Tilting the Balance of Power among Nations of the World

By Ed Young, PhD

August 21, 2007

When the cold war with Russia ended, it became clear that there no longer was a ‘Balance of Power’ among the nations of the world. Now it was not just a case of the US being the one and only superpower due to its military supremacy, there was a new Roman Empire in the making. The Neo-Cons seized the opportunity and formulated a plan for the ‘New American Century’. Paradoxically, the US’s huge military budget was unwittingly handing the power advantage over the nations with miniscule defense budgets. They not only were gaining economically but also building alliances with other highly industrialized as well as up and coming Asian nations and even underdeveloped countries.

However, another factor entered the equation. The US’s large corporations were turning into giants and spreading over the planet. Globalization of corporations intertwining between almost every nation was taken as a sign by the Neo-Cons that the US was not on the sole military superpower but well on its way to dominating the international corporate scene. However, most of the remaining industrialized countries were not content to sit back and let themselves be swallowed by this new Empire. When they saw the way the Bush administration was bungling things by waging a resource-draining-war in Iraq and souring public relations with the rest of the world, the road to restoration of the ‘Balance of Power’ became clear.

Outsourcing its manufacturing to the second tier, rapidly developing, industrialized nations, thus increasing their economic prowess, soon made them bankers to the now financially desperate US. The US became a debtor nation with the rest of the world like China and the British becoming creditors holding the US’s bank notes and holding over its head the threat of calling the notes back in. A silent fiscal alliance between these creditor nations once again divided the world into a two-party balance but now tilting their way.

Spun like a spider web in the night, they caught the US as though it were an unwary fly. Now, with its military spread too thin to mobilize against any new enemies, it is no longer a military superpower. Now, with its financial indebtedness to the rest of the world and its stupid tax largesse to America’s rich back lashing into a domestic financial mortgage and credit crisis, the downward slope of the tilt is becoming so great that the haughty status of the US after the cold war has been routed into a near complete ‘reversal of fortune’. Now, the one who had been the top dog over the rest of the world has become their tail. No one is afraid of the big bad US wolf anymore and they brazenly nip at the US as though it were a wounded wolf and are watching it scampering off with its tail between its legs and its bark turned into a yelp.

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