BY aarrieta
All empires have a life spam, I mean they are born, they develop, get to their peak moment where they earn the name of empire and relentlessly they are finished.
It is very difficult to precise the exact moment where the changes in history happen since changes don’t happen from one day to another and millions of little changes are generated in the day to day that when added up the end up generating a big change, and one day we wake up and we realize that we are in a completely different world from the one we were used to.
The way of perceiving this grate changes is to take some indicators and compare them in 2 different moments, as instant pictures of the 2 moments and look for the difference of each picture.
Right now, I would take a picture of the US today or at the moment of the presidential transition between Bush and Obama and another picture at the presidential transition of Clinton and Bush 8 years ago and another one when Gore was defeated.
As a recount of the comparison of the pictures I will refer to the recount that Mario Diamet does for La Nacion newspaper where we can see the following:
- The deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression.
- The budget deficit that has autonomous proportions
- The National debt today is 9.7 billion.
- The commercial deficit duplicated
- Unemployment reached 7.2% in December and the number of Americans living under the poverty line grew during the Bush era on 4 million people.
- The American troops are fighting in two fronts. There are 150,000 men in Iraq and 35,000 in Afghanistan. According to a Congress commission, the cost of both wars could reach 1.6 billion in 2009.
- United States has lost influences in all the regions. According to a survey from Centro Pew, the positive image of United States in another 10 countries went from 58.7% in 2001 to 39.2% today.
- The Israeli- Palestinian conflict has exploded into a cruel fight in the Gaza Strip. Hamas as well as Israel took advantage of the “window of opportunity” opened by the lack of operation of the White House to obtain political and strategically advantages.
- Latin America has formed a blistering anti American core
- European Union and China have chosen independent paths
- In Georgia and Gaza it was France who intervene with strong proposals
- India and Pakistan, members of the nuclear club, got to the edge of a war without Washington being able to play a relevant role
- Civil liberties, the most important contribution of the United State to the democratic cause, were dangerously cut by the Patriotic Act, passed fast after 9/11
- Human Rights that Bush grandstanded to defend, were systematically violated at Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib and documented by embarrassing testimonies.
- Torture was applied widely, at the same time its definition was submitted to scandalous legal debates.
Clearly we can see the deterioration. The question is if this deterioration is simply a product of bad governance from President Bush during his 2 periods or if we are at the beginning of the end of the American Empire? Is it possible that we are witnessing a historical change? If that’s the case, who is going to take that place? China? India? Europe?