IPSNEWS.net
What a difference five years and an invasion and bungled occupation of Iraq make! References to the Roman Empire at this point are more likely to refer to its decline than to its power -- an observation confirmed even by Donald Kagan, a dean of neo-conservatism and Kennedy’s colleague at Yale, whose sons, Robert and Frederick, have been champions of the Bush Doctrine and the Iraq War.
"I’ve argued that not since the Roman Empire has anyone had such extraordinary power as the United States after the Cold War," Kagan told Kitfield. "But all of the elements of our strength are now being challenged, and it’s perfectly possible that we are seeing a relative decline in U.S. power that will prove lasting."
Indeed, that possibility has been transformed into a probability, if not a certainty, by a growing number of policy analysts who see major structural shifts in the distribution of global power -- both "hard" and "soft" -- none of which are likely to lead to the maintenance, let alone the enhancement of Washington’s post-Cold War dominance.
Not only have both Iraq and Afghanistan shown the world the limits of U.S. military power, but they are also exacting an increasingly fearsome toll on Washington’s ability to wage war.
Despite gains in the security situation in Iraq over the past year, top Pentagon brass and independent experts are warning that the current pace of deployments is creating a "hollow force" both in terms of personnel and equipment. In an echo of Kennedy 20 years ago, "overstretched" is the adjective most frequently associated with the U.S. military.
Just as Kennedy had warned against the deadly long-term impact on empires of budgetary deficits, the Bush years have seen an explosion not just of government debt -- currently more than nine trillion dollars -- but also of trade and balance-of-payments deficits. Much of this is due to the high price of oil and gas imports -- which a growing number of experts now believe has become a permanent fixture of the international economy.
The results of the evolving global geo-economy include a much-weakened dollar and increased reliance by both the U.S. government and U.S. business on foreign creditors. Among these creditors are state-controlled agencies (or sovereign wealth funds) some of which -- notably those of China, Russia, and oil-exporting Gulf states -- are not enthralled, to say the least, with Krauthammer’s unipolar vision.
If, for commercial or political reasons, any of these creditors decided to dump their hundreds of billions of dollars of dollar-denominated assets -- or in the case of key energy exporters, for example, to price their commodities in a currency other than the dollar -- the economic impact would be "grave", according to Charles Freeman, retired U.S Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Freeman’s point was echoed for the first time last week in the U.S. intelligence community’s annual review of the major global threats facing the nation.
The possibility that some combination of those creditors, whose own commercial ties have been growing at an accelerating rate, could decide to act in concert in order to constrain Washington’s freedom of action -- in Central Asia or Iran, for example -- is the emerging nightmare of U.S. policy- makers.
Some analysts, including the director of the Geopolitics of Energy Initiative of the New America Foundation (NAF), Flynt Leverett, profess to see the emergence of a potential counterweight to U.S. power -- one, significantly, that does not depend on the co-operation of Washington’s western allies.
"A ‘community’ of largely non-democratic manufacturing powers and energy exporters is already laying the groundwork for real strategic collaboration, aimed at limiting America’s ability to carry out [its] hegemonic agendas," Leverett, who served in the National Security Council under Bill Clinton and Bush, wrote recently in the ‘National Interest’ journal published by the Nixon Centre.
As a result, the degree to which Washington can slow its decline and preserve its primacy will depend increasingly on its willingness to suppress its unilateralist reflexes and "to take account of the perceptions and interests of others in its foreign-policy decision-making," according to Leverett.
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