Missing from Krauthammer's analysis, of course, is the history behind this development.
US global domination, which could be said to have begun with the collapse in the early 1990s of the former Soviet Union, was destined to be a short-lived affair. By 1990, the Soviet Union had been bankrupted by President Reagan's massive military spending campaign, and the USSR's political and economic implosion did leave the US, by default, as the world's last and only "superpower," but left unremarked was that this country's massive military spending had also effectively hollowed out the US economy, too. And instead of turning inward at the end of the Cold War, and investing in a revitalization of America's crumbling physical, social and educational infrastructure, which might have rectified things, the problem was made worse by two more decades of continuous war economy, driven by the very neoconservative ideology that Krauthammer still espouses.
Wars were launched: first the Persian Gulf War against Iraq in 1990-1 (which continued until the 2003 invasion of Iraq with the maintenance of "no-fly zones" over parts of Iraq), then the Bosnian and Kosovo wars in the mid and late '90s, followed by the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And when that was not enough, a fake "War on Terror" was launched to convince the gullible American public of the need of continued massive military spending.
Instead of shrinking the bloated US military, successive presidents -- George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and finally Barack Obama -- all kept increasing military spending to the point that this country under President Obama has been spending as much on its military as the rest of the world combined. And to make things worse, the US has been losing its wars. that is not the kind of thing designed to instill fear in potential adversaries.
At the same time that the US empire was bankrupting itself through extravagant military spending, it has been relentlessly pushing its weight around everywhere in the world, subverting or trying to subvert democratically elected governments in places like Nicaragua, Panama, Grenada, Haiti and Venezuela, and even seeking to undermine governments in states like Russia, Ukraine and Iran.
Something had to give, and as Krauthammer correctly notes, something finally has given.
America's bluff is being called.
Fed up with the clumsy bullying of American foreign and economic policy, angered by the imperial over-reach of America's National Security Agency, and emboldened by the weakness of both the American dollar and America's bloated, bureaucratic and over-stretched military (as evidenced by its inability to defeat minimally armed and trained patriotic forces in Afghanistan and Iraq), Russia and China, and perhaps Iran too, are realizing that they "don't have to take it anymore."
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