Bush Foreign Policy and the Failing Stock Market

Unending war, sacrificing free trade, breaking with Europe and telling allies to shove it, spending his time on planning a new war, neglecting domestic issues, foreign policy made by the Christian Right and Israeli Lobby, disaffecting his Republican base, fumbling the battle against terrorism, and more. No wonder the stock market is afraid. World prosperity is necessary for American prosperity and history teaches that wars have always drive the market lower.

A former Reaganaut warns , "The way things are going, it will soon be the United States against the world." That comment, by a top political leader in Kuala Lumpur, was just one of hundreds of expressions of a new and disturbing alienation from America that I heard during a recent swing through 14 Asian, European and Latin American capitals.

What a contrast to the supportive attitudes abroad immediately after Sept. 11! Then, the sometimes anti-American French journal Le Monde captured the world's sentiment with a headline proclaiming: "We are all Americans." Ten months later, sympathy for the victims of the terror attacks remains. However, the American image is increasingly perceived as ugly, and support abroad for U.S. policies is plummeting.

Bush's speech at West Point that threatened dozens of nations with American bombing attacks totally ignores what such threats mean to world trade. This threat could make American civilians overseas counter targets of terrorists all over the world. Already the jokes are beginning about President Bush appalling ignorance of the world. He allegedly told Tony Blair that he now knew the reason the French economy did not do better: the French language lacks a word for "entrepreneur."

Moreover, columnist Paul Craig Roberts warns, "It is absurd for the Bush Administration to spend so much time on Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq when its position in the world rests much more on its stock market than on its armaments…....Today, Washington is focused on wasting resources on wars….."