Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed Are Tearing America Apart - Hardcover

Buchanan, Patrick J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312376960 ISBN 13: 9780312376963

Verlag: Thomas Dunne Books, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

The conservative political thinker and best-selling author of State of Emergency forecasts America's social and cultural collapse as he describes how current policies will cause a permanent loss of American sovereignity and independence and the impact of substituting ideology for true faith in a de-Christianized America. 300,000 first printing.

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PATRICK J. BUCHANAN, America’s leading traditional conservative, was a senior adviser to three American presidents, ran twice for the Republican presidential nomination, in 1992 and 1996, and was the Reform Party’s candidate in 2000. The author of eight other books, including the bestsellers Right from the Beginning; A Republic, Not an Empire; The Death of the West; Where the Right Went Wrong; and State of Emergency, he is a syndicated columnist and a founding member of three of America’s foremost public affairs shows, NBC’s The McLaughlin Group and CNN’s The Capitol Gang and Crossfire. He lives in McLean, Virginia.

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Day of Reckoning

1

The End of Pax Americana

Never glad confident morning again!

--ROBERT BROWNING, "THE LOST LEADER"

 

 

 

The American Century is over.

Pax Americana has come to a close. Gone now is all the hubristic chatter of an American Empire. Gone is the "unipolar world" where the United States was the undisputed hegemonic power.

"The US has had its unipolar moment for about fifteen years but is beginning to realize that it isn't getting the things done it wants," says Paul Kennedy, author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. The essay that carried his verdict was titled "Imperial Sunset."1 Kennedy now believes that America's task is "managing relative decline."2

Yet after the startlingly swift U.S. triumph in the Afghan war, the rout of the Taliban and fall of Kabul, Kennedy himself had succumbed to hubris, declaring of George W. Bush's America:

Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power, nothing ... . No other nation comes close ... . Charlemagne's empire was merely western European in its reach.The Roman empire stretched farther afield, but there was another great empire in Persia, and a larger one in China. There is, therefore, no comparison.3

Now we can see clearly that the American tide has begun to recede. We have entered a new world--a world of a multiplicity of powers like the world of a century ago, when the British Empire, following the Boer War, found itself divided at home and challenged abroad by rising powers in Asia, Europe, and North America.

The signs of decline abound. From the Davos Conference of 2007, Newsweek foreign editor Fareed Zakaria reported: "[F]or the first time I can remember, America was somewhat peripheral ... . In this small but significant global cocoon, people seemed to be moving beyond America."4

Wrote Zakaria: "[W]e might also be getting a glimpse of what a world without America would look like. It would be free of American domination but perhaps also free of American leadership--a world in which problems fester and the buck is passed endlessly until situations explode."5

Zakaria titled his report "After America's Eclipse."

From a Doha conference on U.S.-Middle East relations, columnist David Ignatius reported a similar phenomenon:

We are in the ditch in the Middle East. As bad as you think it is watching TV, it's worse. It's not just Iraq, but the whole pattern of American dealings with the Arab world. People are not just angry at Americans ... they're giving up on us--on our ability to make good decisions, to solve problems, to play the role of honest broker.6

"Giving up on us" puts it precisely. After King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia brought Hamas and Fatah together in a unity government and revived the Saudi plan for Palestinian peace and Arab recognition of Israel, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice refused to speak to any member of Hamas. At the Arab summit in March 2007, Abdullah denounced the United States: "In beloved Iraq, blood is flowing between brothers, in the shadow of an illegitimate foreign occupation."7

Not since Franklin D. Roosevelt met King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud aboard the cruiser Quincy in the Suez Canal in 1945, where the U.S.-Saudi friendship was cemented, had a Saudi king so insulted the United States.

Ignatius cited a Zogby poll of six friendly Arab countries--Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Only 12 percent of the people in the six nations had a favorable view of the United States; 38 percent named President George W. Bush as the foreign leader they most despised. Ranked behind Bush were Ariel Sharon at 11 percent and Ehud Olmert, who had launched the summer war on Lebanon, at 7 percent.8

"The American era in the region has ended," writes Richard Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who served on President Bush's National Security Council:

The American era was one in which, after the Soviet Union's demise, the US enjoyed unprecedented influence and freedom to act. What brought it to an end after less than two decades? Topping the list is the Bush administration's decision to attack Iraq and its conduct of the operation and resulting occupation.9

Zakaria, Ignatius, and Haas were echoed by Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson.

With hindsight we may see 2006 as the end of Pax Americana. Ever since World War II, the United States has used its military and economic superiority to promote a stable world order that has, on the whole, kept the peace and spread prosperity. But the United States increasingly lacks both the power and the will to play this role.10

But if Pax Americana is at an end, what will replace it?

Several years ago, British historian Niall Ferguson described a dystopian vision in "A World Without Power."

Anyone who dislikes U.S. hegemony should bear in mind that, rather than a multipolar world of competing great powers, a world with no hegemon at all may be the real alternative to U.S. primacy. Apolarity could turn out to mean an anarchic new Dark Age: an age of waning empire and religious fanaticism; of endemic plunder and pillage of the world's forgotten regions; of economic stagnation and civilization's retreat into a few fortified enclaves.11

"Be careful what you wish for," Ferguson warned. 12

For America and President Bush, 2006 was, in Victor Hugo's phrase about 1870-71, that year of defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, "L'Année Terrible." For in 2006 it became clear the United States was failing in Iraq.

In December, former secretary of state Colin Powell described the situation as "grave and deteriorating." America is "losing" the war, he said.13 Powell echoed the Iraq Study Groupof former secretary of state James Baker, which concluded, "A slide toward chaos could trigger the collapse of Iraq's government and a humanitarian catastrophe ... . The global standing of the United States could be diminished."14

Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker informed Congress that the U.S. Army of 500,000 was stretched to the breaking point by the insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq.15 Yet those two wars had not cost as many casualties as the Philippine insurrection of 1899-1902, which is not regarded as a major U.S. war.

Early in the New Year, Tony Blair, his premiership a casualty of Iraq, announced a withdrawal of 1,600 of the 7,100 British troops. The South Koreans, Danes, and Lithuanians were to follow the Brits out. The Spanish, Italians, Ukrainians, and Japanese had already gone.16

Two thousand and six was the year North Korea's Kim Jong-Il defied the Bush Doctrine--the world's worst regimes would not be allowed to acquire the world's worst weapons--by exploding a North Korean nuclear device in America's face. It was the year Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran defied a Bush ultimatum and continued to enrich uranium for nuclear power--or nuclear weapons. It was the year Tehran's Shia allies took power in Baghdad, while its Hezbollah allies stood off the Israeli army in a five-week war in Lebanon.

As Iraq ends its fifth year of fighting, Tehran appears the true victor of the U.S. wars to oust the Taliban and overthrow Saddam that had cost 4,000 American dead and 27,000 wounded, over half a trillion dollars, and the unity of the nation.

In 2006, the elections Bush had demanded of the Middle East were held and produced victories for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Moqtadaal-Sadr in Iraq. Bush's vision of a peaceful and democratic Middle East had vanished as completely as Wilson's...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Thomas Dunne Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0312376960
• ISBN 13: 9780312376963
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 294
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar