The Unrighteous Servant
By know you will have turned your ear from understanding...but listen to what the LORD your God has to say:
“The kingdom of heaven is like a certain king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. And when he had begun to settle accounts, one was brought before him who owed him ten thousand talents. But as he was not able to pay, his master commanded that he be sold, with his wife and children and all that he had, and that payment be made. The servant therefore fell down before him, saying, ‘Master, have patience with me, and I will pay you all.’ Then the master of that servant was moved with compassion, released him, and forgave the debt. But the servant went out and found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii’s; and he laid hands on him and took him by the throat, saying, ‘Pay me what you owe!’ So his fellow servant fell down at his feet and begged him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you all.’ And he would not, but went and threw him into prison till he should pay the debt. So when his fellow servants saw what he had done, they were very grieved, and came and told their master all that had been done. Then his master, after he had called him, said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you begged me. Should you not also have had compassion on your fellow servant, just as I had pity on you?’ And his master was angry, and delivered him to the torturers until he should pay all that was due to him. So my heavenly Father will do to you if each of you, from his heart, does not forgive his brother his trespasses. Matthew 18:23-35.
In the name peace and manifest destiny for the American people... those who somehow thought that through their suffering that they were more worthy because their suffering had made them so much more worthy...under the direction of its own government and its corporate backers... hundred’s of thousands of American Indians were slaughtered, murdered and killed outright with no semblence of due process of the law, as "The United States of America "pushed westward...towards the settiing of the sun...towards the going down of the light...towards the gowing down of God"s glory...towars the gowing down of "God's truth."
This nation too, incorporated the slavery of hundreds of thousands more Black Africans, many of whom died en-route, many more of whom were killed, beaten, whipped, raped, and worked to death…all in the name of progress and national interest. ..the innocent blood was shed. ..and the nation that produced themignores it as their atoninment for sin...going out, still again in search of more innocent blood to shed.
Because this nations leadership refuses the atonement of innocent blood...they have decided to sacrifice over and over, that which was finished with Christ...it can never wash its hands...no matter how much innocent blood is shed...because it will forever bear the guilt as a government of shame because it is the only way it can ignore the heart that it was meant to bear.
Each administration from now forward, will bear its mark in that shame, unless it repents of the deeds of its fathers...who taught it to do the same...let truth speak... I do not speak for myseld...but for all of our nation, O LORD
Corporate America has gone into every nation in this world and uprooted whole communities for the sake of this progress. Anyone speaking out or getting in the way through any type of resistance has been imprisoned or killed...evidence this in the despots and dictators we have supported and removed because they came to the truth.
This is the foundation that this country was built upon, despite all the lofty and noble words. This is the debt that is owed to the Master and no matter how hard we may have begged in the past for the Lord to have patience with us, he has done so already, as our song sings, "God shed His grace on thee."
Yet we have forgotten His mercy and the promises of His grace.
Instead we have become a nation of self-righteous individualists who point the finger at everyone in every nation who disagrees with us and the ideology which we attempt to impose. Those whose heart keeps them silent in the face of this evil are only attemptiong to hold onto what they have...to preserve their own life.
The Father now has to do what is just, for the sake of all those fellow servants who have become witnesses against us, our bretheren in sin, and have become grieved by the lack of our compassion that this nations leaders are now hell bent on demonstrating...despite their call for a kinder, gentler, more compassionate nation.
This is what agrees with the final reality…this is truth.
The death of over 100,000 Iraqi civilians: men, women, and children are considered collateral damage, and an acceptable number of casualties for the progress mentioned and the protection of national interests that is nothing more than the greed of a nation. The over half a million Iraqi children who starved to death under the U.N. sanctions imposed before this war began was considered to be an acceptable number by the players of the political landscape. Madeline Albright, Colin Powell, Barbara Bush, George Bush.
Before even this, the sanctions imposed at the demands of the U.S. caused the starvation deaths of over 500,00 Iraqi , men, women and children. The bombings that began against this population began well before George "W." Bush ever took his oath of office.
