Matthew Yglesias: A New Superpower?

Matthew Yglesias: A New Superpower?:

But I think one thing we've clearly seen happening over the past few years is that the United States is putting much more emphasis on raw military force as a policy instrument than it traditionally has. One way to think about this is as a response to the rise of Europe (and, to a lesser extent, the big Asian countries) as economic and diplomatic forces. Increasingly, raw force is where our comparative advantage lies, so we find it increasingly useful to define international politics in terms of force. The trouble is that -- as we're seeing in Iraq -- even with 50 percent of the world's military spending, our overwhelming military preponderance accomplishes rather less than one might think.