The Best Trained, Most Professional Military...Just Lost Two Wars?

[Bob's World]

I'll tell him once I meet the next farmer from Malawi.


Seriously, you added a lot to the more usual US-centric view here.
Your statement would be trivial if true, for it could then just as well be said that everything not Turkish is in competition with Turkey.

Fuchs,

Somehow I doubt you spend much time chatting with farmers anywhere, yet alone in Malawi. But you miss my point. It is not that everyone is out the get the US, it is that everyone everywhere is in competition with each other. We are part of that competition.

The US didn't shed any tears for the UK when we nudged past them during WWII, nor would the UK shed any tears for the US if the situation were reversed. This is not about "allies" and "enemies," or "friends" and "threats." It is about competition. Those in power tend to set up systems to suppress the competition of others and to provide advantages to themselves. Spain did this, France did this, the UK did this, and the US has done this in its own way as well. Just as an example. Same applies to all nations. Increasingly their are major players who are not nations at all, and who have a flexibility of loyalty that is particularly frustrating to an American approach to foreign policy that is so emotional rather than pragmatic.

My point is that we need to stop whining and lashing out at those seeking their own best futures in ways that circumvent, by-pass or ignore our carefully crafted systems of obstacles that have been rendered as obsolete and irrelevant as the Maginot line by the emerging global geo-economic / political reality. Instead we need to put on our big boy pants and come up with a new understanding and new approaches for competing more effectively in the world as it is, not as we wish it was.