The Decline of Empire

Via Steven C. Clemons' "The Washington Note," this piece by Michael Lind, addressing the increasing isolation of the United States in the formation of new international alliances, is a must read. By it's unilateralist practices, based on the belief that, as Madeline Albright put it in 1998, the US is the "indespensable nation," the Bush Administration has encouraged the other nations of the earth to form alliances that deliberately exclude the US. The Bush approach has been to enter into only those alliances in which the US can be dominant, a situation which other countries are understandably reluctant to embrace. Embracing multilateralism, other countries are developing regional economic and military cooperatives that exclude and challenge the US.