The United States already is being out-musseled in strategic parts of the world by China and the European Union, the two main challengers to America’s superpower status.
Waving Goodbye to Hegemony, by Parag Khanna, appears in the current issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine.
The article’s writer is a senior research fellow in the New America Foundation, a center-left to far-left think tank. But don’t let that deter you from reading and pondering his insights.
The article raises issues and outlines a realignment of world geo-political forces that threaten America’s future.
Among other things, by inference, it raises profound doubts about the suitability of any of the Democratic Party candidates to deal effectively with a hostile world driven by real economic, political, and military interests. The reality described by Parag Khanna has no connection with liberal-progressive fantasies about a make-nice diplomatic world governed by the UN and the socialist religious dogma of social justice (i.e., redistributing Western wealth to the poorer countries of the world).
Among other thing, he recognizes that the issues at stake are economic: the competition for control of long-range strategic natural resources, capital, and markets. He also notes that the Pentagon’s structural organization and its geographic divisions of world power are more in line with those of China and the EU than are those of the State Department. Accordingly, he recommends bypassing the State Department and transferring management of foreign affairs to the Pentagon.
Finally, unlike Democratic Party presidential candidates, the writer calls for an increased role of American business in the process of rebuilding our foreign policy to counter the rising strength of China and the EU.
Back to summary...
