Friday
Nov212008
Panic! US No Longer Number One!
Friday, November 21, 2008 at 9:56
Less than 24 hours after I argued, "America should not be at the centre of our approach to the world. It is not a case of 'America leads, we follow'," I read these headlines in the British press:
"No more them and us, with a farewell to American supremacy", "Sun setting on the American century", "US influence to decline"
The occasion for these doom-laden announcements is the publication of the US National Intelligence Council report, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World. Actually, the substance of the report was leaked months ago, but its formal presentation is the ideal accompaniment to the fretting of columnists such as Thomas Friedman and Paul Kennedy that "[Obama] is to run a country far less dominant, relatively, than at the time of Wilson, Truman and Kennedy".
Still, maybe we're overreacting. Maybe we can go to sleep assured that America is still protecting all of us. For this is the headline on the same report in the New York Times:
Global Forecast by American Intelligence Expects Al Qaeda’s Appeal to Falter
"No more them and us, with a farewell to American supremacy", "Sun setting on the American century", "US influence to decline"
The occasion for these doom-laden announcements is the publication of the US National Intelligence Council report, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World. Actually, the substance of the report was leaked months ago, but its formal presentation is the ideal accompaniment to the fretting of columnists such as Thomas Friedman and Paul Kennedy that "[Obama] is to run a country far less dominant, relatively, than at the time of Wilson, Truman and Kennedy".
Still, maybe we're overreacting. Maybe we can go to sleep assured that America is still protecting all of us. For this is the headline on the same report in the New York Times:
Global Forecast by American Intelligence Expects Al Qaeda’s Appeal to Falter