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Most Americans may not consider that their government is building an empire, but unilateral actions by its armed forces, trashing the sovereignty of other nations is certainly making the world a more dangerous place.
Robert Gates, the US defense secretary, has not taken kindly to President Vladimir Putin sharp criticism of US foreign policies, accusing it of being at the genesis for other nations' ambitions to acquire Nuclear Weapons. However, American led war on terror is going overboard and smaller nations are living in fear of interventionist US foreign policy.
To protect ones sovereignty, being armed with Nuclear weapons does create an ambience of security, even if it risks proliferation of nuclear weapons and makes the world a more deadly place than it was before 9/11. Unfortunately, the policy decisions that they have made since 9/11 have merely contributed to enlarging rather than shrinking the Al- Qaeda phenomenon.
Cold Warrior President Putin, may have vested interests in criticizing the American foreign policy over NATO making inroads into former Warsaw Pact countries and containing Russian influence in Eastern Europe, however, building a false weapons of mass destruction case to unilaterally destabilize the Iraqi nation and get rid Saddam Hussein is where American interests in the region preceded the issue of war on terror.
Putin told the annual Munich Conference on Security Policy:
One state, the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is very dangerous. Nobody feels secure anymore because nobody can hide behind international law. It is a world of one master, one sovereign.... It has nothing to do with democracy. This is nourishing the wish of countries to get nuclear weapons. Unilateral, illegitimate actions have not solved a single problem: they have become a hotbed of further conflicts.
Republican Senator John McCain said-
Putin's comments were the most aggressive speech from a Russian leader since the end of the Cold War.
I think now is the time for an honest postmortem of US or rather Bush foreign policy.
US foreign policy has failed not just because of incompetence or bad luck in Iraq. The entire intellectual edifice of Bush foreign policy is deeply flawed. And let's be clear, the sloppy intelligence, faulty judgment, and ideological zealotry that marked implementation, above all in Iraq and in many other parts can be believed yet one can not believe the poor implementation is an accident. The Bush administration's grand strategy is not simply a variation on earlier postwar liberal internationalist grand strategies however, it was a radical departure from America's postwar liberal hegemonic orientation - and the world has bitten back.
Global goodwill towards America has vanished and it is hard to find countries that support Washington's policies. The U.S. has gone from sympathetic victim to arrogant victimizer. Hatred of American policies is especially strong among Muslims, stretching from the Mideast to Indonesia to Europe.
I strongly believe that someone has violated the trust to whom was given the reigns to care the most powerful nation on earth. America indeed had that ability to 'leave behind a better world' of which Mr. Bush boasts each and every time but those goals are likely to be realized only under a different president. With almost two years left of Bush's presidency, Americans must do everything possible to reduce any further harm he can wreak. The U.S. must now start again. It must design a foreign policy for the current age. In doing so, it should discard almost everything the Bush administration has proclaimed.
