US global influence is waning-by Frederick Kempe
America 2005 is a dramatically different place than the country I left. Like the World Trade Center, America 1990 spoke of limitless possibilities. The Berlin Wall had fallen and the Soviet bloc was imploding, leaving just one superpower standing. America now is no less powerful, and by many measures it is mightier. Yet at the peak of its power, it has become a more vulnerable, apprehensive and polarized place. What's changed most is the U.S. ability to translate muscle into clout, strength into influence. U.S. military superiority doesn't produce proportional results. America's annual military spending is greater than that of the 25 countries of the European Union, China and Russia put together.
Yet the U.S. is woefully ill-equipped to take on its greatest new threat, non-state actors (diplo-speak for "terrorists"). Some Pentagon planners doubt they have the resources for a new major military engagement simultaneous with Iraq. They privately concede the political costs may be too high and their weaponry and intelligence insufficient to block Iran's nuclear ambitions. perhaps the most dramatic difference between America 2005 and 1990 is that the U.S. must move faster and smarter to avoid falling further behind. "America is the Red Queen," says Mr. Hormats.
For the uninitiated, the "Red Queen principle" applies to an evolutionary system where continuing development is needed just in order to maintain fitness relative to others. It arises from what the Red Queen told Alice in Wonderland in Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass": "In this place it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place."
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