Turkey is Rebuilding Somalia

Posted: 2012-06-10 09:05:58

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Anthony

“China, Turkey, India, and Brazil aren’t going to do things exactly as we would do them” nor should they; but if the structural imperatives of international system (which are powerful) help to indirectly achieve advantages by which United States prosper then so much the better – science, technology, diplomacy, governance, etc. spreads.
Luke Lea

@ – “The United States isn’t trying to build some kind of old fashioned empire in which we are the kings of the world and everyone else bows and kisses the ring. We’re trying to build a world in which people live more or less as they like, the advance of science and technology lifts the world’s standard of living, and the nations of the world are much less interested in trying to overturn the world system than in trying to prosper within it.”

If we were serious — or, rather, if we were more imaginative in our diplomacy — we would band together with our major allies to leverage the democratic world’s combined economic muscle to establish norms of civilized behavior. By means of punitive tariffs and conditionality on access to the international banking system and travel to the West, we could use our soft power potential while we still have it.
Luke Lea

We should put the Communist Party of China on notice that if they don’t surrender power and move to a genuine constitutional democratic form of governance with the rule of law and an independent judiciary — in reality, not just on paper — then they are going to pay to price. Announce a ten year plan of gradually increasing tariffs and other penalities or else. The only language China understands is the language of money. Let them fume. They can’t live without us.
Luke Lea

We should ally ourselves with the Chinese people not with the Communist Party. Change in China will only come from above — a coup by benevolent dictator — and/or from outside economic pressure.

Sorry I’m off topic but I just can’t get excited by Turkey in Somalia.
JKB

I disagree that the US isn’t in decline. We are but not because Turkey, China and Brazil are stepping up but because so many in the US have abandoned the system that built the world. As we see, though, success breeds its own imitators.

Since our heyday in the ’50s, most in the US government foreign relations establishment have hated free enterprise and distrusted democracy. When they’ve promoted it, they’ve sought to hobble it. Now with decent alternatives, the poor of the world will see not the crippled US way but The Way to prosperity. They can see the US government strangle business in the crib today but how it wasn’t so when we were rising and seek not to make the same mistakes.

Competition is good, clears out the fool ideas and makes a stronger result able to withstand the waves of utopians who seek to loot nations that gain some ground away from the precipice.

BTW, sounds like even more reason to move the UN headquarters from NYC to Mogadishu. Most of the world’s representative could commute in with short flights leaving mostly the US, Canadian and perhaps Mexican representatives with large carbon footprints for meeting attendance.