by PETER LEE
On the matter of Libya, the West appears on its way to a Pyrrhic victory. Success in Libya gives the West a chance to say it got regime change right after its disaster in Iraq – and reassert its global moral relevance after it bungled the world economy into recession.
The rising BRIC countries, on the other hand, find their mistrust of Western self-delusion, enabled by military force and insistence on a rule-based world in which only the Western democracies have the right to break the rules, confirmed.
In an era in which the United States is still the only power capable of projecting military force across the globe, the unique combination of anxiety, arrogance and oblique post-colonial racism that marks the Libyan intervention will probably not signal the twilight of Western influence.
But the West will probably find its ability to project its power beyond the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Gulf Co-operation Council significantly and actively constrained.
Last week, China finally rolled up its sleeves and became involved in that exercise in imperial sausage-making that is New Libya. Per the announcement of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) Ministry of Foreign Affairs:
ATO for more