Taming Pakistan: Modi Effect

[Dayuhan]

As you live outside the US one would think that you would be able to establish how the world sees American foreign policy actions (or interference).

What I've been able to establish is that practically everyone in the world "knows" what's best for the US and "knows" what the US ought to do, and that practically everyone in the world is upset that the Americans don't do what they think the Americans ought to do. Of course all of these opinions are different, often widely divergent, and generally completely incompatible. You can hardly walk into a bar or an internet forum on this planet without hearing some blowhard discoursing at length on what the Americans ought to do and how the Americans are such fools for not following the prescription offered by the blowhard. Of course all of the blowhards have different prescriptions and most of them are grossly inconsistent with reality, but one gets used to that. I've occasionally introduced myself as Canadian just to escape the invariable lecture.

There is a simple reason why the US 'empire' will last a short 75 years and that is because the US are both unable and unwilling to understand the realities of the world they live and see everything through myopic and parochial eyes.

Non-Americans also see the world, and America, through their own parochial and often myopic eyes.

I don't think there ever was an "American Empire" in any literal or meaningful sense, and I don't think that American primacy was necessarily a good thing for America or the world. In any event the US no longer enjoys economic primacy (a good thing; a unipolar global economy is a very unstable thing) and a power that does not have economic primacy cannot reasonably aspire to military primacy, so there will have to be adaptation. Those who fail to adapt don't survive.

You really expect the world which has been subjected to the ravages resulting from the incompetent foreign policy adventures of the US to be understanding of the US's domestic challenges (which you list)?

The world can understand the domestic realities of the US or not, as it pleases. Just as it would be silly for India to submit it's policies to American review (or to expect automatic American support for its policies and leaders), it would be equally silly for the US to submit its own policies for foreign review and approval. Those outside the US (and most of those inside it) need to accept that the US government will not always do what they want. That would of course be impossible even if the US tried to do what they want, because they all have different ideas about what the US ought to do... and of course they all "know" that their particular slice of myopia and parochialism is the true and right one.

These comments are Germaine to this discussion as unfortunately the US still the power to interfere and really screw things up in the subcontinent.

The subcontinent also retains the power to screw things up on its own, although when they do somebody somewhere will invariably find a way to blame it on the US. Some things are inevitable...