far East economically, they don't have enough time to exploit it. Say what you want about Castro, but Clinton's handling of the Elian Gonzalez incident, in the end, was an opening into better dialog. By contrast, from the beginning this administration has been about rachetting up the tension and rolling back all good will with Cuba, as if that was all it took to win the Cold War and therefore should be employed everywhere.

They (Bush and Co.) bungled the diplomacy end of the coup against Chavez, they've been blind as South America turns left and away from Washington, and they were out to lunch as Ortega reclaimed power in Nicaragua. For a bunch that tried to do a gross mimcry of Reagan in foreign relations, they've managed to undo most of the security we thought we had won in 1990-1. Russia is again a growing threat, the new Asian economic bogeyman is more menacing than Japan ever was, and now Latin America finds China a more honest trading partner than the U.S. I don't think the reckoning has even begun for Bush as a foreign policy failure.