More revelations ahead. I'm responding to this stuff as I read it.
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Originally Posted by Trumanator
However, the reason the US is the presumed world leader has a lot more to do with the realities of economics and world peacekeeping than arrogance.
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To be true, as stated before by others like Edi, the US isn't seen much like peacekeeping anymore, more like warmongering. Preferably in other places of the world, not just on their own territory. Hey, it worked for 50 years and kept everybody distracted, why change it?
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Originally Posted by Trumanator
The US is still the worlds largest economy I think, and provides the vast majority of forces to any kind of peacekeeping operation that the UN orchestrates.
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The US has the biggest army in the world and spends the most money on it every year, yes. I just checked that and had it confirmed pretty well here:
http://www.globalissues.org/article/...itary-spending
About the world's largest economy, I've been reading my newspapers on the weekend when they were analyzing the Lehman Brothers collapse, and what they wrote about the US economy was that it was based on credits, with the credit card being a consistent part of the pocket, and that the US Americans basically have been living above their financial circumstances for years and economists have been warning since a long time that a radical change of course has to happen sooner or later if this continues. So far, with the US being a big consumer like that it was a win-win for everybody because they imported a lot more than they exported, but it can't be expected to continue like this forever, the Dollar is going to decline in value.
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Originally Posted by Trumanator
I don't know what you think but as far as my limited knowledge of other governments goes I think that you could describe the current French, Italian, and German governments as somewhat "pro-american" to use the media phrase.
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As Edi pointed out, the US is of course an important and powerful ally. You can't simply ignore it. But the way that the US has been handling international politics under Bush has caused dismay, especially among the people. It's hard to stomach that the UN is being seen as "ineffectual and useless" by lots of US citizens instead of considering themselves a part of it, just because they think it's okay to go by whatever serves US American interests the most. "Pro-American" was once, to be true the people have now been leaning more towards "Anti-American" lately, especially because of the Iraq war which caused a lot of bad blood. We won't be parading around and burn USA flags, of course. But we're doubting that the USA really has "world peace" in mind and the trust is gone.
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Originally Posted by Trumanator
Not to mention that I have yet to see a useful idea come from the international community as far as terrorism goes. The main idea seems to be capitulate and hope they leave us alone.
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The US wasn't the only target for terroristic attacks. You might have overheard about those in the UK. In Germany, there were some terroristic attacks which fortunately didn't succeed and/or were prevented in time. Diplomacy isn't capitulation, no, it isn't waving guns around either.