Henry Kissinger: The world must forge a new order or retreat to chaos

[Panther]

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/comme...os-1451416.html

 

Henry Kissinger: The world must forge a new order or retreat to chaos

 

Not since JFK has there been such a reservoir of expectations

 

Tuesday, 20 January 2009

 

 

As the new US administration prepares to take office amid grave financial and international crises, it may seem counterintuitive to argue that the very unsettled nature of the international system generates a unique opportunity for creative diplomacy.

 

 

That opportunity involves a seeming contradiction. On one level, the financial collapse represents a major blow to the standing of the United States. While American political judgments have often proved controversial, the American prescription for a world financial order has generally been unchallenged. Now disillusionment with the United States' management of it is widespread.

 

At the same time, the magnitude of the debacle makes it impossible for the rest of the world to shelter any longer behind American predominance or American failings. Every country will have to reassess its own contribution to the prevailing crisis. Each will seek to make itself independent, to the greatest possible degree, of the conditions that produced the collapse; at the same time, each will be obliged to face the reality that its dilemmas can be mastered only by common action.

 

Even the most affluent countries will confront shrinking resources. Each will have to redefine its national priorities. An international order will emerge if a system of compatible priorities comes into being. It will fragment disastrously if the various priorities cannot be reconciled.

 

The nadir of the international financial system coincides with simultaneous political crises around the globe. Never have so many transformations occurred at the same time in so many different parts of the world and been made accessible via instantaneous communication. The alternative to a new international order is chaos.

 

The financial and political crises are, in fact, closely related partly because, during the period of economic exuberance, a gap had opened up between the economic and the political organisation of the world. The economic world has been globalised. Its institutions have a global reach and have operated by maxims that assumed a self-regulating global market. The financial collapse exposed the mirage. It made evident the absence of global institutions to cushion the shock and to reverse the trend. Inevitably, when the affected publics turned to their political institutions, these were driven principally by domestic politics, not considerations of world order. Every major country has attempted to solve its immediate problems essentially on its own and to defer common action to a later, less crisis-driven point.

 

So-called rescue packages have emerged on a piecemeal national basis, generally by substituting seemingly unlimited governmental credit for the domestic credit that produced the debacle in the first place, so far without achieving more than stemming incipient panic. International order will not come about either in the political or economic field until there emerge general rules toward which countries can orient themselves.

 

In the end, the political and economic systems can be harmonised in only one of two ways: by creating an international political regulatory system with the same reach as that of the economic world; or by shrinking the economic units to a size manageable by existing political structures, which is likely to lead to a new mercantilism, perhaps of regional units. A new Bretton Woods kind of global agreement is by far the preferable outcome.

 

America's role in this enterprise will be decisive. Paradoxically, American influence will be great in proportion to the modesty in our conduct; we need to modify the righteousness that has characterised too many American attitudes, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union. That event and the subsequent period of nearly uninterrupted global growth induced too many to equate world order with the acceptance of American designs, including our domestic preferences. The result was a certain inherent unilateralism

[JUDE]

I didn't read this.

[ZenLunatic]

There is a new world order coming... the shifting of power... Interesting times. America's house of cards is collapsing.

 

This is an example of a poorly run country that we can see happen to us:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090126/ap_on_..._iceland_crisis

[Guest Jules]

What's the question?

[bjorn_skurj]

Keynsian economics will save us all.

[JUDE]

Keynsian economics will save us all.

 

Is that where you send some minister in Africa a few thousand US dollars and he uses the money to free up the millions that are in a frozen bank account and you get like 25% of the money for your troubles?

[bjorn_skurj]

Is that where you send some minister in Africa a few thousand US dollars and he uses the money to free up the millions that are in a frozen bank account and you get like 25% of the money for your troubles?

And he won the Nobel Prize for it. Go figure.

[Good Old Neon]

Awesome - I subscribe to the Independent, Kindle edition, read this story and thought, I have to post this for Panther, and sure enough....

[Sparky speaks]

I don't think we need their NWO.......But we are going to get it anyway.....

 

http://www.prisonplanet.com/obama-appoints...rg-members.html

[conspiracy panther]

I was going to put this in the things we can do with out thread but this is more appropriate.

 

things we can do with out soverignty!!!!!!

 

umm so yall would now agree that the term New WORLD Order is not a meaninglesss open term referring to points of history.

it must be clear that it is a speccififc thing that has been in the works fro years by the likes of kissenger.

so for those of you with enuff sense to at least admit that, we can have a discussion on what it really means.

not fearmonbgering what but is really possible.

[mfwahl]

I was going to put this in the things we can do with out thread but this is more appropriate.

 

things we can do with out soverignty!!!!!!