Enfeebled superpower: how America lost its grip

[struggle4progress]

From The Sunday Times
June 22, 2008

The mighty US has held the best ever hand in global political history but played it spectacularly badly. Now its influence is waning on all fronts

Fareed Zakaria

... It was not just the substance of American policy that changed in the unipolar era. So did the style, which has become imperial and imperious. There is much communication with foreign leaders but it’s a one-way street. Other governments are often simply informed of US policy. Senior American officials live in their own bubbles, rarely having genuine interaction with their overseas counterparts, let alone other foreigners. Bush’s foreign visits - he was in London last week - seem designed to require as little contact as possible with the countries he visits.

“When we meet American officials they talk and we listen - we rarely disagree or speak frankly because they simply can’t take it in. They simply repeat the American position, like the tourist who thinks he needs to speak louder and slower and then we will understand,” a senior foreign policy adviser in a European government told me. To foreigners, US officials seem clueless about the world they are supposed to be running.

“There are two sets of conversations, one with Americans in the room and one without,” says Kishore Mahbubani, formerly Singapore’s UN ambassador. Because Americans live in a “cocoon”, they don’t see the “sea change in attitudes towards America throughout the world” ...

Having spooked ourselves into believing that we Americans have no option but to act fast and alone, preemptively and unilaterally, we have managed to destroy decades of international goodwill, alienate allies and embolden enemies, while solving few of the international problems we face. Through inattention, fear and bureaucratic cowardice, the caricature of the bad American threatens to become reality ...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article4186066.ece

[bemildred]

1. It's been a long, bumpy downhill ride since WWII with these corporate weasels in charge.

This is just the end-game in a much longer tale of incompetence.