Are the Limits of American Power Closer Than We Think?

-Mafiovi: …. The rest of the world might not depend on American protection from the Soviet Union, but it depends on the U.S.-enforced political and economic order. That’s the new American leadership
It's getting tougher for the U.S. to impose its will, but we can still lead the world -- the trick is convincing the world to follow.

President Barack Obama speaks in Washington. Reuters

Here are a few of the big, global problems that the U.S. has recently tried and failed to resolve: 

• North Korea's recent test-launch of a long-range missile, which U.S. diplomacy and threats couldn't deter.

• A new war between the Sudans, breaking a short-lived peace that the U.S. spent years building.

• Syria's continuing massacre of civilians, for which neither American diplomats nor American generals can find an acceptable solution.

• Egypt's tightening military rule, which has gotten so bad that the U.S. spent weeks just to extricate some detained American NGO workers.

• Israel's settlement growth in Palestinian territory, which the U.S. opposes as a barrier to Middle East peace.

• The Yemeni president's refusal to abdicate power, despite a U.S.-brokered pledge that he would step down.

• Afghanistan's unceasing war with itself, to which ten years of American-led war have not brought peace.

• Iran's nuclear development, which looks to be continuing despite U.S. sanctions and recentU.S.-led disarmament talks.

The U.S. isn't powerless. It's significantly alleviated most of these conflicts, and it's taken the international lead on all of them. But the pattern is unmissable. It is a big, complicated world in which the U.S. can only do so much. We're the most powerful country in the world by far, but that doesn't always make us the bosses. This might seem obvious, but American domestic discourse -- not to mention foreign discourses -- often seem to assume a strength of American hegemony that just doesn't exist. 

President Obama's major foreign policy addresses, like those of the presidents before him, take American dominance in world affairs as both necessary and absolute. There's nothing wrong with declaring that Iran will not be allowed to build a nuclear weapon or that democracy will come to the Middle East. And there's nothing wrong with the American leader discussing those issues from an American perspective. After all, the U.S. is the strongest and richest country in the world, which also makes it the best positioned to help. But there's a difference between helping and solving, just as there's a difference between offering leadership and having others follow. We seem to assume the latter (as do many non-Americans, for example in Egypt, where it's common to assume "foreign hands" guide Egyptian politics when in fact the U.S. seems to have less influence there every day), imagining American power extends far beyond its actual limits.

Part of this is domestic politics. Mitt Romney was probably making a smart political move to jump on Obama's hot mic comments to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev about how the U.S. couldn't make another nuclear arms reduction deal until after the election. Reducing American might is politically unpopular (even though we don't actually need those thousands of nuclear warheads) as is the idea of offering concessions to another, not-so-friendly country. It would be bad politics for Obama to enter tough and maybe even painful negotiations with a competing nation, probably because this conflicts with the Reagan-era idea that America's inherent strength and goodness means that we dictate terms to the world. But even Reagan compromised and horse-traded with Moscow, though he also had the good sense not to do it during an election. 

This is the big conflict between how U.S. leaders negotiate American politics and American foreign policy: the former requires confidence, the latter humility. But the two are not inseparable. Maybe because our political system promotes leaders who believe most strongly in American power, or maybe because it pressures those leaders to exercise more power than they might actually have, it can often seem that the U.S. is constantly falling short of our ambitions. We can't stop Israeli settlement growth, Iranian nuclear development, Sudanese civil war, AIDS in Africa, or terrorism in Pakistan, even though Americans presidents keep insisting that we will.

There was a time when we seemed to have more influence on how other countries behaved. In this1980 map of Cold War alliances, the "blue" countries would reliably, if not always, follow U.S. leadership. Part of that was because we had easier requests then; it's one thing to tell Pakistani generals to train anti-Soviet fighters, quite another to ask them to give up power to democratic institutions. But the threat of Soviet domination gave us a common mission that made cooperation more attractive and American leadership more desirable. There's no more great red menace to unify the majority of the world under American leadership. Other countries don't need us in the way that they used to.

The good news is that American and global interests still tend to line up pretty frequently. That's not a coincidence. The U.S. does more than any other country at maintaining global peace, cooperation, and free trade. The rest of the world might not depend on American protection from the Soviet Union, but it depends on the U.S.-enforced political and economic order. That's the new American leadership. When China slashed its Iranian oil imports by half -- a big blow to Tehran and a boost to the U.S.-led effort to isolate Iran -- it wasn't because Obama called up Chinese President Hu Jintao and told him to do it. The U.S., through a lot of difficult and sometimes painful diplomatic and economic maneuvering, found a way to line up American and Chinese interests.

This sort of power makes the U.S. good at promoting democracy, cooperation, and free trade -- Burma's opening, for example, or China's remarkably peaceful rise -- but less effective at stopping civil wars or convincing dictators to do things that might threaten their own rules (or lives). If Iranian leaders believe they need a nuclear program to save themselves from a U.S. invasion, they're going to keep it. And the logic of ethnic conflict or religious terrorism can't really be refuted by, say, American trade incentives. 

