The American people don't much care for intrigue in their daily lives, but they like it in the movies; to abandon everything they worry about. 
Superheroes like the Justice League of America and Captain America of old never labored under the burdens with which latter-day descendants like The Dark Knight find themselves struggling. But this misunderstood caped crusader, at the end of the day, is not obligated beyond turning a big profit for Warner Bros. on a global scale by satisfying a hungry audience with a huge appetite for escapist entertainment.
The travel and tourism sector of the United States ranks seventh among other countries in 2008 for hosting foreign visitors. The U.S. stood in fifth place the previous year—with fewer than 10% of Americans (relative to its population of 280 million) even owning a passport, to say nothing of actually using one. This is the most popular explanation why America is often described as an “insular country”, while clearly not the only reason for the lack of international travel.
Meanwhile, no question the retail politics of American ideology has been exported in abundance to the Middle-East and the Asian subcontinent. Never as certain as outsourcing jobs or trading in commodities, under the Obama administration the world will soon see just how far the current wave of political inquiry will flow.
The American president traveled to Europe to consult and address (and where possible) argue in good and honest company about U.S. foreign policy. Mostly, though, to listen.
For those who take a dim view of unwarranted optimism, a little perspective .
President Barack Obama in his first term must manage the genuine decline of the United States (not out of business yet, just reorganizing under bankruptcy protection) while keeping faith with the rest of the world. Moral influence is a powerful force, but unlikely to leave an impression upon dictatorships unimpressed by diplomacy or intimidated by guilt, and undeterred by disapproval or swayed by moderation and refinement.
Following the G-20 summit in London, President Obama from the Czech capital of Prague outlined a nuclear-free world in a major speech
with European leaders,
hoping to form partnerships in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, this
coming hours after North Korea fired a rocket despite international warnings against the launch.
Previously, in Strasbourg, Germany the president said he would lay out his goal of a world without nuclear weapons".
If the United States depends upon the prevention of nuclear proliferation for global security, that ship has long since sailed. Nations known to possess such weapons, “the nuclear club” currently number nine, all having successfully detonated nuclear devices. Five (5) are considered “nuclear weapons states” conferred by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT): United States, Russia, United Kingdom, France, China—and South Africa that popularly disassembled its nuclear arsenal before joining the NPT.
Three (3) states are not party to the treaty but have conducted nuclear tests: India, Pakistan, and North Korea (the last formerly a member of the NPT).
Also: Israel is deliberately ambiguous about ownership of such an arsenal. However, according to former President Jimmy Carter, the nation has stashed away at least 150 nuclear weapons.
On September 6, 2007, the Israeli Air Force launched Operation Orchard in Syria, bombing what it suspected to be a nuclear site. Although presently the two countries are busy negotiating a peace accord, President Obama now must restrain Israel from launching a unilateral attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. For a legitimate democracy to demand a sovereign nation to cease its nuclear enrichment program affirms a callow and arrogant understanding of the numbingly complex political conundrum.
The remaining problem for the U.S. president is that of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu dodging Palestinian statehood while proposing stripping Arabs of citizenship unless they pledge loyalty to Israel as a Jewish state, rhetorically leaning heavily toward a military answer to the Palestinian question. Obama’s need here is to promote the preservation of a democratic Jewish state, and the only way for this to be accomplished is for Israel’s government to accept a two-state solution as prerequisite for normal relations with the United States.
In light of the continued U.S. occupation of Iraq and invasion of Afghanistan, and the many miseries inflicted on them both, President Obama by social prescription must tread lightly in dealing with the Russian Bear. To broker change in establishing a climate of trust and goodwill must overcome political stagnation and diplomatic languishing, inaction and disengagement.
It’s useful to remember (President Obama already knows.) that U.S. military supremacy is not more acceptable simply because the country is a democracy. To prevent a “new chill” by upbraiding or scolding Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic requires unwavering awareness of the country’s historical concerns about invasion. Enduring the wrath of war from Napoleon to Hitler, bellicosity perceived as a threat of invasion only feeds Russia’s paranoia and may well lead to another Cold War.
Twenty years since the end of the Cold War, the Obama administration is currently reviewing plans to deploy a system in Eastern Europe to intercept and destroy missiles, meant to counter nuclear attacks from countries like Iran and North Korea, but Russia views such plans as a military threat.
Under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) the boundaries for a missile defense would be pushed eastward. Tensions arose between Moscow and Washington over U.S. plans for the defense shield, some elements of which being stationed in Poland and the Czech Republic.
President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia met with Mr. Obama, promising future discussions about cuts in nuclear arms while sending a powerful signal that Moscow has the ear of the new U.S. president.Mr. Obama expressed his desire to work with the Russia president in resolving the nuclear stand-off with Iran. What will be given in exchange for Moscow’s help?
