AMERICAN POWER. Responding to a relatively unobjectionable Tom Friedman column calling for "Russia and China [to] get over their ambivalence about U.S. power", Matt notes that "ambivalence about U.S. power is a natural thing for Russia and China to feel." More than that, particularly for China, concern over US power is a natural way to feel. After all, it wasn't that long ago that some nobody named Paul Wolfowitz drafted a document for then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney arguing that "America�s political and military mission in the post-cold-war era will be to ensure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territories of the former Soviet Union." In other words, US foreign policy should be explicitly aimed at stopping other large countries from becoming competing superpowers. Do you think China, with four-and-a-half times our population, thinks America should be the most powerful and dominant country in the world, forevermore? Or Russia, with their land mass, proud history, and in-living-memory superpower status? For these countries, and many others, America's power is not obviously benign, and there's every indication it could eventually be turned on them were they to pose even a nonaggressive threat to it. And that probably leaves them something worse than ambivalent towards our might, attitude, and obvious affection for unipolarity.
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Ezra Klein
