Kevin Bondelli's List: International

• the damage that the financial meltdown is doing to America's "brand."
• The first was a certain vision of capitalism—one that argued low taxes, light regulation and a pared-back government would be the engine for economic growth.
• The second big idea was America as a promoter of liberal democracy around the world, which was seen as the best path to a more prosperous and open international order.
• what political scientist Joseph Nye has labeled our "soft power."
• Worse, the culprit is the American model itself: under the mantra of less government, Washington failed to adequately regulate the financial sector and allowed it to do tremendous harm to the rest of the society.
• To many people around the world, America's rhetoric about democracy sounds a lot like an excuse for furthering U.S. hegemony.
• And we cannot even begin until we clearly understand what went wrong—which aspects of the American model are sound, which were poorly implemented, and which need to be discarded altogether.

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