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America: The end of arrogance?

The financial meltdown continues across the globe. It seems like the contagion in America has spread to everywhere.

Interestingly, what does all this mean for the US? Have its domination on the world-scene now ebbed? Spiegel International, makes its assessment on the question in a piece under the banner "The End of Arrogance":

"The banking crisis is upending American dominance of the financial markets and world politics. The industrialized countries are sliding into recession, the era of turbo-capitalism is coming to an end and US military might is ebbing. Still, this is no time to gloat.

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.

George W. Bush has grown old, erratic and rosy in the eight years of his presidency. Little remains of his combativeness or his enthusiasm for physical fitness. On this sunny Tuesday morning in New York, even his hair seemed messy and unkempt, his blue suit a little baggy around the shoulders, as Bush stepped onto the stage, for the eighth time, at the United Nations General Assembly.

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."

Comments

Jose Angel said…
"The banking crisis is upending American dominance of the financial markets and world politics."

Oh yeah? And may we know who´s replacing America?
Europe with it aging population and over regulated economies that helped nothing in averting the financial crisis? They are suffering as much as the americans in this crisis.
China? Will 7 hundreds of millions of one-dollar-a-day workers help China become the next greatest economic superpower? No democracy, no freedom of speech, is this the great next superior society?
Rusia? Brazil? Heavily dependent on commodities, deeply burden with corruption and social problems and underdeveloped industries.

give me a break.

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