The Shaky US Empire

Washington cannot deal with Iraq, North Korea and Latin America at the same time

After the Porto Alegre - Davos controversy in January, the world will attend this year to two new battles of the war between the global powers and the anti-globalization movements. The first one is the WTO meeting scheduled for September in the Mexican resort of Cancun and the second one, the summit of the Free Trade Zone of the Americas - ALCA in Spanish - to take place in Miami by November.

There, the United States of America will keep on pushing its globalization process and will try to expand NAFTA to the rest of Latin America (from Alaska in the USA to Tierra del Fuego in Argentina). As usual, hundred thousands of activists will join to repudiate the plans of the powerful.

However, the powerful are showing signs of not being as powerful as they look. Tom Hayden, the famous social activist and leader of the anti-Vietnam war movement in the sixties, believes that Bush's ambitions face serious problems to become reality.

"There is some underlined conflict or friction between the USA and Europe on this question of the US globalizing, militarizing to build an empire. The former empires in Europe don't really want to be junior servants in the American Empire. They'll share world trade; they'll share oil from Iraq. The US will have a very rough time bringing Europe under control", said Hayden to PRAVDA.Ru in Buenos Aires on this issue.

This can be easily explained by the independent position assumed by France, Germany and Russia on the Iraq's war. On the other hand, Hayden remarks the importance of the process that Latin America is facing after the victory of Lula in Brazil.

"Lula is a big problem for Bush. He got three millions more votes than Bush and he is not only a labor leader. He is the president of a country and not just any country but the country that has the ninth largest economy of the world. And is not so easy to demonize him. There's no any international communist conspiracy behind him; he is not agent of Fidel Castro. They are trying to find a way to discredit Lula, but he is a pretty lovable guy and pretty hard to discredit." As many others, Tom Hayden has great expectations on the leader of the Brazilian Workers Party - PT by its initials in Portuguese -.

Moreover, the combination of these two facts, plus the diplomatic confrontation with North Korea, show that UUS leading globalization has its fissures, as every structure. In this case, it takes the form of an unstable new world order. Again Tom Hayden: "To be an empire is pretty a shaky one because already you see it is going to be very difficult for Bush to win a war in Iraq and establish a protectorate in the Middle East and deal with Latin America at the same time. And it is just forgetting Africa and the whole Europe getting angry with him. It is a sort of empire with a great doubtful world's loyalty."

This is maybe the United States of America were not meant to be the center of a world empire. Perhaps, the democratic tradition of the USA comes back and contradicts Bush's authoritarian plans, like a revenge of History.

Hernan Etchaleco PRAVDA.Ru Argentina

Cartoon source: www.uiowa.edu