American Cold War dominance of the non-communist world had been based on the perceived global threat of Soviet and potentially Chinese Communist aggressions.once that threat ended at the end of the 1980's, as Washington well knew, restraints on its major military allies were gone. The allies were potential economic rivals. Japan and East Asia, as well as the European Union, were emerging as major economic challengers to American hegemony. That economic challenge was to be the focus of U.S. geopolitics after 1990.
Armed with the Gospel of free market reform, privatization and dollar democracy, and backed by the powerful Wall Street financial firms, the Clinton Administration began a process of extending the dollar and U.S. influence into domains which had previously been closed to it. The near religious campaign to win those areas to Washington's peculiar brand of market economy, was to include not just former communist economies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. It was to include any and every major part of the world that continued to try to develop its own resources, independent of the mandate of the IMF or the dollar world. The process also involved bringing every major oil region of the world under more or less direct U.S. control, from the Caspian Sea to Iraq to West Africa and Colombia. It was an ambitious undertaking. Critics termed it imperial, the Clinton Administration called it the extension of market economy and human rights. It was definitely not what most of the world were hoping for as the Cold War drew to an end.
The Clinton Administration and its Wall Street allies had broughtone region after the other into its direct orbit during the 1990's, with the promise of the free market as the road to wealth and prosperity. The catch word was "globalization", and in reality it was globalization of American power, consolidated through American banking and finance and co rporate power.
Few realized it might be part of a well thought-out strategy, until the process was well advanced. Free trade had traditionally been the demand of the superior economic power on its weaker partners. By the time it became clear what the Washington agenda was, America had largely disarmed potential opponents, and built a new ring of military bases around the world to defend its gains, a guarantee that the new converts to free market did not lose the faith, and try to revert to older economic forms.
In the 1950's, under the Cold War, and the Eisenhower Doctrine, the United States declared itself prepared, with armed force if necessary, to assist any Middle Eastern country asking help to resist any incursion backed by international communism. This brush was used repeatedly by Washington during the four decades after 1945, to paint countless nationalist leaders from Mossadegh to Nasser, with a red color. The red taint justified military or other action.
After 1990 Washington faced a significant problem. What bogeyman could it find to justify such acts of foreign policy in the future, now that the danger of Godless communism could no longer be used as a rationale? The answer was to take until the new millennium, more than a decade.
In the meantime, the U.S. establishment had prepared a full plate to dish out to an unsuspecting world, starting in Japan. Washington knew its continued global dominance depended on how it dealt with Eurasia, from Europe to the Pacific. Former Presidential adviser and geostrategist, Zbigniew Brzezinski, put it bluntly, "…in terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to 'keep the barbarians from coming together'." It was an ambitious agenda.
http://www.detailking.com/blog/light2008/
http://light2008.baidu.ws/
http://www.militarylogbook.com/?w=light2008