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"This negotiating tactic does an excellent job of uncovering the actual global demand out there for America's intervention & stabilization services. A lot of anti-interventionists (and sheer Bush haters) want to pretend that's a myth and that there is no such demand for the American Leviathan, but the truth is, there's plenty of demand out there. The question is US bandwidth, which Bush-Cheney narrowed considerably. "
"It is not the loss of the reactors that will shake Japan the most but the loss of the certainty that the reactors were their path to some degree of safety, along with the added burden on the economy. The question is how the political system will respond. In dealing with the Persian Gulf, will Japan continue to follow the American lead or will it decide to take a greater degree of control and follow its own path? The likelihood is that a shaken self-confidence will make Japan more cautious and even more vulnerable. But it is interesting to look at Japanese history and realize that sometimes, and not always predictably, Japan takes insecurity as a goad to self-assertion."
"If I ever hear a disparaging remark against the quality of Al Jazeera journalism or the "tilts" in their coverage, I will say "shame" on that person or that Fox News commentator. Shame because Al Jazeera has been fighting hard to keep its cameras in the field and to keep its people from being hunted down by ruthless leaders that see the free press as an enemy to their power."
"Even in the depths of mortification, a lower depth still threatens Washington, thanks to our double image of ourselves. As the sole superpower, we want to be everywhere (and everywhere in charge); but as the best hope of democracy, we must be seen to be nowhere (and nowhere in charge). You might suppose that the greatest threat to such a double image lies in the possibility of the endless documentary on American foreign policy and America’s wars being offered by WikiLeaks. In fact, the government’s reactions to WikiLeaks have posed a far greater danger -- not to America the superpower, but to the constitutional America in whose name it acts."
"The would-be foreign policy prodigy Parag Khanna made a splash with his first book, “The Second World,” in 2008, by announcing with great fanfare — including a lengthy adaptation in The New York Times Magazine — what everyone already knew: that the international order was changing. The book was Khanna’s version of the fall of the West and the rise of the rest. Having described this grave new world, Khanna now wants to tell us how to run it. The result is another easy, breezy book that dispenses platitudes as though they were original insights and in the process fails to examine their actual significance. "
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Over time, I think one of the most damning lessons from the State cables will be evidence of the tolerance for bribery and looting that rots our foreign policy. Thus far, we’ve seen details of our allies’ oil bribery, our disinterest in doing anything about Hosni Mubarak’s or Muammar Qadaffi’s or the Saudis’ looting, We’ve also seen how our government apparently threw its investigation of rich tax cheats to get Switzerland to take three of our Gitmo detainees. Our government complains about the corruption of other countries. But as WikiLeaks makes clear, those complaints are mostly just for public show.
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