Change is afoot. You can see it everywhere if you know what to look for, where to look. The global power base is changing. Power and influence is slowly draining out of America and passing to China.
One of the signs of this transition from a declining America to an ascendant China is the attitude displayed by other players. Around the world officials are now calling out America as they once never would have dared. The German finance minister slamming the U.S. for living so long on borrowed money. African nations quite curtly snubbing American overtures to establish a military presence on the continent. The Japanese telling America to get out of Okinawa. Now, according to AFP, the Chinese are suggesting that the G20 should begin monitoring the U.S. Federal Reserve.
China’s state media has issued a new broadside at the US Federal Reserve’s move to prime the US economy, suggesting the Group of 20 should monitor policy shifts by the US central bank.
The Xinhua news agency said in a commentary the Fed was “risking the global recovery by following its own track for economic revival” by spending an extra $US600 billion ($A593.65 billion) buying Treasury bonds to stimulate the US economy.
It's obvious that the Chinese, like the Euros and others, are no longer hesitating to grumble about what they see as America's fiscal excesses. Free Market America is now calling on them to accept fixed limits to the trade surpluses countries like China and Germany can run with the U.S. and they're openly balking.
America's problems are compounded by its dependence on these same upstarts for loans to keep itself afloat and its insistence that those loans be written in American dollars while, at the same time, it undermines its own currency by printing another $600-billion of magic money. That's like saying "loan me some money and I'll pay back some of it."
The sun is setting on America and that's a reality ushered in when Ronald Reagan introduced America's Age of Ruin. Reagan single-handedly transformed the U.S. from the world's largest lender nation into the world's largest debtor nation and the only president who even tried to reverse that and put America back on an even keel was Bill Clinton. That is the post-Reagan Republican legacy, the hollowing out of America's power and prestige.
America isn't going to precipitously collapse. It will probably just continue to decline as the Brits did after WWII - but only if it's lucky and comes to its senses in time. If ruin does befall America, it will be of its own making.
3 comments:
Bingo.
The Japanese have been telling the Americans to get out of Okinawa for years. It's the people who live on Okinawa who don't want the Americans to go. Okinawa is the only place in Japan where you will find the orginal peoples and they don't like the Japanese. Besides, it is an easy road for the Americans to increase their bases in South Korea which is what they are about to do.
Anon, you haven't been paying attention to the reports over the past few years of massive protests by Okinawans about the American military presence. They've pretty much had it with living with the American presence. That's why the U.S. is pursuing the option of relocating those forces to Guam.
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