When U.S. interests line up with global interests, we suddenly become very effective at leading the world: isolating Iran, convincing Sudan to allow its southern third to secede, or curbing Chinese trade abuses, for example, would probably all have been impossible on our own. But they also wouldn't have happened without the U.S. taking the lead. That means that U.S. leadership is becoming more about finding opportunities for cooperation and compromise than it is about, say, the strength of our military or force of our ideas, although those help too. Sometimes the U.S. president has to tell his Russian counterpart that he'll offer some concessions in exchange for, say, dismantling Soviet-era nuclear weapons or reducing arms sales to Syria. That's not a particularly jingoistic vision of American leadership, and it's not likely to play well in a political campaign. But that's the world we live in.



 -Theo:-Are the Limits of American Power Closer Than We Think? APR 23 2012,

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-Mafiovi: What does, at last, ...

....your "beloved" China's Bo history show?
- It just shows the tiny wisdom every Vietnam schoolboy knows for long time ago:

China (was and) remains the same one It was for all of its history:
- The same mindset
- the same way of life
- the same ticks for getting the power 
- the same tricks for "dealing" with others all.
- the same view on the world
- the same trick for getting the "I".
- Chinese People? - The crowd, which is ready to live and to die for its rulers. Even without asking: Why it is and When it had begun? 
China: Identity crisis?
- No, Sir. It's the continuing of that same Identity:
"....the past 30 years have seen the Chinese people develop very rapidly,”.... “But now you have a very large part of the Chinese population, 200 million people, who are living in a situation not unlike that of South African apartheid..."
Look at China's History, and You'll see: I'm right.
"My realism rests in the realization that the China-U.S. mutual distrust is not only real but also structural and deep-rooted in each country’s politics, and that this distrust,..."
- What does it mean?
- That's what: The only way you can overcome the distrust is that: America must become a next country of evil.The three Ds of American foreign policy - defense, diplomacy and development
- Dandy, Ma'am.But let me be clear to offer the fourth: Don't fear Chinese.
Ha ha....
Put it serious?
The US must create the 4-d (dimensions) Foreign Policy:
- Political
- Cultural
- Military
- Intellectual
...and spin it in all power in Asia.
In first: Korea (S. & N.), Japan, India, Vietnam, ASEAN, ...

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 Now , think again Lê Ngọc Thống!
Ta đã đọc khá nhiều bài ngài viết về Nghệ thuật chiến tranh của ta, về sức mạnh của Dân tộc ta.
Ở đó ta chỉ thấy cái-mạnh-đã-có mà chưa thấy cái-mạnh-phải-có. 
1/ Thằng giặc đầu tiên và cũng là cuối cùng của ta - Rợ - hôm nay khác lắm:chúng có thể tấn công ta cả trên Không, trên Bộ và trên Biển, thậm chí từ Space và trong Không gian Ảo. 
Front có thể trải dài suốt cả Biên giới phía Bắc của cả Lào và Ta, chạy suốt hơn 3000 Km bờ Biển. 
Đó là thứ mà Cha Ông ta chưa bao giờ phải đối mặt. 
2/ Cấu hình Địa-Chính trị hôm nay khác lắm: 
(ví dụ nhỏ : kẻ cung cấp năng lượng và vũ khí cho Rợ hôm nay nằm sát sau lưng Rợ và lại là kẻ cung cấp chủ yếu vũ khí cho ta)
3/ Tác chiến trên Biển là khâu yếu nhất, ít được thực hành nhất của cả Cha Ông ta và ta.
Giặc đã renew, thế trận đã renew, mà chúng ta chỉ có cái cũ (cái-mạnh-đã-có) - chủ yếu là vậy - thì tức là chúng ta toi rùi. 
Nói cách khác: Để thắng thằng giặc này - for Now - đòi hỏi chúng ta phải - bên cạnh việc phát huy khó báu Cha Ông để lại - tạo ra được một Chiến lược Quân sự hoàn toàn mới.
Và Chiến Lược đó sẽ là Tối Ưu, nếu nó cho phép ta Không đánh mà thắng. 
Và đó chính là: cái-mạnh-phải-có.(Đó chỉ là một phần trong Nghệ thuật chiến tranh mới mà chúng ta phải có for facing the China threat. Nhưng vì ngài - ta biết - là một chuyên gia Navy).

Và...

....Từ tất cả những thứ mà ngài ca ngợi (chiến tranh Nhân dân, nghệ thuật tạo thế, ....), ta chưa luận ra được : Bằng cách nào chúng ta thắng được cái chiến thuật gậm nhấm mà Rợ có thể bắt đầu ngay từ ...tối nay?

Và nên nhớ là: Ngay cả người Nga - những người ít quan tâm đến Rợ hơn - cũng hiểu một điều: Rợ đã đến đâu là không có rời đó.

Vì vậy mà một idea v/v dành lại Hoàng Sa bằng "đấu tranh hòa bình" chỉ là thứ giẻ rách còn sót lại của bọn AQ thời Toàn cầu hóa
Còn đây là một ví dụ khủng khiếp cho điều mà nhiều người đã cảnh tỉnh:
- Nếu chúng ta im lặng về Lịch sử của Cha anh thì con cháu ta sẽ đọc những thứ không chính thống này và lâu dần, nó trở thành ...chính thống.
Nói cách khác: Nếu Media chính thống của chúng ta vẫn ...cứ như thế này thì Media lề trái hay không lề sẽ trở thành chính thống, trong ý nghĩa là nó thống trị mọi nhận thức của con cháu ta.

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