US & China - relative approaches

13 November 2004

The unwisdom of the Iraq occupation - and the way it has reduced the geostrategic clout of the United States and by extension the United Kingdom - could not have been better illustrated than it was last weekend.

President Bush criss-crossed the US defending the occupation, trying to save Republican Congressional seats - vainly, it now seems - and reminiscing with Karl Rove about better days. China’s President Hu Jintao hosted a trade and investment summit in Beijing with no less than 40 African leaders.

Via Iraq, Bush spent much of the last three years weakening America's friendships, and making her enemies more numerous and more virulent; Tony Blair has acquitted himself of precisely the same task for Britain. President Hu spent the same period quietly extending China's economic and political reach.

It has taken three short, dire years for the neoconservative doctrine of the Bush administration to be discredited, along with that administration's few international acolytes.

John Macgregor

Chiang Mai

Thailand