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable: Aldous Huxley
Passion and redemption were probably essential parts of our parents' religious experience. But I believe it would be wiser and more humane in our 21st century to reflect upon the sins of our little human gods, those evangelicals who also claim we are fighting for "good" against "evil", who can ignore history and the oceans of blood humanity has shed - and get away with it.
O LORD, hear my cry unto Thee...see my tears for those who have fallen before me...and when I fall, know that I fall for all of those who came before me...those who were considered last, LORD, are those who were first before me...and now it is LORD, that I fall too...it shame for what I believed.
Americans supported this in every way by keeping silent, by consuming goods that they have grown dependant upon, by consuming oil and gasoline at a rate that is anything but conservative, by paying taxes into a system that is more ruthless than any other empire that has gone before it.
While we render unto Caesar what is due Caesar, we also render unto “In God We Trust.” How can two faces be on the same coin unless one face considers itself to be the same as the other? ...Do not believe in that!!!
Satan has certainly grown more bold and has learned how to manipulate here. We allow our system to feed us the treasures that we continue to desire and covet and even crave, heaping them to ourselves at the expense of countless innocent lives, convinced that we are in need of them to sustain the American way of life while other nations whither under our greed.
These treasures are produced by greedy corporations who employ labor in other nations at anything but a living wage. They reap the worldly rewards as America's insatiable demand for cheap, quality goods has caused the suffering of many a poor nation.
And yet...we are still without our chastisement.
That should make you whither and tremble with fear.
[We allow ourselves], those who call themselves Christian, to be deluded into thinking we are more deserving somehow of God’s grace and abundance, and because we think we are righteous, and that we will be going to heaven when we die. We allow ourselves to be diluded into thinking that it is our responsibility in the world to pass out judgments and vengeance on our fellow nation servants, taking them by the throat, throwing them in prison, conquering, pillaging, looting and robbing, after this nation’s debts to God have so graciously been forgiven.
How do we do this?
We do this because those who were set in place to teach us have taught us such...the religious order of the day...and yet...it is not by their own hand...it is by the freewill of our own selves that has allowed it...we cannot pass blame.
By supporting the purveyors of this violence who bring us our goods, we evidence in our own hearts that is our own comfort that we desire over everything else...even if it means destroying another people...even if that people be our own...Chritianity as we would like to have it, but does not in anyway reflect God's will for it.
"God shed His grace on thee"…why?
...because we have been so abominably wicked...not because we have been so righteous...for righteousness needs no grace.
We allow ourselves to feel as a nation, that we, of all people can be the moral voice of the world...that America reflects the Israel of the past...but wereas Israel of the past was chosen...it was because of their ignorance...we have God's word...and Christ's gospel...so what is our excuse.
And yet, we allow ourselves to be led to reject the empathy and compassion necessary to reflect what has been given to us. We allow ourselves, as a nation, to determine and define the poverty of other nations according to a standard we have been fed from our infancy, and by the abundancy provided, by the purveyors of this evil notion.
We have forgotten our own poverty.
In our abundance, we wag our finger at nations less fortunate. And yet, our outward show of moral self-righteousness is only a false covering of the pride for the sins that fester deep in the soul of our nation, helping us to believe the lie that we are better than all other nations in some way.
We may like to think we are noble and righteous and good because we have abundance...but there are countless lost lives that cry out in testimony against what we would like to believe about ourselves.
The parable of the unjust servant that was spoken by Jesus Christ is the truth about whether we can or can’t lose the salvation we all hope in...the forgiveness received. It depends on what we do with the grace we were given as to whether we will enter into the kingdom of God...the promised land.
If we use it based on what we consider to be our own righteousness, we will lose it...but if it is according to God's righteousness, that tells us that we still fall short of His own righteousness then we can gain through the humbleness that it offers.
No empire nation who has gone before us has had the privaledge of doing that...
because they exalted their ways over God's ways...their nation over the rest of the nations of the world...whom God so loved. So why do we desire to follow them?
