http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/15/i_love_the_us_republic_and
It's about decisions by the US to go back to being a republic and giving up on empire. It's much more complicated and covers a lot of things mainly in the Middle East and the US wars.
``So, having said that, we come to alternative five for the US: to become irrelevant. Neither victory nor defeat, nor withdrawal, nor conflict resolution-becoming irrelevant. And that, of course, leads us to the question, who then is relevant? Countries in the region, Turkey. Turkey is led today by three people-the President, the Foreign Minister, and of course the Prime Minister-Davuto?lu, Erdogan, Gül-of an exceptional quality, I will call a team more in tune with what happens in the world than the people leading the United States of America at present. I'm not talking badly about Obama and Hillary Clinton; I'm just saying that those three, it's very hard to come up to that level. Now, they are not becoming a regional power. They are now very high up on world diplomacy. They are not, as Washington Post is saying, turning against the West; they're turning against the United States and Israel, turning against the US empire and the Israeli mini-empire after 1967, forty-three years ago, after the occupation, after the June War. You see, all over the region you find people saying that we can tolerate, we can live with-I mean, I talk with Hamas people, and I ask them, "Is there an Israel you can acknowledge, you can recognize?" And they say, by and large, 4 June, 1967, with some revisions. Well, Turkey is on that side, and they are making contacts now with Iran, with Afghanistan, Iran with Afghanistan, Iran with Turkey. So there you have a quite interesting triad coming up...''
I would add, that Galtung doesn't seem to see how much of US society and its intitutions are involved, committed to, and depend on the imperial project. He seems to think that turning around foreign policies and re-thinking are enough. There are so many elements involved that we in the US are never going back to the concept of a republic. Chavez is right, just as Castro was fifty years ago. Capitalism is incompatible with a democracy. And Evo is right that capitalism is incompatible with Life. In the long, long ago, it was argued in the US that the US military machine was incompatible with a democracy. Thinking back, how naive, as the military was the problem.
CG