America's Severely Diminshed Global Power

On Saturday on this blog I argued that years of neo-con led "go it alone" foreign policy has had the opposite of the effect they desired. America's influence in Asia, arguably the most dangerous region of the world today (Taiwan, North Korea) is greatly diminished. We've taken second position to China who now wields great power in the region.

During this same time we have stretched our tangible and non-tangible resources to dangerously impaired levels. Our military is bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan and we are broke.

The American people have a terrible day of reckoning just over the horizon. We are going to have to understand that Bush administration and Republican Party policies in general have left us vulnerable to likely events that will have huge adverse impact on our psyche and geo-poliitical power.

How would we be able to respond to China's simply taking Taiwan?

Today on Huffingtonpost.com Thomas B. Edsall writes in a column titled Global Economic Crisis Likely To Have Profound Consequences For U.S. Politics, World Relations. that

"The global economic crisis is likely to have profound, long-range consequences for American politics and for the relations of the United States with the rest of the world, severely constraining any effort to maintain or revive the Bush administration's propensity for unilateralism, and posing a broad international challenge to free market ideologies, according to a range of experts."

The neo-cons convinced America that the only important power is military power. So called "soft" power was for wimps. Now our military power has proved feckless for the conflicts of our time, we have given up our influence because the leaders of other countries no longer even want to discuss issues with the Bush administration and we have squandered our treasure through lassez fare hands off "self-regulating markets" nonsense.

Who is going to tell the people?