(Community Matters) A must read – fodder for reflections on American exceptionalism – “Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power,” by Zbigniew Brzezinski
Politico Playbook: THE BIG IDEA – “The United States is still preeminent [among global powers] but the legitimacy, effectiveness, and durability of its leadership is increasingly questioned worldwide because of the complexity of its internal and external challenges. Nevertheless, in every significant and tangible dimension of traditional power – military, technological, economic, and financial – America is still peerless. It has by far the largest single national economy, the greatest financial influence, the most advanced technology, a military budget larger than that of all other states combined, and armed forces both capable of rapid deployment abroad and actually deployed around the world. This reality may not endure for very long but it is still the current fact of international life.
The European Union could compete to be the world’s number two power, but this would require a more robust political union, with a common foreign policy and a shared defense capability. …
“China’s remarkable economic momentum , … coupled with the worldwide expectation that soon it will challenge America’s premier global status, justify ranking China just below the United States in the current international hierarchy. … A sequential ranking of other major powers beyond the top two would be imprecise at best. Any list, however, has to include Russia, Japan, and India, as well as the EU’s informal leaders: Great Britain, Germany, and France. Russia ranks high geopolitically largely because of its rich stores of oil and gas and its continued status as a nuclear power second only to the United States …. Brazil and Indonesia have already laid claims to participation in global economic decision making within the G-20 …
“The foregoing composition of the current global elite thus represents … a historic shift in the global distribution of power away from the West as well as the dispersal of that power among four different regions of the world. … [W]ith the self-serving domination of major portions of the world by European powers now a thing of the past, these new realities of power are more representative of the world’s diversity. The days when an exclusive Western club – dominated by Great Britain, France, or the United States – could convene to share global power at the Congress of Vienna, at the Versailles Conference, or at the Bretton Woods meeting, are irrevocably gone. … [T]his new state of affairs also highlights the increased difficulty of consensual global decision making at a time when humanity as a whole is increasingly confronting critical challenges, some potentially even to its very survival.” $17.12 on Amazon http://amzn.to/xj74Ua
Community Matters 