[Mb-civic] A CIA report predicts that American global dominance could end in 15 years.

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit

[We can all see it coming, but not our elected representatives and
certainly not the blinkered dudes in Fortress White House. Even the CIA
can see it, which is why they've been frozen out.]

sent by Steven Robinson (activ-l)

Slate - Jan 26, 2005
http://slate.msn.com/id/2112697/

2020 Vision

A CIA report predicts that American global 
dominance could end in 15 years.

By Fred Kaplan

Who will be the first politician brave enough to declare publicly
that the United States is a declining power and that America's
leaders must urgently discuss what to do about it? This prognosis
of decline comes not (or not only) from leftist scribes rooting for
imperialism's downfall, but from the National Intelligence Councilthe
"center of strategic thinking" inside the U.S.

intelligence community.

The NIC's conclusions are starkly presented in a new 119-page
document, "Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National
Intelligence Council's 2020 Project." It is unclassified and available on
the CIA's Web site. The report has received modest press attention the
past couple weeks, mainly for its prediction that, in the year 2020,
"political Islam" will still be "a potent force." Only a few stories or
columns have taken note of its central conclusion:

The likely emergence of China and India ... as new major global
playerssimilar to the advent of a united Germany in the 19th century
and a powerful United States in the early 20th centurywill transform
the geopolitical landscape with impacts potentially as dramatic as
those in the previous two centuries.

In this new world, a mere 15 years away, the United States will
remain "an important shaper of the international order"probably the
single most powerful countrybut its "relative power position" will
have "eroded." The new "arriviste powers"not only China and India,
but also Brazil, Indonesia, and perhaps otherswill accelerate this
erosion by pursuing "strategies designed to exclude or isolate the
United States" in order to "force or cajole" us into playing by
their rules.

America's current foreign policy is encouraging this trend, the NIC
concluded.

"U.S. preoccupation with the war on terrorism is largely irrelevant
to the security concerns of most Asians," the report states. The
authors don't dismiss the importance of the terror warfar from it.
But they do write that a "key question" for the future of America's
power and influence is whether U.S.

policy-makers "can offer Asian states an appealing vision of regional
security and order that will rival and perhaps exceed that offered by
China." If not, "U.S. disengagement from what matters to U.S. Asian allies
would increase the likelihood that they will climb on Beijing's bandwagon
and allow China to create its own regional security that excludes the
United States."

To the extent that these new powers seek others to emulate, they
may look to the European Union, not the United States, as "a model
of global and regional governance."

This shift to a multipolar world "will not be painless," the report
goes on, "and will hit the middle classes of the developed world
in particular" with further outsourcing of jobs and outflow of
capital investment. In short, the NIC's forecast involves not merely
a recalibration in the balance of world power, but alsoas these
things doa loss of wealth, income, and, in every sense of the word,
security.

The trends should already be apparent to anyone who reads a newspaper. 
Not
a day goes by without another story about how we're mortgaging our future
to the central banks of China and Japan. The U.S. budget deficit,
approaching a half-trillion dollars, is financed by their purchase of
Treasury notes. The U.S. trade deficitmuch of it amassed by the purchase
of Chinese-made goodsnow exceeds $3 trillion. Meanwhile, China is
displacing the United States all across Asiain trade, investment,
education, culture, and tourism.

It's also cutting into the trade markets of Latin America. (China
is now Chile's No. 1 export market and Brazil's No. 2 trade partner.)
Asian engineering students who might once have gone to MIT or Cal Tech 
are
now going to universities in Beijing.

Meanwhile, as the European Union becomes a coherent entity, the
dollar's value against the euro has fallen by one-third in the past
two years (one-eighth just since September). As the dollar's rate
of return declines, currency investorsincluding those who have been
financing our deficitbegin to diversify their holdings. In China,
Japan, Russia, and the Middle East, central bankers have been
unloading dollars in favor of euros. The Bush policies that have
deepened our debt have endangered the dollar's status as the world's
reserve currency.

What is the Bush administration doing to alter course or at least
cushion the blow? It's hard to say. During Condoleezza Rice's
confirmation hearings last week, Sen. Paul Sarbanes, DMd., raised
some questions about the nexus between international economics and
political power. Rice referred him to the secretary of the treasury.

The NIC issued the report a few weeks before Bush's inaugural
address, but it serves to dump still more cold water on the lofty
fantasy of America delivering freedom to oppressed people everywhere. In
Asia, the report states, "present and future leaders are agnostic on the
issue of democracy and are more interested in developing what they
perceive to be the most effective model of governance." If the president
really wanted to spread freedom and democracy around the planet, he 
would
(among other things) need to present America as that "model of
governance"to show the world, by its example, that free democracies are
successful and worth emulating. Yet the NIC report paints a world where
fewer and fewer people look to America as a model of anything.

We can't sell freedom if we can't sell ourselves.

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***


----- Original Message ----- 
From: Michael Schwartz
To: IRAQVIEWS-L at LISTS.SUNYSB.EDU
Sent: Saturday, January 29, 2005 6:52 PM
Subject: The cost of the war


If you want a constant reminder of what the war is costing in terms of
forgone social programs, here is the site

http://costofwar.com/




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