Much like its successful military campaign in Iraq, the Pentagon is moving at breakneck speed to redeploy U.S. forces and equipment around the world in ways that will permit Washington to play “Globocop,” according to a number of statements by top officials and defense planners. While preparing sharp reductions in forces in Germany, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, military planners are talking about establishing semi-permanent or permanent bases along a giant swathe of global territory–increasingly referred to as “the arc of instability,” from the Caribbean Basin through Africa to South and Central Asia and across to the North Korea.

The announcement on June 5 that the State Department’s director for policy planning, Richard Haass, is leaving to become the next president of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), marks the latest sign of the eclipse of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s influence in the Bush administration.

President George W. Bush recently completed his first tour of major world capitals since the war in Iraq, en route to the Group of 8 (G-8) meeting of the world’s wealthy countries and Russia in Evian, France. His handlers are predictably depicting his stature as something akin to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar “bestrid[ing] the world like a Colossus.” After all, the notion that the new world order most closely resembles Caesar’s Pax Romana has become a commonplace. History, so its advocates argue, is now witnessing a Pax Americana.