The role of the US in the world Follow

So I was reading this article in Al Jazeera and it mentioned how the US is retreating from a role of global leadership. Do you all figure to be accurate? What sort of impact do you suppose it will have on the world and, more importantly, the people of the US?


The recent European leadership of the Libyan intervention has been criticized as toothless and ineffective. It's not the first such case, either. If someone does replace us as the world police I don't suppose it would be a European country.

Edited, Jun 4th 2011 10:26am by nonwto

That may well be, but this limits our ability to contain the rising powers in the world.

They're a threat to our hegemony. Not that difficult to understand.

How's that?

We got nothing better to do.

Relevant, but unwelcome. You can't just blow off at the kind of forces we've had entrenched there the past few years/decades.

I do think that we need to tone down our aggressive tendencies some. When that puppet movie becomes more and more relevant we should be re-examine our priorities and methodologies (though it would have been somewhat amusing to see SEAL Team Six destroy half of Islamabad through collateral damage).

We're renting land from them. Like hell the land owners want us out.

I would argue that is probably true for the most part everywhere. That explains our relationship with China

Even if there existed a country with the military power, do you think a country would play that role for anything outside of money and power motivations?

That's why I said outside of money and power, i.e. "world domination". I'm no history/poly sci buff or anything, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the assumption that most people develop strong military forces to either start war (for personal gains, i.e. money/power) or to defend themselves from other powerful armies. I didn't think there were too many countries who developed armies to go around and "save the day" in a "world police/Justice League" type of manner.

That's pretty much what the U.S. has been doing.

You mentioned "outside of money and power," and I wanted to remark on two points. The first being is that it's just power, not money. Nations haven't profited through military force in a long time. Pretty much the only way to profit through use of a military is to plunder, which nearly everyone is adverse to these days. The second point was that "power" and "playing world police" are the same thing. The U.S. has been spending billions of dollars forcing brown people to dance when we tell them, how we tell them.

That depends on which end of the service revolver you're on.

Listen young country, if you don't stop picking fights with your sister nations, we're just going to turn this world around and call this vacation off.