Month: July 2004

Wednesday, my youngest and I picked up the middle daughter at the airport, home from her year abroad. We circled the city as I missed a series of turnoffs from the beltway. I enjoyed listening to the sisters talk and talking myself. Then, I started a monologue; it is hard to believe, I told them, what Americans say to one another, do. They let me speak. Then I realized their faces had changed. Their impatience was not because I was talking too much nor because they felt I was prying nor even their usual boredom with me. Instead, they were both appalled.

“Mommy,” the younger one said, “I don’t think Tessie wants to hear this. I don’t.”

Yes, the stories were not just ugly, they were unimportant. I’d been drawn to them because they demanded attention, raw with anger – theirs and mine. But they had gotten me off track as much as those missed exits kept me circling the city. Bush as a Satanic creature from Goya’s Spain, Michael Moore’s tiresome spiel, novels that wittily discuss assassination – these are not the story. Not really.

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James Hoge, editor of Foreign Affairs, in his article A Global Power Shift in the Making, claims a global power realignment is currently underway; from the West to the East. China, with 1/4 of the worlds population within its borders and a fast growing, increasingly decentralized market economy, has the potential to become the worlds largest economic and military power in the coming century. India, with a population exceeding a billion people and an economy growing at sustained rates of 6-8% per year, could outstrip both the US and China, should it maintain that growth for a number of decades. (In related and rather unsettling news, the US and India recently completed another series of ‘Cope India’ war games, wherein the pilots of the Indian Air Force cleaned the proverbial clocks of their USAF counterparts. That raised eyebrows in astonishment all over the world. The Russians loved it.)

This transistion of power centers will not be without difficulties, Hoge says. History, he points out, is replete with examples of large scale wars that result from the inability of nation states to fully grasp, much less manage and cope with these power transistions. War, from Taiwan to North Korea to Kashmir to the Indian-Chinese border, could more than simply derail the process, it might plunge the world into catastrophic warfare.

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Author and Marine Corp reservist Eric M. Johnson writes a lucid account of his experience in Iraq and how it compares to The Washington Post’s “experience”.