Word: cannot
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...difference between the end of World War II and the end of the Cold War cannot simply be one of personality. Those who put together the international settlement after 1945 - Harry Truman, George Marshall, Dean Acheson and the like - were indeed, in the title of a marvelous book by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men. They were aware of their responsibilities and understood that American power would best be protected if it was shared in a network of institutions that made up a new liberal international order. Granted, George Bush is no Truman, nor Condoleezza Rice a Marshall...
...This matters, because you cannot be a leader without followers. The end of America's monopoly on modernity, coupled with the pride that other nations and cultures take in their own versions of modernity, has changed the game. What the U.S. faces in the world now is not a crisis of leadership so much as one of followership. To be sure, the fiasco of Iraq has meant that there is no new generation of people and nations keen to follow America's lead. But the fundamental point transcends Iraq. It is that the conditions which created leadership and followership...
...that the rest of the world should be anything but grateful for the leadership that the U.S. took on in the period after World War II. But the world has changed; the language and the concepts that made sense 50 years ago do not make sense now. The U.S. cannot expect an old debt of gratitude to be paid in the coin of perpetual deference. Nations outside the U.S. have no special need or want to hear claims for American leadership today. If those claims are made, they are likely - in American eyes - to be met with nothing more than...
...powerful collective voice of the European Union, and there are the great [democracies] of India and Japan, Australia and Brazil. There are also the increasingly powerful nations of China and Russia. In such a world, where power of all kinds is more widely and evenly distributed, the United States cannot lead by virtue of its power alone ... We need to listen to the views and respect the collective will of our democratic allies. When we believe international action is necessary ... we will try to persuade our friends that we are right. But we in return must be willing...
Instead, what we are seeing now in Washington and other world capitals is fear we might be headed for an economic collapse caused by a collapse of demand caused by a collapse of credit. Confronted with that threat, governments seemingly cannot help turning to the remedy formulated by Keynes during the dark years of the early 1930s: stimulating demand by spending much more than they take in, preferably but not necessarily on useful public works like highways and schools. "I guess everyone is a Keynesian in a foxhole," jokes Robert Lucas, a University of Chicago economist who won a Nobel...