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Born at the Crest of the Empire

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Dangerously irrelevant

To some degree this was inevitable. If you hew to an ideological rather than realist foreign policy, there will always be an inertial drag back towards realism as the players manage their own interests.

When your administration is weakened and discredited, they're going to stop listening to you, and you lose control of how things shape out.
Just days after President Bush returned from the Middle East, the Middle East is moving beyond the Bush administration.

Two major peace efforts -- a surprise announcement of indirect talks between Israel and Syria brokered by Turkey and an eleventh-hour deal to prevent a new Lebanese war brokered by Qatar -- were launched without an American role, and both counter U.S. strategy in the region....

The United States is not playing a role in other critical Middle East initiatives, Ottaway noted, including an Egyptian effort to reconcile the two major Palestinian parties, Fatah and Hamas, and negotiations between Iran and the Gulf Cooperation Council sheikdoms. The Bush administration is absent "across the board," she said.

And, further east......
Pakistan's new government has signed a peace deal with Islamic militants in a valley of northwestern Pakistan, in a process that Western officials worry could take the pressure off Taliban and al Qaeda hardliners.

Indeed, part of it is lame duck, but, I would argue that an equal part is all the political capital and goodwill wasted on ideological fantasy policies and the perception of a US weakened by overextension in Iraq and an overextended economy.

The provinces are defying the weakened empire.

3 Comments:

  • Israel negotiates with Syria. Lebanon's west-leaning government makes a deal with Hammas.

    Goddamn appeasers....

    Bush is officially irrelevant to the governments of the Middle East. He is something to be trotted out for paper-pageantry and then put back in the box and ignored. The question is: Is Bush the lame duck, or has he done so much damage that he's made America a lame duck? Possibly for a generation?

    By Blogger -epm, at 8:58 AM  

  • Well considering that we've been drained of good middle-class jobs, have a Federal gov., so deep in debt that we don't really know how bad it is and recession cycles coming in 7 years instead of 10 - 15 year cycles.

    I'd say the USA is about as morally, economically and socially irrelevant as a country with our previous potential can be.

    And that war thing in the ME isn't helping us at all either.

    By Blogger matt, at 10:38 AM  

  • EPM, The level of damage is a key question. It's long been my contention that the goal of US foreign policy should be to adjust to this new China/India world, and instead of doing that, the Bush administration went tilting at the idea of parlaying the current military advantage into a "new American century." We've lost eight years going completely the wrong way.

    ....


    Matt, Yeah, we've squandered our hyperpower status (which was a bit overinflated.) We've abused our position and now stand overextended and weakened.

    By Blogger mikevotes, at 11:11 AM  

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