There were over 600,000 Israelites who fled Egypt in the days of Moses. All but two who left out of that sin world died in the wilderness without ever seeing the Promised Land. One was Calab...whose name means boldness...and the other was Joshua...which means , God is my salvation.
All Christians who were born again, or remain obedient throughout the ages risk dieing in this wilderness of self-righteousness without ever obtaining the heavenly support simply because they refused to take hold on it...they refuse to face and speak and live the truth about their present day reality…to face the reality of ourselves… to speak out against injustices committed in our name…or any other name...to live according to the righteousness that Christ showed us in courage(boldness) and strength (salvation). that entered into the kingdom of God before we were ever born.
Like sheep being led to the slaughter, we refuse to learn the truth for ourselves, preferring that it be given by another. But be damned sure that the other that we hear from is of the same character as that of Moses, who cared for his people, and was not concerned for himself only.
In our ignorance, we remain silent, following the prince of the air, the ruler of this world which is after the workings of Satan. But we fail to seek those in whom would give up their lives to lead us. We say..."they are not qualified"...Instead we give our lives over to the ones who set a price upon it. This in effect makes them hierlings, whose care for the sheep is based upon what the sheep will give to him or her as in a salary to provide for their comfort. The Good Shephard asks for nothing, except the sheep follow His God
Liberty can not be preserved without general knowledge among people." (August 1765) John Adams
If you have faith as a mustard seed, you would be able to say to this mountain, be thow removed from here unto there and it would be removed. Matthew 17:20
America's Superpower Is About to End ( By the prayers of all who have faith)
By Gwynne Dyer 03/30/05 "Cincinnati Post" - -
Assume that the people who run defense and foreign policy in the Bush administration are as ferociously intelligent as they think they are.What would their grand strategy be?
The very phrase "grand strategy'' has an antiquated ring; ( it is from of old as the devil and Satan) Enlightened modern opinion rejects the notion that relations between the great powers are just a zero-sum game. But this is a group of people who are steeped in traditional ( of old)modes of strategic thought: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Stephen Hadley and Condoleezza Rice would all have worked quite comfortably for Cardinal Richelieu or Count Bismarck. Because it is the poiwer they crave that is their desire.(Whether they would have been hired is, of course, another question.)
They are, in addition, patriotic Americans who are firmly convinced that U.S. power is an instrument for good in the world. And they all know that the days of the United States as the world's sole superpower are numbered.They must know it. They cannot be unaware of the statistics the rest of us know:
a Chinese economy that has been growing over twice as fast as the U.S. economy for almost two decades now, and an Indian economy that has been growing at around twice the U.S. rate for almost a decade already.And they surely understand the magic of compound interest.China's economy will overtake that of the United States in one long generation if current trends continue. (Goldman Sachs predicted in 2003 that Chinese GDP would surpass that of the U.S. in 2042.)
India, starting later and growing slightly slower, will not reach the same milestone for a further decade or more, but both Asian giants will be nipping at America's heels long before that. And economic power is the source of most other kinds of power.
Per capita income in China and India will still be much lower than that of the United States, but it will not be that low: Goldman Sachs predicts a Chinese per capita income in 2042 comparable to that of Western Europe today. Combine this wealth with populations that will be three or four times bigger than that of the United States in the 2040s, accept that there is unlikely to be any remaining innovation gap, and Washington will be facing a formidable pair of strategic rivals.
Most people are not panicked by this future because they assume that there will no longer be a Communist regime in China 35 years from now, and they know that India is a democracy already. There is nothing in either country's history or current behavior to suggest that they would behave less responsibly than the existing great powers have done (though admittedly the bar has not been set very high). But seeing the United States reduced to only one great power among others cannot be a prospect that appeals to American strategic thinkers of a traditional bent - so what is their grand strategy for averting it?
They must have one.
Paramount powers facing relegation always have one, although it rarely stays the same for long and it never, ever works.
In the past four centuries we have observed three other "sole superpowers'' of the age slide down the slope of (relative) decline - Spain, France and then Britain - and none of them even came close to solving the problem: economics trumps everything else in the long run.
