But, as Kruschev said: "Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge where there is no river."
I certainly don't disagree with this.
But to claim that US foreign policy has been some kind of facade for US "meddling", or expansionism, in the world, as implied by Lee, doesn't bear closer scrutiny.
The US economy amounted to 50% of the global GDP in 1945. That percentage declined to 20% by 1997, just prior to the collapse of the Asian economies, and now stands somewhere approximately at 30-33% of total world GDP (depending on how recent your figures are) which amounted to some 33.7 Trillion in 1998. The US GDP is now currently around $10 Trillion, as compared to the $7.3 Trillion in 1998, and has grown in size while other nations have grown much slower, stagnated, or even declined in GDP growth:
theworldeconomy.org
theworldeconomy.org
So my point is that we've seen US GDP decline in percentage to the rest of the world, hardly something that is indicative of economic imperialism, or a desire to dominate the global economy.
Because had we the will, or the desire, to do so, it would have be fairly simple to coerce the rest of the world to fall in line behind the US in 1945, or face the threat of nuclear annihilation.
And the US was the primary force behind the decolonization of the world after WWII, oftentimes directly confronting our allies (if the French have ever qualified as such) such as in 1956 when both the British and French invaded the Sinai and Egypt, upon Nasser's nationalization of the Suez canal. Had it not been for the US, Nasser would have been overthrown and even greater Arab resentment might have ensued against the west.
Of course, that's not to say that Nasser didn't have it coming, given his aggressiveness towards other nations in the region and his attempts to dominate other Arab states with intent of forming a regional Arab republic (with him at its head).
No.. US foreign policy does not occur in a vacuum. And I still submit that we're primarily reactive, rather than proactive, in formulating our policies throughout the world. We're great at reacting to a crisis, but not so good at preventing such crises from occurring in the first place.
And our failure to possess a prophylactic foreign policy is likely due to our natural hesitation to be seen as the global policeman and hesitation to be the ones who have to force developing nations to stop quarreling with one another over petty rivalries, and to spend more time improving their legal and economic systems so capital investment will migrate to their nations.
There's a damn good reason that emerging growth investment funds have been crushed over the past 5 years, and it has very little to do with any overt US actions. If anything, it is due to US lethargy in dealing with the forces of political and economic chaos that have arrived with the collapse of the bi-polar geo-political power structure that existed during the cold war (US vs USSR), where most major global events were analyzed in that context, justifiably or not.
Hawk |
