A question for political heads

Do you believe that the united states needs international support/approval for its actions or can the United states do whatever it wants (say the arab states don't sell us oil, we just go in and take them all over) to without fear? My friend says the United States is so powerful, the Arabs should be more worried about us not buying then them not selling. He also basically says we are so powerful, we can do whatever we wish whenever, without needing the rest of the world.

 

Answer: Go read/watch Lord of the Rings Or just wait till May and watch Attack of the Clones. (In LOTR book version pay close attention to Saruman. What he thinks, says, does, and what happens to him.)

It's not so much a question of can or cannot.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

 

Yeesh. No offense but...

The US in no way qualifies as an absolute power. The US could not operate unchecked, or ignore the rest of the wolrd in either a financial or millitary capacity.

1) Other countries have nuclear capacity (and I'm not talking about the Russians. I'm taking about England, France etc which wouldn't stand idly by if the US just started doing whatever the hell it wanted.)

2) The US economy is built around world trade

Neither really lends itself to some storybook version of Good vs Evil.

 

But...

... the US has enough influence to go off and do things they want to do, with or without the approval of the rest of the world. At least, things that are 'somewhat' defendable... Those strikes on Iraq a few years ago, and this whole Afghanistan thing are unilateral (well, with sidekick Britain)

 

Here’s my 2 cents

The people that hate the USA always say the same thing. Americans think they are more important than the rest of the world this is why we hate them (this is of course really simplified reasoning. But I believe this is at the core of this whole terrorism thing)

So having said all that, “can the US do what ever it wants?†I think it probably could for a while. But I think anti-American sentiment would get to a boiling point and we would see a lot more terrorist blowing American stuff up. In the end I think the US will either learn it’s place in global politics or it will basically break down into a US vs everybody else fight (and that would suck for everyone)

 

Here is another take on things .

Full article here : http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/020418/7/1eyd5.html

The moral high ground has eroded out from under the U.S. in the months following September 11th. First our bombing campaign killed 10,000 innocent Afghan civilians as we sought vengeance for the murder of 3,000 Americans. Then we supported Ariel Sharon (news - web sites)'s murderous rampage in the West Bank. Now we're back in the business of creating-or trying to create-banana republics in South America. Not only are we reinforcing the worldwide perception that Americans are pompous hypocrites; we're setting the stage for the kind of instability that followed U.S. coups in Iran.

"I haven't said that this conspiracy (against me) has its roots in the United States," President Chávez said April 15th. He didn't need to.