----- Original Message ----- From: "Ronaldo Carpio" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Brin-L" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2002 6:37 PM Subject: Re: US and Europe (L3) > > There was an article in last month's Atlantic Monthly by a couple of guys > with (I think) the Cato Institute: > > http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/01/schwarzlayne.htm > > They argue that the US chooses to be the world's overwhelming military > power, in part because it doesn't want Europe, Japan, and other potential > "great powers" to emerge.
The Cato institute is Libertarian/Conservative. That means it wants virtually no government. Also, if you read between the lines, they are really arguing for isolationalism and a very narrow view of American interests. To illustrate this, let me give you their suggestion for handling Tawain: "With respect to China, the United States would recognize that the Taiwan issue is an internal Chinese matter. Taiwan's unresolved status is a legacy of the civil war that ended on the mainland in 1949. It is worth recalling that before the outbreak of the Korean War, Secretary of State Dean Acheson advised that the United States should extricate itself from the unfinished business of the Chinese civil war and leave Taiwan to its fate." Basically, its let the democracy in Taiwan be overrun. >I don't know how true this is, but if so, then > you shouldn't be surprised when other countries spend less on their > militaries, or when the inevitable complaining from some in those countries > occurs. I know that some folks argue that a unipolar world is better than a multipolar world because multipolar worlds tend to have a lot more wars than unipolar worlds. But, I think that can be overcome with democracies. I think that group dynamics is at the foundation of why the US keeps its military dominence among the industrialized democracies. Dan M.
