On Dec 4, 10:53*am, Gunner Asch wrote:
...
Those who tut-tut approvingly about a democracy [that] purports to be
world policeman being brought down a peg ignore the fact that we
have fallen into this role in large part due to the abdication by
numerous other Western nations of their own security responsibilities.
If our capacity is weakened, the result will be a vacuum of
responsibility, not a shift. That is well understood in other capitals,
which is another reason I suspect the fallout from this episode will be
more muted than one might expect.

An excellent example is the Eur-moil in the Balkans before Clinton
intervened. In that instance the whiners blamed us for neglect when
they couldn't accuse us of meddling. Rwanda was another, where was the
UN???

The first major signs of the transfer of global influence were the
1956 Suez cisis where Egypt outmuscled Britain and France, and the
extremely swift US response in Lebanon in 1958.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Lebanon_crisis
It wasn't a major event, but it showed world leaders how capable we
had become relative to their declining, underfunded militaries. We
reacted in hours, Russia needed weeks to bolster Syria. It also proved
the worth of self-supporting carrier groups that could remain on
station for many months, which not even the Royal Navy had ever had.

Imagine the righteous indignation if someone leaked the internal files
of Wikileaks or the outlets that published the leaked documents.