America's decline

I think that America is intoxicated by the notion of its powerful position in the world and is unaware that its circumstances are rapidly eroding.
  Steve Clemons post

The End of the American Era : U.S. Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics of the Twenty-first Century
by CHARLES KUPCHAN

Kupchan asserts that the rise of the European Union coupled with the emergence of a strengthened Asia will create a serious challenge to America's primacy, and that new fault lines will emerge around these multiple centers of power, creating a new cycle of history. With a belief that America will contribute to its own demise with the current "go-it-alone impulses" of American policy makers, he warns the U.S. to shy away from an isolationist policy that could alienate potential partners. Given most recent foreign policy developments, Kupchan's book should be more relevant-and more roundly criticized-than ever.
Copyright 2002

How America Became the World's Dispensable Nation
By Michael Lind
Whitehead Senior Fellow
The Financial Times
January 25, 2005

In a second inaugural address tinged with evangelical zeal, George W. Bush declared: "Today, America speaks anew to the peoples of the world." The peoples of the world, however, do not seem to be listening. A new world order is indeed emerging - but its architecture is being drafted in Asia and Europe, at meetings to which Americans have not been invited.

[...]

The deepening ties of the APT member states are a big diplomatic defeat for the US, which hoped to use the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum to limit the growth of Asian economic regionalism at American expense. In the same way, recent moves by South American countries to bolster an economic community represent a clear rejection of US aims to dominate a western-hemisphere free-trade zone.

Consider, as well, the EU's rapid progress towards military independence. American protests failed to prevent the EU establishing its own military planning agency, independent of the Nato alliance (and thus of Washington). Europe is building up its own rapid reaction force. And, despite US resistance, the EU is developing Galileo, its own satellite network, which will break the monopoly of the US global positioning satellite system.

The participation of China in Europe's Galileo project has alarmed the US military. But China shares an interest with other aspiring space powers in preventing American control of space for military and commercial uses. Even while collaborating with Europe on Galileo, China is partnering with Brazil to launch satellites. And in an unprecedented move, China recently agreed to host Russian forces for joint Russo-Chinese military exercises.

[...]

Nor is American democracy a shining example to mankind.[...] America's antiquated winner-take-all electoral system has been abandoned by many other democracies for more inclusive versions of proportional representation.

[...]

It is true that the US remains the only country capable of projecting military power throughout the world. But unipolarity in the military sphere, narrowly defined, is not preventing the rapid development of multipolarity in the geopolitical and economic arenas - far from it. And the other great powers, with the exception of the UK, are content to let the US waste blood and treasure on its doomed attempt at hegemony in the Middle East.

That the rest of the world is building institutions and alliances that shut out the US should come as no surprise. The view that American leaders can be trusted to use a monopoly of military and economic power for the good of humanity has never been widely shared outside the US. [...] In recent memory, nothing could be done without the US. But today, most international institution-building of any long-term importance in global diplomacy and trade occurs without American participation.

[...]

  New America article