[North-NV-Greens] Fwd: Mapping the Global Future - 2020 Vision

[Paul Etxeberri]

>
>
>2020 Vision
>
>A CIA report predicts that American global dominance could
>end in 15 years.
>
>By Fred Kaplan
>
>Jan 26, 2005, Slate
>
>http://slate.msn.com/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 Council the "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 players similar to the advent of a united Germany in
>the 19th century and a powerful United States in the early
>20th century will 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"probably the single most powerful country but its
>"relative power position" will have "eroded." The new
>"arriviste powers"not only China and India, but also Brazil,
>Indonesia, and perhaps others will 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 war, far 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 also as these things do a 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 deficit much of it amassed by the purchase of
>Chinese-made goods now exceeds $3 trillion. Meanwhile, China
>is displacing the United States all across Asiain 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
>investors including those who have been financing our
>deficit begin 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,
>D Md., 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 Bush's 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"to 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.
>
>
>_______________________________________________________
>
>portside (the left side in nautical parlance) is a news,
>discussion and debate service of the Committees of
>Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. It aims to
>provide varied material of interest to people on the
>left.
>
>For answers to frequently asked questions:
><http://www.portside.org/faq>
>
>To subscribe, unsubscribe or change settings:
><http://lists.portside.org/mailman/listinfo/portside>
>
>To submit material, paste into an email and send to:
><moderator at portside.org> (postings are moderated)
>
>For assistance with your account:
><support at portside.org>
>
>To search the portside archive:
><http://people-link5.inch.com/pipermail/portside/>


-- 
Paul Etxeberri

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