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[The Telegraph, U.K.]

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Gazeta, Russia

A World Without Captain America

 

"Captain America, following Captain Russia, has completed its journey through the realm of imperialism. The world is becoming a global empire, a global colony, a global village. Simply put, we are now traveling in one ship and must fight as hard as we can to make sure that it doesn't turn out to be another Titanic."

 

By Semen Novoprudski*

                                         

 

Translated By Yekaterina Blinova

 

August 12, 2011

 

Gazeta - Russia - Original Article (Russian)

Managing America's return to a multilateral world is a difficult task for any American president. Barack Obama - whether he wins in 2012 or not - has his work cut out for him.

 

RUSSIA TODAY VIDEO: 'U.S. empire designed to self-destruct, more unrest to follow', Aug. 11, 00:01:54RealVideo

During the latest economic shock, the syndrome of dependency on America, from which Russia and humanity in general chronically suffer, has become especially apparent. Everyone hates the States, but depends solely on it. Even now, what other nation can deal with the responsibility of maintaining international order and pulling the global economy up by its ears? Alas, the demands on “Captain America” critically exceed the supply. The modern world can no longer afford just one "captain country."

 

We live in an era not just of the end of the U.S. as the world’s sole superpower, but of the superpower idea as such.

 

Russia's superpower crash was torturous. Even after twenty post-Soviet years, neither the man on the street nor the nation's heads of state have managed to internalize that we are now inhabitants of a large country that finds itself in a rapid and perhaps irreversible historical decline. That there is no longer a throng of dependent countries behind us, eager to demonstrate their loyalty and subservience in exchange for support. That we no longer have the resources to impose our own rules outside our own geographical borders. Even for ourselves, we can't establish any intelligible order.

 

The best sign of our gradual awakening to the death of superpower Russia (the Russian empire, the Soviet Union) is precisely our attempt to demonize the United States on every possible occasion. We behave like a country manically-dependent on America. It is Americans who allegedly dispense funds to Russian liberals and U.S. state propaganda that created the “color revolutions” - none of which, by the way, succeeded. It was they who destroyed the Soviet Union. It was they who organized our economic crises. And so, what do we do? What can we do? Win a war against tiny Georgia? Pay the tiny atoll nation of Nauru [$50 million] to recognize the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia? Threaten the United States with sanctions in response to U.S. sanctions on officials complicit in lawyer Sergei Magnitsky’s prison death? But a ban on an American’s entry into Russia cannot in any way be considered a sanction: why would they want to come here? Our inflated sense of influence is now based on gas imports to the E.U. - but even that last shred of "superpowerdom" will last only a few more years: Europe is diversifying its gas supplies and altering consumption toward different fuels.

 

The United States; the economically-accelerating but politically-barbaric China; India, with the world’s second-largest population; and the European Union, mired in an identity crisis coupled with severe economic problems, are not in any way superpowers. None can unilaterally set the rules of game on a global scale.

 

Of course, some nations are more influential than others. But the United States cannot cope with today's global crisis alone. It wasn't by chance, after the shocks of 2008, that only a coordinated and to a large extent identical response by dozens of countries - regardless of the nature of their political regimes - helped the world climb out of the economic abyss. And the state of our economy is no longer in the hands of the U.S. Federal Reserve, but the Russian government.

 

 

SEE ALSO ON THIS:
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Taiwan News: Inadequate U.S. Arms Deal Shows Failure of Taiwan President

Global Times, China: U.S. Arms Sale to Taiwan 'Not Necessarily Bad'

Die Tageszeitung, Germany: Taiwan Arms Sales a Gut Check for U.S.

Rceczpospolita, Poland: China Feels Her Oats at America's Expense

China Daily, China: U.S. Weapons Sale to Taiwan will 'Sour Ties'

Taiwan News, Taiwan: Taiwan Leader Welcomes American Weapons Deal
Magyar Nemzet, Hungary: Bachmann: Will 'One-Eyed Monarch Lead the Blind'?
Hispanidad, Spain: How Spain Can Build its Own 'Tea Party': Copy Sarah Palin
El País, Spain : Tea Party 'Endangers Health' of American Democracy
ABC, Spain: The Misguided Demonization of the 'Tea Party' Movement
Frankfurter Rundschau, Germany: 'Radical' Republicans Threaten America with Ruin
Le Monde, France: Charting the Tortured Path of the Tea Party
Le Temps, Switzerland: America's 'Cry of Agony' Through the Tea Party
Romanian Libera, Romania: Tea Party Activists Reflect U.S. Checks and Balances
Excelsior, Mexico: Paradox: The Tea Party is 'Determined to Help Obama'
Le Figaro, France: The Tea Party: An 'American Fever' that Will Soon Pass
El Universal, Mexico: The Tea Party and Immigration: Obama's Ace in the Hole
Tageblatt, Luxembourg: Prepare for 'Tea Time' in America
Upsala Nya Tidning, Sweden:
U.S. Should Choose Patriotism Over Party Tactics
Cotidianul, Romania: The Tea Party and the Workings of American Democracy

FTD, Germany: Why Obama Shouldn't Listen to the Tea Party
La Jornada, Mexico: Glenn Beck and the New U.S.-Right: 'Like a Horror Movie'

Die Zeit, Germany: The Head-Spinning Rate of Change in American Politics

Folha, Brazil: Obama: An American Anomaly?

 

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By the way, Russia is behaving in a fundamentally differently way than a nation vying for the title "master of the world" should. The key rule for any country with geopolitical ambitions is to take responsibility and not shift blame to others. Russian leaders, by contrast, categorically don't want to be responsible for the situation - even in their own backyard.

 

But even countries that are trying to conduct responsible policy and have relatively large financial resources to draw on can no longer behave like superpowers. It is clear that manifestations of "superpowerness," such as organizing emergency aid to millions of starving people in Somalia, where in the past few months every tenth child under the age of five has died of starvation, are appropriate and necessary. But maintaining an active military presence far from one’s own territory and a desire to establish certain political regimes in other countries by force are doomed to failure. “A person is a person, no matter how small” wrote wonderful storyteller Theodore Geisel. Right now, the same can be said about nations.

 

International terrorism, the global economy, information networks, a growing lack of essential natural resources, the creation of history’s first weapons not simply of mass destruction - but of total destruction - have made us, regardless of the size of the countries in which we live - players of relatively equal significance.   

Posted by WORLDMEETS.US

 

And so we play the game of organizing, through joint efforts and even against our will, a world order the likes of which might permit humanity to survive and develop without destroying ourselves and the planet.

 

Like never before, the threat of the humanity's and the earth's total self-destruction is real. The order under by which in different times determined the course of individual countries, tribes, and tyrants has been irreversibly changed.

 

Today, in a moment, the strong become the weak, and the weakness of one country is felt by another, even thousands of miles away.

 

Captain America, following Captain Russia, has completed its journey through the realm of imperialism. The world is becoming a global empire, a global colony, a global village. Simply put, we are now traveling in one ship and must fight as hard as we can to make sure that it doesn't turn out to be another Titanic.

 

*Semen Novoprudski is executive editor of the Moscow News

 

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[Posted by WORLDMEETS.US Aug. 24, 12:49am

 

 

 







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