…that if we voted for John McCain, our status around the world would suffer.

And they were right!.

For the Kyrgyz, the Russians are the devil they know, the Chinese are the devils flush with yuan, and the Americans, two decades after the collapse of the USSR, are the tight-fisted guys all too willing to cut a deal corrupting the previous presidential administrations of Akaev and Bakiev while delivering lectures about democracy. To quote some of the acerbic critics of former U.S. President George W. Bush, “all hat, no cattle.”

The Pentagon has lost yet another opportunity to expand its global footprint, but to use an American baseball metaphor, “three strikes and you’re out.” It’s not as if anyone except the most tone-deaf in Washington couldn’t see it coming.

Nothing’s better for a power vacuum  than letting the Chinese and Russians fill it without a serious fight.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, November 8th, 2011 at 6:52 am and is filed under World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.