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http://www.prometheus6.org/node/20957 And incidentally:
GDP growth is hardly the only indication of a move away from U.S. economic dominance. The rise of sovereign wealth funds -- in countries such as China, Kuwait, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates -- is another. These government-controlled pools of wealth, mostly the result of oil and gas exports, now total some $3 trillion. They are growing at a projected rate of $1 trillion a year and are an increasingly important source of liquidity for U.S. firms.
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This, not handing it over to people who already have so much money they could never spend it all, is what we should have done with our budget surpluses. AFTER paying back all our national debt. But noooo...
The Age of Nonpolarity
What Will Follow U.S. Dominance
By Richard N. Haass
From Foreign Affairs , May/June 2008
Summary: The United States' unipolar moment is over. International relations in the twenty-first century will be defined by nonpolarity. Power will be diffuse rather than concentrated, and the decline as that of nonstate actors increases. But this is not all bad news for the United States; Washington can still manage the transition and make the world a safer place.
RICHARD N. HAASS is President of the Council on Foreign Relations.
The principal characteristic of twenty-first-century international relations is turning out to be nonpolarity: a world dominated not by one or two or even several states but rather by dozens of actors possessing and exercising various kinds of power. This represents a tectonic shift from the past.
The twentieth century started out distinctly multipolar. But after almost 50 years, two world wars, and many smaller conflicts, a bipolar system emerged. Then, with the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union, bipolarity gave way to unipolarity -- an international system dominated by one power, in this case the United States. But today power is diffuse, and the onset of nonpolarity raises a number of important questions. How does nonpolarity differ from other forms of international order? How and why did it materialize? What are its likely consequences? And how should the United States respond?
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calm
