Carl Remick wrote:
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> When it comes to fantasies of vulnerability, Israel has plenty to learn from
> the even more delusional USA -- that everlasting "pitiful, helpless giant"
> with history's greatest war-making machine.
>
It's been a long time since I read Thucydides, but if I remember correctly one of the core arguments Pericles used for aggressively defending the Athenian Empire was, in effect, that Athens had a tiger by the tail, that they had made more or less their whole world very angry at them, and if they lost the empire that freed empire would gang up on them, so they had better fight.
The US people have nothing to fear from the peoples of China, India, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, eastern Europe, fSU, Africa, Middle East, and Latin America. But the U.S. ruling class has a hell of a lot to fear from those peoples if they once escape from under the thumb of U.S. imperialism.
And incidentally, the U.S. ruling class has not only to fear socialist revolutions but opposing capitalisms. I think Dennis is merely silly in his claims that Japan/China and/or Europe has already achieved hegemony. U.S. hegemony is clear and growing. But the world does change, and sooner or later (probably not a _lot_ later) u.s. hegemony _will_ be challenged: socially, economically, _and_ militarily. I suspect that the stupid fanfare about rogue nations etc. is merely the wrapping for more 'sensible' long-run fears. One could, for example, imagine a China/India/Iran axis (allied with some forces in the fSU and even a South American breakaway state challenging the U.S.
Specifics are mere fantasy -- but the possibilities such fantasies image are not.
Carrol