USA And The Future Of The World

[acharya]

Pakistan, a nuclear nation, is splitting despite lots of aid and support from the U.S.

Analysts who are very familiar with Iraq have announced that Iran is the strategic winner in Bush’s Iraq War, even though Washington’s troop surge seems to be a big victory. The Iraq War has encouraged Iran greatly by cultivating a new regional superpower, and it seems that Iran may become a major architect of the new Iraq.

It is unfortunate that people have forgotten during Bush’s age of arrogance that it is the military, economic and moral forces that uphold American superiority. The Abu Ghraib scandal, America’s invasion of a sovereign country without provocation and the stupidity that allowed radical Muslims to describe the U.S. as the enemy of 1.5 billion Muslims have all sent the moral superiority the U.S. possessed before 2003 up in flames.

Washington’s uncritical support of Israel at the expense of the Palestinians is considered excessive hypocrisy by lots of countries. Therefore, the conflict between the U.S. and Islam might be irreversible. Muslims believe that Islam will never lose its moral high ground - and they will not give it up easily.

Even The National Interest, a politically conservative publication, acknowledged these problems. Robert Pape stated in the latest issue that “The self-inflicted wounds of the Iraq War, growing government debt, increasingly negative current-account balances and other internal economic weaknesses have cost the United States real power in today’s world of rapidly spreading knowledge and technology. If present trends continue, we will look back at the Bush administration years as the death knell for American hegemony."

Now the U.S. economy is suffering from a large-scale reduction, and it is time to get rid of this spiritual shackle of superpower heritage and accept a more peripheral agenda. This doesn’t mean isolationism or retreat. The U.S. still needs of a large amount of high-quality military forces, but they can only be used when it is affordable and there are national interests at stake. The Iraq War does not conform to these requirements.