Pubdate: Tue, 12 Mar 2002
Source: Times Record News (TX)
Copyright: 2002 The E.W. Scripps Co.
Contact:  http://www.trnonline.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/995

IDENTITY CRISIS

U.S. Has No Clear Idea Where To Focus Global Efforts

Six months after the terrorist attacks on the United States, we're calling 
ourselves the world's first and only hyperpower.

The nomenclature is less important than the reality, and the reality is 
that as a nation we continue to grow stronger as time goes by, by just 
about any measure you can come up with.

But naming what we are is not the same as defining what it means to be a 
hyperpower, and we continue to struggle with identifying precisely what our 
role in the world should be or needs to be.

It is not yet clear that we can walk and chew gum at the same time, 
globally speaking, and there are those who would argue that we don't need 
to; we can just sit here between the oceans and ignore everyone else.

Which, of course, is a ridiculous notion, as we were reminded last 
September. No nation is an island, least of all one as rich as ours is and 
as dependent as ours is on the resources of other parts of the world.

That we are struggling to find our place in the world is clear from the 
record, discounting our war in Afghanistan.

We have no clear idea of what to do about the fractious situation in 
Israel. Pep talks, finger-pointing and counseling haven't seemed to work 
very well, and ignoring the fight between the Israelis and the Palestinians 
is unseemly for the world's most powerful nation.

Nor do we know what to do about the Pakistan-India conflict.

We identify an axis of evil, reposition our nuclear weapons along the axis, 
bringing Russia back into our sights, along with the rest, and expect 
everyone to be ... well, what, exactly do we expect of them?

The other war, the war on drugs, threatens to become a quagmire in 
Colombia, morphing into a battle against entrenched guerrillas rather than 
a fight against drug lords.

Faced with these challenges and others, how should we lead and to what 
purposes?

Outside of government, a lot of thought is going into answering that question.

 From Kai Bird of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and 
Martin Sherwin, professor of history at Tufts University, writing in The 
Washington Post: "To our own peril in this interdependent world, we are 
foolishly squandering our first and strongest line of defense: the 
imponderable that the venerable World War II Secretary of War, Henry L. 
Stinson, called our reputation for fair play. ..."

 From Sebastian Mallaby, a British Journalist, quoted in the New York 
Times: "A new imperial moment has arrived. ..."

 From Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne, writing in The Atlantic 
Monthly: "We need to come to grips with an ironic possibility: that the 
very preponderance of American power may now make us not more secure but 
less secure."

So the conversation is taking place. It just doesn't seem to be taking 
place in the place that counts, which is in Washington.

After Sept. 11, everything changed. Everything, that is, but our reaction 
to the attacks, and our reaction has been to deal with the problem as we 
have always tried to deal with such things, which is to say by exerting our 
considerable brute force.

Today's world is quite a bit more complex than the world was during the 
Cold War when friends and enemies were easily identified, when our place 
was clear and that place was in opposition to whatever the communist world 
stood for.

What kind of country do we want to be from now on in reference to other 
nations?

Now is a good time to have that discussion.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom