George Soros Is the billionaire speculator the Democrats' most powerful weapon? By Sebastian Mallaby Posted Wednesday, March 10, 2004, at 2:17 PM PT
Way, way back, when Howard Dean had neither risen nor fallen, George Soros began to plot the sort of speculative bet that has made him a hero and a villain. Contemplating a popular president preparing an invasion of Iraq, Soros was shocked but unwilling to be awed: He believed that this show of American supremacy was a bubble waiting to be pricked and that the president's popularity could be made to pop with it. And so he did what only billionaires with attitude can do. He prepared to back his hunch with millions of dollars in speculative wagers, the sort that triggered the collapse of the British pound in 1992 and made Soros a demon to Asian leaders during that region's financial crisis.
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What are the fundamentals in this case? Soros' answer is contained in The Bubble of American Supremacy, his eighth and latest book, which he began to write as American troops arrived in Iraq a year ago. It argues that Bush's foreign policy, far from being unassailable, is actually untenable; it confuses overwhelming military superiority with omnipotence. Like other Democrats before him, Soros points out that you can't remold the world with tanks alone. Harvard's Joseph Nye, for example, has compared American power to a three-level chess board. On the military level America has no rival; on the economic level it depends on partners to finance its twin deficits and buy its exports; and on the third level—the level of transnational threats like terrorism and AIDS and drugs—America can do little by itself. In this sense, American supremacy is illusory.
full: http://slate.msn.com/id/2096921/
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