[Note: This essay was drawn from FPIF analyst Mark Engler’s new book, How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy, published by Nation Books.]
The Democrats "Free Trade" Divide
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military bases
Possibility
In 1991, Fort Ord, a military base in California for 80 years, is closed down. In 1994, California State University Monterey Bay opens on its grounds.
Yankees Head Home
Absent in the discussion of the conflict brewing in the Andes over a Colombian military incursion into Ecuador to kill a guerrilla leader is the role of U.S. military in the conflict. It goes well beyond providing satellite intelligence on the location of guerrilla camps: the two countries have opposing responses to Washington’s attempt to militarize the hemisphere. Ecuador’s constituent assembly proposes prohibiting all foreign military presence, while Colombia seeks ever greater U.S. military hardware, intelligence and troops. The U.S. response has been quite undiplomatic.
The Million Year War
Think of the top officials of the Bush administration as magicians when it comes to Iraq. Their top hats and tails may be worn and their act fraying, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Their latest “abracadabra,” the president’s “surge strategy” of 2007, has still worked like a charm. They waved their magic wands, paid off and armed a bunch of former Sunni insurgents and al-Qaeda terrorists (about 80,000 “concerned citizens,” as the president likes to call them), and magically lowered “violence” in Iraq. Even more miraculously, they made a country that they had already turned into a cesspool and a slagheap — its capital now has a “lake” of sewage so large that it can be viewed "as a big black spot on Google Earth" — almost entirely disappear from view in the United States.
Is China a Threat?
China’s unprecedented industrial growth over the last two decades has raised the question of whether it now poses a threat to the security of the United States economically, militarily, or both. Economically, the extent to which China truly threatens the United States depends at least in part on the chauvinistic assumption that any potential challenge to absolute U.S. global economic dominance is threatening.