Putin says U.S. wants to dominate world

Russian President Vladimir Putin has launched his harshest criticism yet of the Bush administration, claiming that the US is attempting to force it's will on the entire world.

Attacking the concept of a "unipolar" world in which the United States was the sole superpower, he said: "What is a unipolar world? No matter how we beautify this term it means one single center of power, one single center of force and one single master."

"It has nothing in common with democracy because that is the opinion of the majority taking into account the minority opinion," he told the gathering of top security and defense officials.

"People are always teaching us democracy but the people who teach us democracy don't want to learn it themselves."

I think Putin raises a very valid point. Often, in the comments section of this site, I am told that Americans "don't care" or "couldn't care less" about matters which concern Europeans.

Indeed, there is a strange dichotomy raised by an American state that claims to be interested in exporting democracy whilst, simultaneously, ignoring the UN; the ultimate expression of global democracy.

Surely any state that supports the democratic ideal would - as a matter of course - be interested in the opinions of the majority of citizens? Putin's point is that the US - whilst claiming to be exporting democratic ideals - has very little interest in what most of the planet thinks about what it doing. Indeed, it is led by a President who seeks to make a virtue out of the fact that he pays little attention to opinion polls; polls which express the opinion of the majority.

The attitude of Bush and Cheney - certainly from the way they seek to bypass their own Congress - is that, once elected, the President is, in effect, a dictator for his remaining term in office; he is "The Decider" and the rest of the governmental apparatus is there simply to facilitate his decisions.

This is the "reclaiming of Presidential powers" that Cheney thinks was lost after the Watergate scandal, a scandal which grew out of a President believing that he was the law and that it naturally followed that anything he did could not be illegal. Which is surely the best definition one could ever come up with for a dictatorship; a place where the opinion of one person held sway over all other opinion. A place where the laws that apply to all of us do not apply to the leader; who is deemed, as a matter of course, to be above the law.

In the US today we have a President who has publicly admitted to committing a federal crime - to wiretapping US citizens outside of FISA - and yet nothing has been done to censure him. No attempt has been made to bring him back within the law. Indeed, the Democrats have, shamefully, acquiesced in making his illegality legal.

It is against this backdrop that Putin raises the question of where this US definition of "democracy" is leading us. What kind of world is being fashioned by a US that gives itself the right to attack non-nuclear powers with nuclear weapons if it sees fit? What kind of world is being fashioned by a US that allows itself to develop a new range of "bunker busting" nuclear weapons, whilst demanding that the rest of the planet, especially Iran and North Korea, abide by the NNPT?

The democratic ideal is a fine one. Indeed, the Bush administration claim to be so fond of it that they wish to export it throughout the Middle East. However, as Putin rightly points out, that ideal has - at it's heart - the belief that the opinion of the majority should ultimately hold sway.

The Bush philosophy appears to state that the rest of the world should acquiesce to US superiority, that the laws which govern the rest of the planet do not apply to the US itself. This is manifested in the US's attitude towards the NNPT, Guantanamo Bay, and a host of other issues. It is the antithesis of the democratic ideal, and it is the dichotomy at the heart of Bush's supposed love of democracy.

Since the end of WWII, the US has led the world. Under Bush, it seeks to rule. Those are very different things, and Putin may very well attract approbation from Lieberman and others for pointing this out, but his point is valid.

No country has the right to state that international law does not apply to them. In repeatedly doing so, Bush undermines the very ideals which he claims to aspire to.

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