While Americans are wrapped up in the banking crisis, the long-range, international effects of what is happening are being ignored here at home. Der Spiegel has an interesting commentary on what the crisis means to our position in the world that could entail the end of the American world as we all know it today.
"There are days when all it takes is a single speech to illustrate the decline of a world power. A face can speak volumes, as can the speaker's tone of voice, the speech itself or the audience's reaction. Kings and queens have clung to the past before and humiliated themselves in public, but this time it was merely a United States president. Or what is left of him.
"He talked about terrorism and terrorist regimes, and about governments that allegedly support terror. He failed to notice that the delegates sitting in front of and below him were shaking their heads, smiling and whispering, or if he did notice, he was no longer capable of reacting. The US president gave a speech similar to the ones he gave in 2004 and 2007, mentioning the word "terror" 32 times in 22 minutes. At the 63rd General Assembly of the United Nations, George W. Bush was the only one still talking about terror and not about the topic that currently has the rest of the world's attention.
"Absurd, absurd, absurd," said one German diplomat. A French woman called him "yesterday's man" over coffee on the East River. There is another way to put it, too: Bush was a laughing stock in the gray corridors of the UN.
"The American president has always had enemies in these hallways and offices at the UN building on First Avenue in Manhattan. The Iranians and Syrians despise the eternal American-Israeli coalition, while many others are tired of Bush's Americans telling the world about the blessings of deregulated markets and establishing rules "that only apply to others," says the diplomat from Berlin. But the ridicule was a new thing. It marked the end of respect.
"This is no longer the muscular and arrogant United States the world knows, the superpower that sets the rules for everyone else and that considers its way of thinking and doing business to be the only road to success. A new America is on display, a country that no longer trusts its old values and its elites even less: the politicians, who failed to see the problems on the horizon, and the economic leaders, who tried to sell a fictitious world of prosperity to Americans.
"Also on display is the end of arrogance. The Americans are now paying the price for their pride."
"The financial crisis has uncovered the world power's true weakness. The more the highly indebted United States has to spend to stabilize its own economic system, the more trouble it has performing its self-imposed duties as the world's policeman.
"The century that just began is unlikely to be declared the American century again. Instead, "Asia will shape the fate of the world, with or without the United States," says Parag Khanna, a young Indian-American political scientist whose book "The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order" has attracted a great deal of attention in the United States.
"Even before the financial crisis, there was lively debate in the United States over whether the world's largest economy could become overtaxed in the long run as a result of its international obligations and the global deployment of its armed forces. The war in Iraq costs the country $3 billion (€4.35 billion) a week. And it is already clear that Bush's successor will find his powers in the White House further limited by the enormous mountain of debt he inherits. And then there are the costs of the financial crisis -- and the recession that will inevitably follow.
"The effects of the financial crisis are already serious, both for the American taxpayer, who will end up footing the bill no matter what, and for the relationship between the government and the economy. An era of American economic policy is coming to a close. Ironically, and surprisingly to many, the last few months of the Bush administration will mark the end of the so-called "Reagan revolution."
"A new chapter in economic history has begun, one in which the United States will no longer play its former dominant role. A process of redistributing money and power around the world -- away from America and toward the resource-rich countries and rising industrialized nations in Asia -- has been underway for years. The financial crisis will only accelerate the process."
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,581502,00.html
