A Global Power Shift in the Making

Foreign Affairs ^ | June 24, 2004 | BluegrassScholar

[Cronos]

Xenophobia rules that chunk of the world
Well, just to play devil's advocate, you must remember that a century ago xenophobia vis-a-vis the Germans and the French was all too true.

[discostu]

Yeah, and it's one of the reasons America was able to become such a dominant force. European countries doing stuff (like forming alliances) just to spite each other is one of the reasons we won the Revolution, helped us a bit in 1812 too. And they still don't like each other very much, they've just finally realized they need each other. But it's not as deep as what goes on in Asia, a really quick way to get decked by somebody from Viet Nam, Korea, China or Japan is to tell them you thought they were from one of the other countries in the list. There's genuine loathing on the Pacific rim, Europe specialized in snooty disdain.

[Cronos]

There's genuine loathing on the Pacific rim, Europe specialized in snooty disdain.

True, those countries do have a much much longer history than any country in Europe.

[CarrotAndStick]

I disagree. It is this very distrust that breeds competition, much like the Cold War. Mutual animosity fuelled technological and military development both in the US and Russia.Working together usually ruins competition, which in turn ruins development, much like socialism.

[discostu]

And the Cold War destroyed Russia's economy bankrupting their government and people. When both sides have all the stuff they need competition is good, when they don't (which is generally the case in most of Asia and Europe) co-operation is needed. Look at Airbus, nobody in Europe on their own could accomplish Airbus, working together they have a really good chance of driving Boeing right out of business, and government assistance is the only reason Airbus is succeeding, they make the right plane for the marketplace at this time. There's a big gap between co-operative capitalism and socialism, co-operative capitalism means pooling your strengths to better assault other competition, it's the difference between a great QB with nobody to throw to and a good QB with a good receiving core.

[CarrotAndStick]

It was not the Cold War explicitly that destroyed Russia, it was their Afghanistan debacle. Their decline started around '79. Before that, you will have to agree their economic and technological numbers pointed nowhere but upward. fter '79, the freefall began.

I thought Europe was nearly all socialistic when Airbus was formed.

[discostu]

Russia simply couldn't afford to keep spending with us. Their economic numbers weren't very good in the 70s and neither was their technology. One of the big things that came out after the wall came down was that Russia had been feeding a major line of BS to the world about how well they were doing, it was a poor country barely hanging on, then Reagan came in and up-ed the anti. According to Gorby we won the Cold War when Star Wars was announced, they knew they couldn't even afford to start equivalent research, knew we would make it work, and knew that it would instantly render obsolete the missiles they'd bankrupted the nation to build.