Foreign policy aims and foreign policy results are usually two different things. And our State Department is in major need of housecleaning.
I can't make the leap, though, to your conclusion that we are the weakest nation on the planet.
The opposite is true, although our foreign policy often seems to be ashamed of that fact.
"I can't make the leap, though, to your conclusion that we are the weakest nation on the planet......The opposite is true, although our foreign policy often seems to be ashamed of that fact."
When our foreign policy is used as though we "are the weakest nation on the planet", then the ability of our strenght to help affect our foreign policy goals is no better than the actual weakest nation on earth.
Under Condi, our "diplomacy" carries no sticks, projects no sense of the power we actually have, to either friend or foe and thus our diplomacy is mere talk, mere process, like the French, where just because we are talking we get to pretend some goal is being met. It is as if we actually are powerless and the results are no better than if we actually were.
There are things that China, Iran and our allies can all be told, in terms of the risk to good relations with us and continuation of the world status quo that their appeasement of current dangerous conditions that their actions could invoke, in terms of our response.
Instead, we appease the foreign policy goals of every foe and ally on the pretense that we are getting their cooperation, when the results of our diplomacy continue to show that they got the most the could have hoped for and we got the least.
When you emasculate, through "diplomacy" the real power you have, it creates practical results that in affect deny you have any real power; and nations that are your foes are encouraged, given every expectation that they should be and cannot understand when a Reagan comes along to finally correct course.
The self-imposed fiction on our power is more dangerous than flexing it to begin with; and we have nothing to feel guilty about our goals when we do.