Fareed Zakaria, ritsjóri Newsweek skrifar frábæra grein í The New Yorker, sem ég mæli eindregið með. Hann fjallar um áhrif Bandaríkjanna, sem máttugustu þjóðar veraldar, á mjög áhugaverðan hátt. Greinin er löng en hún er þess virði að lesa.
Hann segir meðal annars:
“It is better to be feared than loved,” Machiavelli wrote. But he was wrong. The Soviet Union was feared by its allies; the United States was loved, or, at least, liked. Look who’s still around. America has transformed the world with its power but also with its ideals. When China’s pro-democracy protesters gathered in Tiananmen Square, they built a makeshift figure that suggested the Statue of Liberty, not an F-16. America remains the universal nation, the country people across the world believe should speak for universal values. Its image may not be as benign as Americans think, but it is, in the end, better than the alternatives. That is what has made America’s awesome power tolerable to the world for so long. The belief that America is different is its ultimate source of strength. If we mobilize all our awesome powers and lose this one, we will have hegemony—but will it be worth having?