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In a Pew 2010 survey, the percentage of respondents who held a favorable view of the United States was 17% in Turkey, 17% in Egypt, 21% in Jordan, 52% in Lebanon, and 17% in Pakistan. In that same survey, the percentage of respondents who believed that the United States considers their country’s interests when making foreign policy either a “great deal” or “a fair amount” was 9% in Turkey, 15% in Egypt, 26% in Jordan, 19% in Lebanon, and 22% in Pakistan.
In a Pew 2008 survey, the percentage of respondents who associated selfishness with people in Western countries was 81% in Indonesia, 73% in Jordan, 69% in Turkey, 67% among British Muslims, 63% in Egypt, 57% among German Muslims, 56% in Nigeria, 54% in Pakistan, 51% among French Muslims, and 50% among Spanish Muslims. In that same survey, the percentage of respondents who associated arrogance with people in Western countries was 74% in Nigeria, 72% in Indonesia, 67% in Turkey, 64% among British Muslims, 53% in Pakistan, 49% in Egypt, 48% in Jordan, 48% among German Muslims, 45% among French Muslims, and 43% among Spanish Muslims.
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Roger Lowenstein’s perceptive
The End of Wall Street
(New York: Penguin Press, 2010) contains the following telling data regarding the overall social and economic consequences of the self-induced 2008–2009 financial crisis:Average deficits of G-20 nations increased from 1% to 8%. (294).
By 2009, each American share of the national debt was $24,000—$2,500 of which was debt to China (294).
America’s total national wealth decreased from $64 trillion to $51 trillion (284).
America’s unemployment rate reached 10.2%. (284).
The United States lost 8 million jobs (284).
Mortgage foreclosures increased from 74,000 a month in 2005 to 280,000 a month in the summer of 2008, and a high of 360,000 in July 2009 (147, 283).
Banks failed at a rate of three per week in 2009 (282).
During the spring of 2009, 15 million American families owed more on their mortgages than their homes were worth (282).
There was a total GDP contraction of 3.8%—the biggest contraction since post-WWII demobilization (282).
America experienced its longest recession since the 1930s (282).
Stocks fell 57%—the biggest drop since the Great Depression (281)
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These two tables represent the averaged rankings of the United States, China, Russia, India, and Brazil across several international indexes that measure economic, social, and political development worldwide. While the United States ranks strongly ahead of the other major aspirants to global primacy in both economic and sociopolitical indicators, the United States does not rank first in any of these indexes when compared against all other countries. These two tables reveal that while the competition for global power is growing, no other emerging power exhibits the combination of soft and hard power that has defined America’s global preeminence.
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Mikhail Bakunin, born in Russia in 1814, was the central figure in nineteenth-century Anarchism and a prominent Russian advocate of terrorism. His disagreement with Karl Marx led to the schism between the anarchist and Marxist wings of the revolutionary socialist movement.
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Its description in
The Grand Chessboard
(1997), p. 31, is still largely valid: “Eurasia is the globe’s largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa’s subordination.... About 75% of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil.... After the United States, the next six largest economies and the next six biggest spenders on military weaponry are located in Eurasia. All but one of the world’s overt nuclear powers and all but one of the covert ones are located in Eurasia. The world’s two most populist aspirants to regional hegemony and global influence are Eurasian.”6
Philip Johan van Strahlberg, a Swedish geographer who traveled throughout Russia in the early 1700s, popularized this idea of a geographic boundary between Europe and Asia through his book
An Historico-Geographical Description of the North and Eastern Parts of Europe and Asia
(London: W. Innys and R. Manby, 1738).7
In late spring of 2007, Estonia was the object of massive cyberattacks from unknown sources following the dismantling in its capital of a statue honoring the Soviet army. In 2009, Russia held a major military exercise on the western borders, called Zapad (“the West”), simulating a counterattack against a Western invader (otherwise unidentified), which culminated in a simulated nuclear attack on the capital of a
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