>The Euro is in trouble, no? I think it has sank more than 10% versus the
>dollar since its creation. Some of the reasons for this sagging I've read in
>the press are the "concessions" made to the Italians on budgetary matters
>and the failure of the ECB to find a single voice.
Those are as good reasons as any. Those, plus the economic weakness of the EU relative to the US.
>I don't know about there
>being no coincidence with the war and the Euro. I think its more about
>"maintaining the credibility of NATO," even thought the U.S. military
>doesn't seem to have its heart in this one.
These aren't mutually exclusive reasons. The US no doubt sees a threat in the general project of European unification, despite the neonatal weakness of the currency. Perhaps scarier than the euro's rivalry to the US$ (ah, hegemony - the $ is an ASCII symbol and the ¤ isn't, nor is the ¥) is the potential for a European military capacity independent of NATO. As Gowan said:
"A NATO 'victory' in this war could promote the Clinton administration's central objective in waging the war: the winning over of Western Europe's political systems to us leadership of the new, aggressive NATO. After all, the political elites of all the main parties of Western Europe now find themselves justifying, day-in and day-out the vital necessity and enormous human value of the new NATO: Western Europe is being won to the idea that attacking damaged sovereign states is legitimate; shattering their military forces, infrastructures and economies is permissible; ignoring the UN Charter and the checks built into the UN Security Council structure is unavoidable; marginalizing and excluding a currently weak Russia is necessary; humiliating and ignoring the interests of the largest nation in former Yugoslavia, the Serbs, is vital. And we Europeans could never have achieved all these things without the generous leadership of the United States."
>And as far as U.S. imperialism,
>Treasury Secretary Summers (bleck) and Greenspan are against dollarization
>for Latin America.
I think they don't want the implied liability of having to bail out a dollarized Latin American financial system.
Doug