People who search for a long-term strategy in neo-conservative policies invariably end up thinking there is none, but that's because they are looking for coherence. They expect too much. When strategists are confronted with an insoluble problem, they generally try to solve it anyway, and they are not above using irrational assumptions to stick the bits of rational analysis together.
Great powers on the brink of decline typically have incoherent and foredoomed strategies to ward off their fate, simply because no better strategies are available.
"I have not become His Majesty's first minister to preside over the dissolution of the British empire,'' Winston Churchill harrumphed in 1940 - but from the Spanish armada of 1588 to the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt in 1956, the flailing efforts of paramount powers to ward off impending demotion from "superpower'' status have generally just hastened the process.
How might this apply to the senior people inside the Bush administration?
Some of them clearly believe exactly what they say, no matter how simplistic and delusional it may appear to outsiders, but others genuinely are strategic thinkers. These people will not speak in traditional power-political terms in public - instead they will use the "terrorist threat'' or any other excuse that comes to hand to justify their strategies - but they know about the coming erosion of American power and they will be desperately seeking ways to avoid it.
Is the invasion of Iraq, and the whole project of resurrecting Pax Americana that lies behind it, just such an attempt to head off impending relative decline by putting the U.S. back in the global driving seat, as much the "leader of the free world'' as it was in the halcyon days of the Cold War?
Very likely.
Will it work?
Don't be silly. It never works: economics rules, and there is no way of stopping China and India from catching up with the current Lone Superpower short of nuking their entire economies.
And no: I don't think they'd do that. But their little adventure will almost certainly have the long-term effect of hastening America's relative decline. That sort of strategy usually does.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent columnist.
Copyright 2005 The Cincinnati Post
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Information Clearing House endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8412.htm
“The kingdom of heaven is like a certain king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. And when he had begun to settle accounts, one was brought before him who owed him ten thousand talents. But as he was not able to pay, his master commanded that he be sold, with his wife and children and all that he had, and that payment be made. The servant therefore fell down before him, saying, ‘Master, have patience with me, and I will pay you all.’ Then the master of that servant was moved with compassion, released him, and forgave the debt. But the servant went out and found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii’s; and he laid hands on him and took him by the throat, saying, ‘Pay me what you owe!’ So his fellow servant fell down at his feet and begged him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you all.’ And he would not, but went and threw him into prison till he should pay the debt. So when his fellow servants saw what he had done, they were very grieved, and came and told their master all that had been done. Then his master, after he had called him, said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you begged me. Should you not also have had compassion on your fellow servant, just as I had pity on you?’ And his master was angry, and delivered him to the torturers until he should pay all that was due to him. So my heavenly Father will do to you if each of you, from his heart, does not forgive his brother his trespasses. Matthew 18:23-35.
In the name peace and manifest destiny for the American people... those who somehow thought that through their suffering that they were more worthy because their suffering had made them so much more worthy...under the direction of its own government and its corporate backers... hundred’s of thousands of American Indians were slaughtered, murdered and killed outright with no semblence of due process of the law, as "The United States of America "pushed westward...towards the settiing of the sun...towards the going down of the light...towards the gowing down of God"s glory...towars the gowing down of "God's truth."
This nation too, incorporated the slavery of hundreds of thousands more Black Africans, many of whom died en-route, many more of whom were killed, beaten, whipped, raped, and worked to death…all in the name of progress and national interest. ..the innocent blood was shed. ..and the nation that produced themignores it as their atoninment for sin...going out, still again in search of more innocent blood to shed.
Because this nations leadership refuses the atonement of innocent blood...they have decided to sacrifice over and over, that which was finished with Christ...it can never wash its hands...no matter how much innocent blood is shed...because it will forever bear the guilt as a government of shame because it is the only way it can ignore the heart that it was meant to bear.
