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Well, the ISG -- the Illustrious Seniors' Group -- has released its 79-point plan. How unprecedented is it? Well, it seems Iraq is to come under something called the "Iraq International Support Group." If only Neville Chamberlain had thought to propose a "support group" for Czechoslovakia, he might still be in office. Or guest-hosting for Oprah. But, alas, such flashes of originality are few and far between in what's otherwise a testament to conventional wisdom. How conventional is the ISG's conventional wisdom? Try page 49: "RECOMMENDATION 5: The Support Group should consist of Iraq and all the states bordering Iraq,...

AMERICA IS FINISHED as a great power. Not because it no longer possesses the resources, but because it has lost the will. That was brought home to me on both ends of a recent trip through London's Heathrow airport en route to Phoenix. * No great power permits its citizens to be discriminated against. Yet just keep your eyes open as you go through security at Heathrow (or any other international airport). Off goes your jacket. Off comes your wife's jacket, like yours, to be deposited in a heap in a plastic bin headed through a machine designed to detect...

Washington: Asians see the United States losing its undisputed superpower status in 50 years to possibly China amid waning trust in Washington to act responsibly in the world, a poll showed Wednesday. But most Asians felt the growth of Chinese military power would be a potential source of conflict between major powers in the region, according to the study by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCGA), an independent US think tank.

Last week John Kerry revealed his plan to "redeploy" U.S. forces from Iraq. This plan is different from fellow Defeaticrat Jack Murtha's plan to "redeploy" U.S. forces from Iraq to Okinawa, which Congressman Murtha seems to think is in the general neighborhood of Iraq. Iraq's in the Middle East, Okinawa's in the Far East: C'mon, how far can it be to get from the Far to the Middle? After all, the distance between the farthest fringe of the kook left and the center of the Democratic Party seems to be closing up every week. Anyway, Sen. Kerry doesn't want to...

As Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao visits Angola, the BBC's Piers Scholfield examines what links the two nations. One of the worst of the countless conflicts that has blighted Africa in recent times is that of Angola. But a peace deal signed four years ago - and huge oil reserves - are now giving the Angolans hope as the country tries to rebuild its devastated infrastructure. A family living in Cambamba Dois slum Most Angolans haven't seen the benefits of the oil billions Recently China, scouring the globe for raw materials to feed its booming economy, has been drawn to...

China's Growing Challenge To U.S. Posted 5/25/2006 Defense: The Pentagon's annual report on Chinese military power reveals that Beijing will soon be as much of a threat to America's security as it is to Taiwan's. We may soon have more to worry about than cheap imports.China's threat to Taiwan has been long-standing, growing and pretty much common knowledge, but the 2006 edition of the Pentagon's annual report to Congress, "Military Power of the People's Republic of China," makes it clear that China's ambitions and abilities go far beyond recovering what it considers its lost province.The 58-page assessment notes that while...

Reprinted from NewsMax.com In Lithuania With CheneyChristopher RuddySaturday, May 20, 2006 If the Russian press is to be believed, Dick Cheney's speech in Vilnius, Lithuania, on May 4 ushered in a new Cold War. As someone who loves history, it is nice to know that I was one of the handful of people who can say "I was there" for that momentous speech. But the moment was far from gratifying on a philosophical level. My visit to the conference of former Soviet republics and allies that met to hear Vice President Cheney – along with several European leaders – underscored...

Symposium: China: Time Bomb WalkingAs President Bush met with Chinese President Hu Jintao at the White House this week, the issue of China’s rise as a global superpower took center stage. Serious concerns are mounting in Washington in regards to China’s increasingly aggressive global posturing. Indeed, Beijing continues to militarily threaten Taiwan, to support a nuclear North Korea, and to forge alliances with anti-American regimes everywhere, including with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Iran’s nuclear-aspiring Mullahs. As the military and economic threat of Beijing becomes increasingly apparent, the question arises: were we complicit in creating this communist monster? If we were,...

"The next area to look for anything significant in Sino-Russian cooperation is with ongoing nuclear diplomacy. China and Russia have long fuelled North Korean and Iranian nuclear ambitions. Both countries have pocketed myopic profits in deals boosted by technical training which had application beyond peaceful energy purposes." "This issue illustrates equal partnership component of the Sino-Russian partnership quite well. Russia takes the lead on Iran with China's support. The roles are reversed with North Korea as China assumes the dominant role with Russia happily takes a secondary stance." "At the end of the day Putin is the one facing the...

FORMER Soviet leader and Nobel peace prize laureate Mikhail Gorbachev has turned 75, bitter that the end of the Cold War has left the United States with what he called a "superiority complex". "It would be in everyone's interest if that big country America recovered from that disease," he said. Mr Gorbachev, who launched the democratic and economic reforms that ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, described the end of the Cold War as a gift that the United States has squandered. He also denounced growing Russophobia, saying "some in the West would like to...

