The failure is bigger than Iraq

Sometimes the vividness of the situation in Iraq obscures the broad impact failure of the Bush foreign policy. This foreign policy has not only lost Iraq, but alienated Muslims around the world, strengthening our enemies, and weakening the generation old friendly governments in Egypt and Saudi.

But beyond the Muslim world, China has also very quietly rewritten their place in the world and South American countries are electing openly anti-American governments one by one. The empire is losing against its likely next rival and seeing its influence fail among its client states.

The thing I think isn't discussed as much is just what a radical departure this foreign policy is from that of Bush I and Clinton.

The "new world order" philosophy of foreign relations was born of the realism that this will not be another American century, and that, within that reality, the US should attempt to construct an international sysytem to its long term favor while it still holds the dominant position.

The foreign policy theorists largely from PNAC, believed that this realist strategy was unnecessarily pessimistic and that the US could parlay its military advantages into a maintenance of its world position primarily by limiting China through the control of oil.

But, there are two primary mistakes in that ideological pipe dream. The first that we are seeing played out in Iraq is that the US military structure was constructed to have its tremendous advantage against large state entities. In other words, the US military is fully constructed to take over countries, but it lacks capacity to occupy them. It's advantage was built for a ground war against Russia, not to implement "democracies" at the point of a gun.

Second, and more troublingly, this decision to largely abandon international structures and attempt to pursue a unilateral domination is a bit of a one way street. As the US now looks to go back to the international community for help on Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, and other less critical situations, it will find itself met by the hostility generated by the original abrogations.

Coupled with the perceived weakness of this failed unilateral foreign policy, the US will attempt to return to the international community accepting their terms, not dictating our own.

We are just beginning to see the results for this epicly poor decision to abandon the rationalist foreign policy of the last two administrations, but the real damage will trickle down for generations in the shaping of trade deals, international treaties, and global diplomacy.

Even if a new administration were to come in tomorrow, they would be looking at a far weaker diplomatic hand and would enter every relationship asking rather than telling.

This is how empires die. They overextend. Full of themselves and belief in their strength, they push their resources too far and find themselves suddenly trapped with economic provinces peeling away, strapping debt, and a rising rival.

As the US feels its relationships growing more brittle, China is making energy and trade inroads in South Asia, the Middle East, northern Africa, and Latin America.

America will not disappear tomorrow, but the seeds for a more rapid subsidence have been laid today.

It's funny, in 2003 and 2004 you couldn't shut them up, but nobody's talking "empire" anymore.

(****Sorry for the long rant, but the blogging had sort of stalled, and I felt I needed to step back and reframe a bit.)