A year or so after the ‘liberation’ of Iraq, an unnamed senior Bush administration official (later revealed to be Karl Rove) boasted: ‘We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.’ Yet a decade later, America’s power and influence has diminished considerably and the American people are suffering from foreign policy fatigue.
The greenback is weak, the debt mountain is of Himalayan proportions, the credit rating is downgraded and economic growth is exceptionally sluggish for a nation that is four years out of a recession. The Chinese own more and more of the US debt and they show no inclination to heed Washington’s demands to revalue the yuan or end their cyber-espionage or prevent North Korea from using nuclear weapons. And whereas two decades ago US military power was universally considered awesome, today the world is much more aware of its costs and limitations, and it is decidedly less impressed.
The ‘reality’ is that the age of US unipolarity, which began with the collapse of Soviet communism, is being increasingly replaced by a world populated by new assertive players, such as China, India, -Brazil, Turkey and, if its intervention in Syria is any guide, even Russia.
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