Each administration from now forward, will bear its mark in that shame, unless it repents of the deeds of its fathers...who taught it to do the same...let truth speak... I do not speak for myseld...but for all of our nation, O LORD
Corporate America has gone into every nation in this world and uprooted whole communities for the sake of this progress. Anyone speaking out or getting in the way through any type of resistance has been imprisoned or killed...evidence this in the despots and dictators we have supported and removed because they came to the truth.
This is the foundation that this country was built upon, despite all the lofty and noble words. This is the debt that is owed to the Master and no matter how hard we may have begged in the past for the Lord to have patience with us, he has done so already, as our song sings, "God shed His grace on thee."
Yet we have forgotten His mercy and the promises of His grace.
Instead we have become a nation of self-righteous individualists who point the finger at everyone in every nation who disagrees with us and the ideology which we attempt to impose. Those whose heart keeps them silent in the face of this evil are only attemptiong to hold onto what they have...to preserve their own life.
The Father now has to do what is just, for the sake of all those fellow servants who have become witnesses against us, our bretheren in sin, and have become grieved by the lack of our compassion that this nations leaders are now hell bent on demonstrating...despite their call for a kinder, gentler, more compassionate nation.
This is what agrees with the final reality…this is truth.
The death of over 100,000 Iraqi civilians: men, women, and children are considered collateral damage, and an acceptable number of casualties for the progress mentioned and the protection of national interests that is nothing more than the greed of a nation. The over half a million Iraqi children who starved to death under the U.N. sanctions imposed before this war began was considered to be an acceptable number by the players of the political landscape. Madeline Albright, Colin Powell, Barbara Bush, George Bush.
Before even this, the sanctions imposed at the demands of the U.S. caused the starvation deaths of over 500,00 Iraqi , men, women and children. The bombings that began against this population began well before George "W." Bush ever took his oath of office.
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable: Aldous Huxley
Passion and redemption were probably essential parts of our parents' religious experience. But I believe it would be wiser and more humane in our 21st century to reflect upon the sins of our little human gods, those evangelicals who also claim we are fighting for "good" against "evil", who can ignore history and the oceans of blood humanity has shed - and get away with it.
O LORD, hear my cry unto Thee...see my tears for those who have fallen before me...and when I fall, know that I fall for all of those who came before me...those who were considered last, LORD, are those who were first before me...and now it is LORD, that I fall too...it shame for what I believed.
Americans supported this in every way by keeping silent, by consuming goods that they have grown dependant upon, by consuming oil and gasoline at a rate that is anything but conservative, by paying taxes into a system that is more ruthless than any other empire that has gone before it.
While we render unto Caesar what is due Caesar, we also render unto “In God We Trust.” How can two faces be on the same coin unless one face considers itself to be the same as the other? ...Do not believe in that!!!
Satan has certainly grown more bold and has learned how to manipulate here. We allow our system to feed us the treasures that we continue to desire and covet and even crave, heaping them to ourselves at the expense of countless innocent lives, convinced that we are in need of them to sustain the American way of life while other nations whither under our greed.
These treasures are produced by greedy corporations who employ labor in other nations at anything but a living wage. They reap the worldly rewards as America's insatiable demand for cheap, quality goods has caused the suffering of many a poor nation.
And yet...we are still without our chastisement.
That should make you whither and tremble with fear.
[We allow ourselves], those who call themselves Christian, to be deluded into thinking we are more deserving somehow of God’s grace and abundance, and because we think we are righteous, and that we will be going to heaven when we die. We allow ourselves to be diluded into thinking that it is our responsibility in the world to pass out judgments and vengeance on our fellow nation servants, taking them by the throat, throwing them in prison, conquering, pillaging, looting and robbing, after this nation’s debts to God have so graciously been forgiven.
How do we do this?
We do this because those who were set in place to teach us have taught us such...the religious order of the day...and yet...it is not by their own hand...it is by the freewill of our own selves that has allowed it...we cannot pass blame.
By supporting the purveyors of this violence who bring us our goods, we evidence in our own hearts that is our own comfort that we desire over everything else...even if it means destroying another people...even if that people be our own...Chritianity as we would like to have it, but does not in anyway reflect God's will for it.
