The U.S. is stuck in the Cold War?

from: Salon


"Thus began the Grand Bargain at the heart of U.S. Cold War strategy toward West Germany and Japan, the "markets-for-bases" swap. In return for giving up an independent foreign policy to their protector, the United States, the West Germans and Japanese would be granted access to American markets (and, in the case of the Germans, access to Western European markets).

"By the 1970s, it was clear that the markets-for-bases swap was a better deal for West Germany and Japan than for the U.S."

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"A version of the markets-for-bases deal was extended to China, which, it was hoped, would acquiesce in U.S. military hegemony in its own neighborhood, in return for unlimited access to American consumers."

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"Like postwar Japan and Germany, China has accepted the terms of the bargain America's elites offered, focusing on economic growth while the U.S. wasted blood and treasure on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."

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" . . . for half a century, America's foreign-policy elite tolerated the targeted deindustrialization of America by Asian mercantilist states, as long as those countries did not challenge America's global military hegemony"

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