It's tough to argue with that logic...

The essays of Elliot, Mahbubani, Judt, and Zakaria present a rather alarming point of view on the Western world's situation, to say the least. Although most of the authors have complaints with the way the West has managed their power thus far, it is obvious that Mahbubani had the most aggressive attack on the West, particularly the United States. Like many Americans, it upsets me when someone critiques my country's policies and lifestyle. What is more upsetting, however, is when those critiques are not fallacies, and actually have credibility. My initial reaction to such criticism is to try and defend my country's honor, which becomes more and more difficult when you find yourself agreeing with the accusations being made. Mahbubani raises a number of good, yet troubling, points that I do not want to believe to be true, however I cannot argue that they are false. It's just one critique after another, and I can do nothing but agree with his arguments while I am overwhelmed with embarrassment for my country's actions, and lack of action. As much as I hate to admit it, we have only made the situation in the Middle East worse with our invasion of Iraq and our undying favoritism of Israel, even when they are clearly in the wrong. Our stance on nuclear arms is built upon hypocrisy as we police others that attempt to produce nuclear arms while we ourselves sit on top of the largest nuclear arms arsenal in the world. Our invasion of Iraq was not approved by the United Nations, yet we ignored their ruling and went on ahead anyways. Now, as painful as it is for me to admit all of these failures (and more), however, the first step in turning around our current global image (which is not particularly good) is acceptance of these failures. We can no longer live in denial of our mistakes, but instead, we must face them and move ahead towards a brighter and more global future.