Free market under assault

While America plays out its domestic soap opera, key pillars of the Pax Americana are being shaken severely in the world outside. Bill Clinton continued former president Bush's crusade for a world order based on democracy, nonproliferation and the free market. But people and events have been overturning many of those certainties.

From East Asia and Japan to Russia and Brazil, free market ideas are under assault. The gurus of the free movement of capital across national frontiers are yielding to revisionists and advocates of capital controls. Washington's carefully constructed nonproliferation regime is coming apart.

Americans may like to blame the shortcomings of foreigners for these setbacks to the good life. But they can only blame their own leaders' lack of restraint and common sense for the sad image American-style democracy is acquiring abroad just now.

-- The Indian Express, New Delhi