'The series of unfortunate and costly decisions made during the two terms of the Bush administration, combined with economic decline at home, might devastate the US’s world standing much sooner than most analysts predict.

What was difficult to foresee was that the weakening of US global dominance, spurred by erratic and unwise foreign policy under Bush, would reignite the Cold War, to a degree, over a largely distant and seemingly ethnically-based conflict -- that of Georgia and Russia. Who could have predicted a possible association between Baghdad, Kabul and Tbilisi?

But to date, the decline of US global power to the advent of the Bush administration, or even the horrific events of 11 September 2001, is not exactly accurate. The rapid collapse of the Soviet Union and the unravelling of the Warsaw Pact -- especially as former members of that pact hurried to joined NATO in later years -- empowered a new breed of US elite who boasted of the economic viability and moral supremacy of US-styled “Capitalism and Democracy.” But a unipolar world presented the US leadership with an immense, if not an insurmountable task.'

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