"God shed His grace on thee"…why?
...because we have been so abominably wicked...not because we have been so righteous...for righteousness needs no grace.
We allow ourselves to feel as a nation, that we, of all people can be the moral voice of the world...that America reflects the Israel of the past...but wereas Israel of the past was chosen...it was because of their ignorance...we have God's word...and Christ's gospel...so what is our excuse.
And yet, we allow ourselves to be led to reject the empathy and compassion necessary to reflect what has been given to us. We allow ourselves, as a nation, to determine and define the poverty of other nations according to a standard we have been fed from our infancy, and by the abundancy provided, by the purveyors of this evil notion.
We have forgotten our own poverty.
In our abundance, we wag our finger at nations less fortunate. And yet, our outward show of moral self-righteousness is only a false covering of the pride for the sins that fester deep in the soul of our nation, helping us to believe the lie that we are better than all other nations in some way.
We may like to think we are noble and righteous and good because we have abundance...but there are countless lost lives that cry out in testimony against what we would like to believe about ourselves.
The parable of the unjust servant that was spoken by Jesus Christ is the truth about whether we can or can’t lose the salvation we all hope in...the forgiveness received. It depends on what we do with the grace we were given as to whether we will enter into the kingdom of God...the promised land.
If we use it based on what we consider to be our own righteousness, we will lose it...but if it is according to God's righteousness, that tells us that we still fall short of His own righteousness then we can gain through the humbleness that it offers.
No empire nation who has gone before us has had the privaledge of doing that...
because they exalted their ways over God's ways...their nation over the rest of the nations of the world...whom God so loved. So why do we desire to follow them?
There were over 600,000 Israelites who fled Egypt in the days of Moses. All but two who left out of that sin world died in the wilderness without ever seeing the Promised Land. One was Calab...whose name means boldness...and the other was Joshua...which means , God is my salvation.
All Christians who were born again, or remain obedient throughout the ages risk dieing in this wilderness of self-righteousness without ever obtaining the heavenly support simply because they refused to take hold on it...they refuse to face and speak and live the truth about their present day reality…to face the reality of ourselves… to speak out against injustices committed in our name…or any other name...to live according to the righteousness that Christ showed us in courage(boldness) and strength (salvation). that entered into the kingdom of God before we were ever born.
Like sheep being led to the slaughter, we refuse to learn the truth for ourselves, preferring that it be given by another. But be damned sure that the other that we hear from is of the same character as that of Moses, who cared for his people, and was not concerned for himself only.
In our ignorance, we remain silent, following the prince of the air, the ruler of this world which is after the workings of Satan. But we fail to seek those in whom would give up their lives to lead us. We say..."they are not qualified"...Instead we give our lives over to the ones who set a price upon it. This in effect makes them hierlings, whose care for the sheep is based upon what the sheep will give to him or her as in a salary to provide for their comfort. The Good Shephard asks for nothing, except the sheep follow His God
Liberty can not be preserved without general knowledge among people." (August 1765) John Adams
True Liberty is what allows us to continually move forward, freely, away from our own righteousness, our own traditions, and towards the righteouness that comes through God by the truth that will change us...Hugh Lipsius
"Too long have the workers of the world waited for some Moses to lead them out of bondage. I would not lead you out if I could; for if you could be led out, you could be led back again. I would have you make up your minds that there is nothing that you cannot do for yourselves." Eugene Victor Debs - From an address on Industrial Unionism delivered at Grand Central Palace. New York City, Dec. 18, 1905.If you have faith as a mustard seed, you would be able to say to this mountain, be thow removed from here unto there and it would be removed. Matthew 17:20
America's Superpower Is About to End ( By the prayers of all who have faith)
By Gwynne Dyer 03/30/05 "Cincinnati Post" - -
Assume that the people who run defense and foreign policy in the Bush administration are as ferociously intelligent as they think they are.What would their grand strategy be?
