Come-uppance

Over at kos, excerpts from a long sobering Financial Times article cataloging the ever-increasing ways that American hubris and hypocrisy are causing the rest of the world to draw away from us. Not only are we no longer the moral authority to the world, but we are being eclipsed on financial and strategic fronts by nations and alliances with a longer view.

A decade ago, American triumphalists mocked those who argued that the world was becoming multipolar, rather than unipolar. Where was the evidence of balancing against the US, they asked. Today the evidence of foreign co-operation to reduce American primacy is everywhere -- from the increasing importance of regional trade blocs that exclude the US to international space projects and military exercises in which the US is conspicuous by its absence.
. . .
In recent memory, nothing could be done without the US. Today, however, practically all new international institution-building of any long-term importance in global diplomacy and trade occurs without American participation.

I guess it's just more for the list of eventual regrets. I can hardly keep up.