[North-NV-Greens] Fwd: [usgp-dx] CIA report: US global dominance could end in 15 years (Fred Kaplan, Slate)

Sat Jan 29 23:36:34 PST 2005

>
>2020 Vision
>A CIA report predicts that American global
>dominance could end in 15 years.
>By Fred Kaplan
>
>Slate
>Posted Wednesday, Jan. 26, 2005, at 2:48 PM PT
>http://slate.com/Default.aspx?id=2112697&
>
>
>Who will be the first politician brave enough to
>declare publicly that the United States is a
>declining power and that America's leaders must
>urgently discuss what to do about it? This
>prognosis of decline comes not (or not only) from
>leftist scribes rooting for imperialism's
>downfall, but from the National Intelligence
>Councilóthe "center of strategic thinking" inside
>the U.S. intelligence community.
>
>The NIC's conclusions are starkly presented in a
>new 119-page document, "Mapping the Global
>Future: Report of the National Intelligence
>Council's 2020 Project." It is unclassified and
>available on the CIA's Web site. The report has
>received modest press attention the past couple
>weeks, mainly for its prediction that, in the
>year 2020, "political Islam" will still be "a
>potent force." Only a few stories or columns have
>taken note of its central conclusion:
>
>"The likely emergence of China and India ... as
>new major global playersósimilar to the advent of
>a united Germany in the 19th century and a
>powerful United States in the early 20th
>centuryówill transform the geopolitical landscape
>with impacts potentially as dramatic as those in
>the previous two centuries."
>
>In this new world, a mere 15 years away, the
>United States will remain "an important shaper of
>the international order"óprobably the single most
>powerful countryóbut its "relative power
>position" will have "eroded." The new "arriviste
>powers"ónot only China and India, but also
>Brazil, Indonesia, and perhaps othersówill
>accelerate this erosion by pursuing "strategies
>designed to exclude or isolate the United States"
>in order to "force or cajole" us into playing by
>their rules.
>
>America's current foreign policy is encouraging
>this trend, the NIC concluded. "U.S.
>preoccupation with the war on terrorism is
>largely irrelevant to the security concerns of
>most Asians," the report states. The authors
>don't dismiss the importance of the terror
>warófar from it. But they do write that a "key
>question" for the future of America's power and
>influence is whether U.S. policy-makers "can
>offer Asian states an appealing vision of
>regional security and order that will rival and
>perhaps exceed that offered by China." If not,
>"U.S. disengagement from what matters to U.S.
>Asian allies would increase the likelihood that
>they will climb on Beijing's bandwagon and allow
>China to create its own regional security that
>excludes the United States."
>
>To the extent that these new powers seek others
>to emulate, they may look to the European Union,
>not the United States, as "a model of global and
>regional governance."
>
>This shift to a multipolar world "will not be
>painless," the report goes on, "and will hit the
>middle classes of the developed world in
>particular" with further outsourcing of jobs and
>outflow of capital investment. In short, the
>NIC's forecast involves not merely a
>recalibration in the balance of world power, but
>alsoóas these things doóa loss of wealth, income,
>and, in every sense of the word, security.
>
>The trends should already be apparent to anyone
>who reads a newspaper. Not a day goes by without
>another story about how we're mortgaging our
>future to the central banks of China and Japan.
>The U.S. budget deficit, approaching a
>half-trillion dollars, is financed by their
>purchase of Treasury notes. The U.S. trade
>deficitómuch of it amassed by the purchase of
>Chinese-made goodsónow exceeds $3 trillion.
>Meanwhile, China is displacing the United States
>all across Asiaóin trade, investment, education,
>culture, and tourism. It's also cutting into the
>trade markets of Latin America. (China is now
>Chile's No. 1 export market and Brazil's No. 2
>trade partner.) Asian engineering students who
>might once have gone to MIT or Cal Tech are now
>going to universities in Beijing.
>
>Meanwhile, as the European Union becomes a
>coherent entity, the dollar's value against the
>euro has fallen by one-third in the past two
>years (one-eighth just since September). As the
>dollar's rate of return declines, currency
>investorsóincluding those who have been financing
>our deficitóbegin to diversify their holdings. In
>China, Japan, Russia, and the Middle East,
>central bankers have been unloading dollars in
>favor of euros. The Bush policies that have
>deepened our debt have endangered the dollar's
>status as the world's reserve currency.
>
>What is the Bush administration doing to alter
>course or at least cushion the blow? It's hard to
>say. During Condoleezza Rice's confirmation
>hearings last week, Sen. Paul Sarbanes, DñMd.,
>raised some questions about the nexus between
>international economics and political power. Rice
>referred him to the secretary of the treasury.
>
>The NIC issued the report a few weeks before
>Bushís inaugural address, but it serves to dump
>still more cold water on the lofty fantasy of
>America delivering freedom to oppressed people
>everywhere. In Asia, the report states, "present
>and future leaders are agnostic on the issue of
>democracy and are more interested in developing
>what they perceive to be the most effective model
>of governance." If the president really wanted to
>spread freedom and democracy around the planet,
>he would (among other things) need to present
>America as that "model of governance"óto show the
>world, by its example, that free democracies are
>successful and worth emulating. Yet the NIC
>report paints a world where fewer and fewer
>people look to America as a model of anything. We
>can't sell freedom if we can't sell ourselves.
>
>
>Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for
>Slate. He can be reached at
>war_stories at hotmail.com.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>__________________________________
>Do you Yahoo!?
>Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone.
>http://mobile.yahoo.com/maildemo
>_______________________________________________
>Natlcomaffairs mailing list
>To send a message to the list, write to:
>Natlcomaffairs at green.gpus.org
>To unsubscribe or change your list options, go to:
>http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/natlcomaffairs
>
>You must know your password to do this.
>
>If you can't figure out how to
>unsubscribe, as a last resort only,
>send a message OFF LIST to
>steveh at wagreens.us
>
>If your state delegation changes, please see:
>http://gp.org/committees/cc/documents/delegate_change.html
>
>For other information about the Coordinating Committee, see:
>http://gp.org/committees/cc/


-- 
Paul Etxeberri

"Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow"   ---Chateaubriand