The very phrase "grand strategy'' has an antiquated ring; ( it is from of old as the devil and Satan) Enlightened modern opinion rejects the notion that relations between the great powers are just a zero-sum game. But this is a group of people who are steeped in traditional ( of old)modes of strategic thought: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Stephen Hadley and Condoleezza Rice would all have worked quite comfortably for Cardinal Richelieu or Count Bismarck. Because it is the poiwer they crave that is their desire.(Whether they would have been hired is, of course, another question.)
They are, in addition, patriotic Americans who are firmly convinced that U.S. power is an instrument for good in the world. And they all know that the days of the United States as the world's sole superpower are numbered.They must know it. They cannot be unaware of the statistics the rest of us know:
a Chinese economy that has been growing over twice as fast as the U.S. economy for almost two decades now, and an Indian economy that has been growing at around twice the U.S. rate for almost a decade already.And they surely understand the magic of compound interest.China's economy will overtake that of the United States in one long generation if current trends continue. (Goldman Sachs predicted in 2003 that Chinese GDP would surpass that of the U.S. in 2042.)
India, starting later and growing slightly slower, will not reach the same milestone for a further decade or more, but both Asian giants will be nipping at America's heels long before that. And economic power is the source of most other kinds of power.
Per capita income in China and India will still be much lower than that of the United States, but it will not be that low: Goldman Sachs predicts a Chinese per capita income in 2042 comparable to that of Western Europe today. Combine this wealth with populations that will be three or four times bigger than that of the United States in the 2040s, accept that there is unlikely to be any remaining innovation gap, and Washington will be facing a formidable pair of strategic rivals.
Most people are not panicked by this future because they assume that there will no longer be a Communist regime in China 35 years from now, and they know that India is a democracy already. There is nothing in either country's history or current behavior to suggest that they would behave less responsibly than the existing great powers have done (though admittedly the bar has not been set very high). But seeing the United States reduced to only one great power among others cannot be a prospect that appeals to American strategic thinkers of a traditional bent - so what is their grand strategy for averting it?
They must have one.
Paramount powers facing relegation always have one, although it rarely stays the same for long and it never, ever works.
In the past four centuries we have observed three other "sole superpowers'' of the age slide down the slope of (relative) decline - Spain, France and then Britain - and none of them even came close to solving the problem: economics trumps everything else in the long run.
People who search for a long-term strategy in neo-conservative policies invariably end up thinking there is none, but that's because they are looking for coherence. They expect too much. When strategists are confronted with an insoluble problem, they generally try to solve it anyway, and they are not above using irrational assumptions to stick the bits of rational analysis together.
Great powers on the brink of decline typically have incoherent and foredoomed strategies to ward off their fate, simply because no better strategies are available.
"I have not become His Majesty's first minister to preside over the dissolution of the British empire,'' Winston Churchill harrumphed in 1940 - but from the Spanish armada of 1588 to the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt in 1956, the flailing efforts of paramount powers to ward off impending demotion from "superpower'' status have generally just hastened the process.
How might this apply to the senior people inside the Bush administration?
Some of them clearly believe exactly what they say, no matter how simplistic and delusional it may appear to outsiders, but others genuinely are strategic thinkers. These people will not speak in traditional power-political terms in public - instead they will use the "terrorist threat'' or any other excuse that comes to hand to justify their strategies - but they know about the coming erosion of American power and they will be desperately seeking ways to avoid it.
Is the invasion of Iraq, and the whole project of resurrecting Pax Americana that lies behind it, just such an attempt to head off impending relative decline by putting the U.S. back in the global driving seat, as much the "leader of the free world'' as it was in the halcyon days of the Cold War?
Very likely.
Will it work?
Don't be silly. It never works: economics rules, and there is no way of stopping China and India from catching up with the current Lone Superpower short of nuking their entire economies.
And no: I don't think they'd do that. But their little adventure will almost certainly have the long-term effect of hastening America's relative decline. That sort of strategy usually does.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent columnist.
Copyright 2005 The Cincinnati Post
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8412.htm
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