Iran's president lashed out Wednesday at the United States and vowed to resist the pressure of "bully countries" as European nations circulated a draft resolution urging that Tehran be brought before the U.N. Security Council for its nuclear activities. In a speech to thousands of supporters hours after President Bush's State of the Union address, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad derided the United States as a "hollow superpower" that is "tainted with the blood of nations" and said Tehran would continue its nuclear program. "Nuclear energy is our right, and we will resist until this right is fully realized," Ahmadinejad told the...

America's Superpower Days are Over by Paul Craig Roberts Posted Jan 11, 2006 President George W. Bush has destroyed America's economy, along with America's reputation as a truthful, compassionate, peace-loving nation that values civil liberties and human rights. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University budget expert Linda Bilmes have calculated the cost to Americans of Bush's Iraq war to be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion. This figure is 5 to 10 times higher than the $200 billion that Bush's economic adviser Larry Lindsey estimated. Lindsey was fired by Bush because his estimate was three times higher than...

China, and not India, will be a superpower in 10 years. That is the view of an overwhelming majority of American adults, according to a Harris Interactive poll released on Tuesday. But then, more Americans feel it will be in the US's best interest to encourage India's growth and prosperity instead of China's. What they dread is China's military might, rather than its economic clout, once it is anointed as the superpower. As many as 70 per cent of those surveyed felt China will emerge as a superpower by 2015. Only 20 per cent believe India will attain that status...

This week, President Bush visits the People's Republic of China. As with all such high-level diplomatic missions, he will doubtless be tempted to accentuate the few, putatively positive aspects of the Sino-American relationship, and gloss over the increasing number of negative ones. In that happens, history may record this as a moment when the failure to speak truth to the Chinese communists condemned the two nations to conflict later.

Fighting Terror: Do’s and Don’ts for a Superpower 1. Be feared. 2. Identify the type of terrorists you face, and know your enemy as well as you possibly can. Although tactics may be similar, strategies for dealing with practical vs. apocalyptic terrorists can differ widely. Practical terrorists may have legitimate grievances that deserve consideration, although their methods cannot be tolerated. Apocalyptic terrorists, no matter their rhetoric, seek your destruction and must be killed to the last man. The apt metaphor is cancer—you cannot hope for success if you only cut out part of the tumor. For the apocalyptic terrorist, evading...

China is building its military forces faster than U.S. intelligence and military analysts expected, prompting fears that Beijing will attack Taiwan in the next two years, according to Pentagon officials. U.S. defense and intelligence officials say all the signs point in one troubling direction: Beijing then will be forced to go to war with the United States, which has vowed to defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack. China's military buildup includes an array of new high-technology weapons, such as warships, submarines, missiles and a maneuverable warhead designed to defeat U.S. missile defenses. Recent intelligence reports also show that China has...

China prepares to head a great manufacturing empire. But empires unravel, usually from within. The forces that will determine which nations will dominate the 21st century may yet favor India's emerging reach for global power status more than China's determined grasp for that prize. Kamal Nath, India's energetic minister of commerce and industry, states the case with economy: "China may win the sprint, but India will win the marathon." The Middle Kingdom serves as a platform to bring together capital, cheap labor and industrial technology from throughout the region and ultimately the world. China relies on this empire, but does...

QUICKLY, QUIETLY, THE EU GAINS SUPERPOWER STATUS: By DON MELVIN Cox News Service BRUSSELS, Belgium — Take a close look at that Coca-Cola bottle in your refrigerator. Ever wonder why this quintessentially American concoction is sold in containers that say "2 Liters" instead of "two quarts?" Blame it on the European Union. The EU says quarts are illegal, and bottlers — even those capping those ounces of liquid Americana — don't find it cost-effective to make two different sizes, one for Europe, the other for the United States. From dictating the size of Coke bottles to dissuading Iran from pursuing...

German foreign minister Joschka Fischer has warned of a possible confrontation between the US and China. The aspiring world power should be held in check by a "policy of containment", the minister said in an interview with Handelsblatt. "The dependence is so big, that by confrontation there would no longer be a winner", he said. The big challenge, according to Joschka Fischer, is to integrate emerging world powers such as China and India into the international state system, in order to prevent any armed clashes. Chinese relations were also on the agenda when EU foreign ministers met informally on Friday...

A dozen years ago, after the Soviet Union collapsed and the United States emerged as the sole superpower, historians began a guessing game. How long had it been, they asked, since anyone enjoyed as much sway as the United States? One hundred years, back to the British Empire? Five hundred years, stretching back to Spain? Yale's Paul Kennedy soon provided the right answer: America, he said, had more economic, political, military, and cultural power than any nation since ancient Rome some 2,000 years ago. But, Kennedy added, there were already signs of American slippage, and that warning set off another...