GW and JM along with Joltin' Joe Lieberman and Rudy are blasting Obama for talking about talking with our non-friends.
Tom Friedman, yes I like Tom (thanks to the NY Times I can again read him), writes today that the issue isn't to whom we might talk, but whether anyone really cares to talk to us. As bad as Iraq is, Iraq isn't the biggest contributor to our problems. Our biggest challenge is the lack of an energy policy -- as Friedman points out, Bush begging the Saudis for relief isn't a policy. Because we don't have a policy that will free us from dependency on foreign oil, we're sending money to places like Iran, Venezuela, Russia, and elsewhere. At $200 a barrel they'll be hauling in money -- to such an extent that they'll be able to buy American companies -- with a couple months revenues.
In other words, GW has so badly bungled our energy policy and our foreign policy that we've become essentially irrelevant in the world. We may have military prowess, but our economic engines are clearly challenged.
He writes:
But that’s not all. Two compelling new books have just been published that describe two other big power shifts: “The Post-American World,” by Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International, and “Superclass” by David Rothkopf, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment.
Mr. Zakaria’s central thesis is that while the U.S. still has many unique assets, “the rise of the rest” — the Chinas, the Indias, the Brazils and even smaller nonstate actors — is creating a world where many other countries are slowly moving up to America’s level of economic clout and self-assertion, in every realm. “Today, India has 18 all-news channels of its own,” notes Zakaria. “And the perspectives they provide are very different from those you will get in the Western media. The rest now has the confidence to present its own narrative, where it is at the center.”
GW has put the next President in a deep hole -- well in Friedman's analysis, three deep holes. Our ability to dig out will require considerable work and quite a bit of luck!
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