>
> I agree that the US uses both the subtle and not so
> subtle means of control.
> But the US attacking Iraq to acquire a stranglehold
> over EU and Japan wasn't
> my idea.
No, it was mine. Though I don't claim great originality for it.
>
> Do you see Japan taking an independent position
> vis-a-vis the US? If the
> claim is that the "old Europe" doesn't want to be a
> US subsidiary, what
> stops Japan from emerging as an autonomous power
> centre?
Is that supposed to be a problem for my view? But I don't pretend to know much about Japan. I assume that other things being equal Japan would like to an independent power center. Right now, though, I guess they have other things on their minds, like shaking off this decade-long recession.
>
> Europe: . . .
> the US's uniltaerlaism
> >is creating a >pressure towards an independent
> foreign policy/
>
> This may happen, say, by 2020. We don't know what
> kind of foreign policy
> this Europe will have in 2020. It is not productive
> to speculate about
> scenarios 20 years from now.
Look, all I'm saying is that there is immense hostility and antagonism to US unilateralism that has driven formerly fairly fractious Euriopean countries together and are creating tendencies towards more European unity in foreign policy. I am not predicting a United States of Europe in 20 years.
But I don't see any
> country or a group of them
> acquiring comprehensive global superiority to
> challenge the US in the
> forseeable future.
Not military. ALthough it depends on what you mean by challenge. Europe will not be able to (politically), and will not be interested in, getting the kind of military machine that the US has. But given the Bush doctrine, the idea that Europe might have its own policies and interests that it pursues without the US's say-so might be construed as a "challenge," and Europe certainly wants that.
>
> >Europe doesn't care about Sddam. It does car about
> keeping the US from
> >setting >up a satapy in the Middle East.
>
> Europe doesn't have much leverage in the Middle
> East: Isreal, Egypt and
> Saudi Arabia. There isn't much that the EU can do
> about the US hegemony in
> the Middle East.
What is your point? I am lost here. Is theresomething wrong with my writing? Am I not being clear? I don't grasp why you are bringing up these irrelevancies.
Is your idea that the US's interests in Iraq don't have anything to dow ith Europe because Europe has no significant influence in the middle east? (A point I neither concede nor deny.) That's a non-starter. It's enough reason for the US to be interested in Iraq that the existence of a fairly independent Iraq, whether or not Europe as an iota of influence there, weakens US control and influence over Europe?
>
> >Are you seriously suggestoing that the US sayiong
> My Way or the Highway is
> >just a difference over tactics?
>
> They agree that Iraq should be disarmed. They
> disagree on how it should
> done.
Sure, Europe wants Iraq disarmed. It doesn't want that very much, and would have been more than happy to continue with the 1990s regime of sanctions, etc. In fact, it would have given up the goal entirely except for US and British pressure. But "disarming Iraq" is merely an excuse in this game of imperial politics. Surely you don't believe that whether or not Iraq has any forbidden weapons is really at issue here for anyone.
P-5 countries are concerned about
> proliferation, it threatens their
> monopoly over WMDs.
>
But they aren't by themselves willing to do anything about it.
> >>Why does European capitalism require an
> independent path?
>
> >Because it doesn't want to be a wholly owned
> subsidary of US capitalsim.
> >But >you err if you reduce foreign policy disputes
> to economic ones.
> >Politics matters >here too.
>
> Nobody wants to be a wholly owned subsidiary of the
> US. What is in question
> is how you go about doing it. If the idea of Europe
> vs the US as a probable
> terrain of fundamental conflict is to be seriously
> argued, it must be based
> on more substantive analyses.
>
Great, in another life, when I return to my abandoned career path as an international relations scholar (this isn't sarcasm; my PhD is a joint philosophy/polsci degree, and I mainly did IR at Michigan polisci, before deciding to go into philosophy full time -- that was before I became a lawyer), I'll write a book. Meanwhile, this is a net discussion list. You want footnotes, go to the library.
jks
> Ulhas
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, and
> more
>
>
>
>
__________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more http://taxes.yahoo.com/