>I see the prediction of a dollar sell-off as inevitable.

Actually I should word that, "as happening right now, but with the rest of the world inevitably joining."

No currency is the World's reserve currency forever. King of the Mountain.

The US has declared that it will be the only superpower in the world. With miltary might comes economic control. It is indisputable that with the peace and stabilty provided by the US that all economies in the world will benefit from it. But don't be fooled that even as the world economies benfit from the US economic engine that other nations don't understand that the US will always put its own interests first. Here in Canada there is an explicit understanding that our economic health depends in large measure on the health of the US economy. At the same time there is also resentment that in areas where there are disputes, such as the 10 year saga over softwood lumber, that the US is determined to get its own way and always be the winner. It is like working for a very good employer, you love the benefits but there is never any question about who is the boss and makes the decisions. And the benefit is always towards the company, not the employees.

As Jeffrey Skilling said, I was helping to make this a better world. Allow the rest of the world to have some scepticism of US motives and actions.

Does it strike anyone else as rather ironic that Rumsfeld who heads up a department that spend more on defense than the rest of the world combined and control enough nuclear bombs to wipe out every major city on the planet should be complaining about another country's buildup of armaments.

And what about the shock that China is propping up brutal dictators in order to further its strategic advantage. How quickly is forgotten that during the cold war the US justified its support for any right-wing dictatorship in its goal of containing communism. Bush nows says that it doesn't work anymore and the US has to spread democracy. Notice that he didn't say that it was wrong and people suffered because of it. Spreading democracy isn't done because it is the best for the people involved, it is done becuase it furthers US interests. Chavez is isolated because he a left-wing, anti-US leader. The Saudi royal family heads one of the most repressive countries in the world but are the friends of the US because of the oil they supply. Principles indeed!

China has been aware of Bush's moiral cowardice since his failure in the "spy plane" incident.

Who mentioned principles? :)

Most people in the United States are living in a Fool's Paradise when it comes to China in particular, and how the rest of the world perceives us generally. The idea of the United States "containing" China at this late stage is like a dog thinking it has power over the person who feeds and cloths it.

The power game was played out in the 1990's and early 2000's and China won. They now have capital, manufacturing, intelligent geo-political strategy and a world vision. Anyone reading Salon regularly knows what we in the United States have, and unless you think that the world really is going to end soon and you will be carried to heaven in the rapture, you know that it isn't going to get us through this mess as a powerful country.

China has formed a NATO-like alliance with Russia, Mongolia, India, Iran, Pakistan, called the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to "contain" the United States, particularly in Asia. I predict that China will be a lot more successful in containing us than we will be in containing them.

There have been several eloquent letters vigorously supporting a "response" (which is to say, an arms buildup) to the Chinese military modernization. I haven't seen any of them try to refute the idea that this will lead to a new arms race, so I have to ask: In whose interest is this? What good will being in an arms race with China do us? Wouldn't it be better to pursue an objective that we actually want - say, peaceful relations with a stable and prosperous China - rather than encouraging the nationalists and hegemonists in that nation? The Chinese are not idiots, and they see our armed-to-the-teeth denunciations of their own buildup, decades behind ours, as hypocrisy of the most insulting sort.

It is neither knee-jerk anti-Republicanism or a hippie fantasy to point out that the only winners in a new arms race are the worst elements in both nations, and we all have much more to gain from an engagement that preserves the better part of both nations' strategic interests.

What nonsense. The U.S. and the Soviet Union never had any direct interests in the welfare of one another, other than hoping for economic and political failure. That is far from the case with the U.S. and China. Therefore, saying that we're heading into a Cold War with China makes about as much sense as saying we are headed for a Cold War with Canada or Japan.

Bush is already a lame duck. He no longer has the political power or authority to radically affect trade and financial relations existing between the U.S. and China. Hu said as much with his itinerary, choosing to visit officials from Boeing and Microsoft before meeting Bush in Washington. I hear he tried to squeeze in a trip to Bentonville as well.:)

I wish the author had gotten more into the Defense Planning Guidance, also known at various times as the National Security Strategy, or the Project For a New American Century. Authorship has alternately been attributed to Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz - it's basically the neocon scriptures.

Besides saying the US has to "contain" any potential rivals, it spells out how. By conquering the Middle East through a series of wars. We need to do this, DPG posits, both because of the strategic location near Russia, China, India, Europe, and of course because of that lovely, lovely oil - not just so we can use the oil, but so China or whoever else can't.

DPG goes on to say that the American people would be unlikely to support the series of wars neccesary to carry out their plan unless there were " a Pearl Harbor-like event" to mobilize public opinion.

Lo and behold, the DPG's author's get into power, 9 month later a Pearl Harbor-like event occurs which the federal government takes no action to stop, even though our Air Force certainly could have reacted in the hour between WTC and the Pentagon being hit. And then we go to war with Afghanistan, and then Iraq, and next Iran, even though only one of those three countries was involved in the Pearl Harbor-like event, and only tangentially at that.

The great irony of all this is that Cheney's master plan to "contain" the Chinese involved us going trillions in debt to... the Chinese. Basically insuring that China will be the world's next superpower and the US will be bankrupt has-beens.