My post yesterday ruminated briefly on the United States's declining global image, and so I was interested to read Thomas L. Friedman's column in the New York Times that reflected upon the potential consequences of a less-influential US.

Friedman acknowledges that the rest of the world has reason to dislike the US due to its recent actions in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. But he uses the recent failed UN Resolution on Zimbabwe as a lens through which to observe the new role models.

"Perfect we are not, but America still has some moral backbone. There
are travesties we will not tolerate. The U.N. vote on Zimbabwe
demonstrates that this is not true for these “popular” countries —
called Russia or China or South Africa — that have no problem siding
with a man who is pulverizing his own people."

I'm not so sure: does the adoption of policies of torture, secret prisons and non-civilian trials at external locations rank lower on the travesty scale than using violence to maintain a dictatorship? Do we really want to get into ranking such things, or use these rankings to somehow claim that one country has moral superiority? My country is more tolerable because it does slightly less deplorable things? 

Meanwhile, inflation in Zimbabwe is over 2 million percent.

Photo of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon from Talkradionews's Flickr page.