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Foreign Policy? Baloney for some!

Perhaps one ought not care whether the US has a foreign policy or how effective it is......but for the fact that the US remains, certainly for the moment, a dominant power in the world. That may well change in the next years as China becomes a more powerful and influential nation on the world stage.

Roger Cohen, writing in The New York Times, decries some old-fashioned notions and ideas of Americans in relation to the country's foregn policy. He is particularly critical of some of the GOP notions, he describes as "baloney".

"I have several reactions to this that all fit under the rubric: baloney! First, we’re not in 1990 any longer: America remains dominant but cannot resolve major problems alone and will in the next decade, by some estimates, see China overtake it as the world’s largest economy.

Second, it’s precisely Republican factionalism in Washington that’s stopping the United States from attaining again the greatness Republicans invoke. Remember James Madison’s admonition to “break and control the violence of faction” through a “well-constructed Union.”

Right now factionalism leaves critical budget challenges unmet, stops serious investment in education and research, and leaves America trailing China on the green technologies that will be big job-creators in coming decades. The road to the American future is not “Drill, Baby, Drill!”

Third, it’s just delusional to imagine that any president, Republican or Democrat, confronted by the meltdown of 2008, would not have seen as a core task a retrenchment of U.S. overseas commitments in an attempt to bring them in line with diminished resources."

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