As the most influential nation on earth for quite a few decades now, the US has always been acutely aware of the inevitable threat to their position from Japan and China. Yet the USA's foreign strategy has been a rojok of mistakes, relying on their leading position rather than any coherent strategy...

An old paper, but relevant just now and justified for a link because of the Rat's old motto, that history predicts the future and learning from history can reduce future mistakes, is Reversals of Fortune: The United States, Japan, and China

Schaller contends in part -

As historian John Dower observed, Americans seem prone to resent only one Asian nation at a time. Triangular relations among the United States, Japan and China, which has often resembled a three-legged stool, confirms this insight.

The United States has sought to maintain an equilibrium in Asia by ensuring that neither the China nor Japan legs became so tall as to throw the stool off balance. Whenever China or Japan threatened to upset what it perceived as a proper balance, the United States undertook to whittle down or elevate one leg or the other.

It may well be that the new "leg" is the Asian Muslim states. A three legged region is strategically easier to manipulate.

The Muslim world, despite the rhetoric from Washington IS being singled out as the new threat, following Japan and China. How else can Iran be included in an "axis of evil". Why else are Muslim travellers to the US, including those from secular states such as Indonesia and Malaysia having their immigration procedures held up for several weeks?

This is the worse kind of racial stereotyping. Is not the American intelligence effort able to tell the difference between a political extremist and a religious group as a whole? The great portion of the story of American spins since September 11th hardly even reaches the quality of an insipid popular Hollywood movie script.

It's a great skill to create simple answers out of complex issues, but like any theory, they are invariably based on the value system of the theory builder, and the answers are not as simple as the theory-makers will make out.

While Bush's spins are being lapped up at home, those outside the "States", from Europe, to Chris Patten, to many in Asia, are becoming increasingly uncomfortable about a USA pitching to be the defacto United Nations.