HYPERPOWER HAS ITS LIMITS

Worth reading: A new credo for the hyperpower.

To improve its influence and image in the world, the US should refrain from building new nuclear weapons, scrap the Bush doctrine of preventive war and regime change, break its climate-changing oil habit, and recommit to international rule-making organisations such as the UN.

The musings of a leftwing think-tank? A liberal pipedream? Not a bit of it. These proposals come from Richard Haass, a leading light in the US foreign policy establishment and former senior official in the Clinton and Bush administrations.
...
Pointing to perhaps the biggest lesson of the neo-conservative era, Mr Haass says hyperpower has limits - and they have been reached.

"The US does not need the world's permission to act, but it does need the world's support to succeed," he writes. "No single country, no matter how powerful, can contend successfully on its own with trans-national challenges."

Iraq, for example, had become a "magnet and a school for terrorists". The US should push for a new set of international "rules of the road" before the opportunity afforded by post-Cold War American primacy is squandered, he argues. But "significant changes" to current US policies are a prerequisite.