Losing more than 20 million people in War World II (one million during the Nazi’s siege of Leningrad alone) the Russian Bear is suspicious of any approach on its borders, refusing to ratify the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, due in no small part to the proposed deployment of the U.S. global missile defense system in Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe. This indifference toward Russian history has cost the United States (under the previous administration) enormous diplomatic capital with that uneasy admixture of righteous anger and fetishistic obsession about The West, though politically Russia will never be a true ally—unless, of course, Mars invades the earth.
The U.S. goal is to produce a new arms control treaty, replacing the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start) expiring at the end of the year.
The Republic of Turkey has acquired increasing strategic significance. Astride two continents, the country holds a powerful, transcontinental presence on the Eurasian landscape with very strong historic, cultural and economic influences not only in the areas of Eastern Europe and Central Asia but also Russia to the north and the Middle East toward the south.
A trip that has taken him to the Group of 20 meeting in England, a summit with European Union leaders in the Czech Republic, and the North American Treat Organization conference in France, President Barack Obama in Ankara, Turkey avoided pushing for a pledge he made during his presidential campaign to recognize officially the massacre of ethnic Armenians in 1915 as a genocide.
A former republic of the Soviet Union, the Democratic Republic of Armenia is a unitary, multi-party, democratic nation with an ancient and historic cultural heritage.
Turkey vehemently denies Armenian claims that one million Armenians were killed in the last days of the Ottoman Empire. On April 24, 1915, Armenian intellectuals were arrested by the authorities and eventually a large portion of the population living in Anatolia (Ottoman Armenia) perished in what has become known as the Armenian Genocide. There was local resistance developed against the activities of the empire, when events of 1915 to 1917 regarded by Armenians and the vast majority of Western historians to have been state-sponsored mass murder. The United States contributed a significant amount of aid to the Armenians during the genocide, the American Committee for Relief in the Near East vowing that the Armenians (among others) “shall not perish.”
However, as Turkey (formerly the center of the Ottoman Empire) is an ally of the West and holds a strategic position near the Middle East, both the United States and the United Kingdom continue to maintain that a lack of evidence fails to categorize the events as genocide. Turkish authorities revisit the deaths as the result of “civil war” along with disease and famine—the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The number of Armenians killed range somewhere between a half million to 1.5 million dead.
While “Holocaust denial” is not politically sanctioned by The West, the U.S. president hinted that a diplomatic breakthrough between Turkey and Armenia may soon come. "My sense is they are moving forward quickly," Mr. Obama said at a press conference. “I don't want to pre-empt any arrangements that could be made in the near future.”
Turkey and Armenia do not have formal diplomatic relations and their borders are closed.
Diplomacy the font of saving grace, international relations and its system for doing business are the signs and portents of “anarchy” though it is not anarchic in any vulgar sense; instead, simply for being disorderly, hopelessly decentralized and horribly unaligned. But that’s the way of the world.
The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan during its long history has seen various invasions and conquests, while regional tribes have committed internecine battles over the vast, surrounding turf to form individual empires, the country suffering continuous and brutal civil wars, and in 1979 the foreign intervention of the Soviet Union and in 2001 the U.S.-led invasion that toppled the central government.
THE UGLY AMERICAN (1963) a film starring Marlon Brando, directed by George Englund based on the 1958 best-selling political novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer is a roman à clef of the United States involvement in Vietnam; a pithy morality tale of misconceptions and delusions, detailing the battle for hearts and minds in Southeast Asia—and the failed struggle due to American arrogance abetted by their ignorance of the local culture.
The book takes place in a fictional nation where a Burmese journalist disclaims: “For some reason, the people I meet in my country are not the same as the ones I knew in the United States. A mysterious change seems to come over Americans when they go to a foreign land. They isolate themselves socially. They live pretentiously. They're loud and ostentatious.”
The “ugly American” became the expression to describe such behavior.
Let’s assume the rest of the world has seen through the hypocrisy of Western powers and bias in the U.S. news media. The consequences of military bullying and political blackmailing have squandered American moral authority, especially since September 11, 2001 under the Bush administration, the Congress and the minority of American who chose to vote their conscience in 2004.
The thrilling novelty of the first black U.S. president has the majority head of state while anxiously questioning:
What kind of hero do we need to rescue us from this financial crisis?
In war will he draw the line between justice and vengeance?
How much local autonomy should be sacrificed in the name of global security?
Emerging nations with influence in global financial decision-making see the fiscal crisis fostered by irrational behavior on the part of "white (men) with blue eyes" who left the impression that they knew everything about economics but demonstrated they know only self-aggrandizement. And yet the third-world must know the arrogance of such men standing akimbo on the other side of the cultural divide may have messed things up royally, but they will not be taking advice from Argentina.
Of course, no one questions countries like the Republic of China and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as full participants in the global financial system; the United States has to hear them out. The reality is the United States (and Britain) need the deep pockets of these countries to buy billions of dollars worth of debt in covering the cost of spending for stimulus and bailouts—which means neither China nor Saudi Arabia is Argentina, but neither are they the enemy. And that’s reality.
The United States of America in the 19th century acquired land from France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Russia; annexing the Republic of Texas and the Republic of Hawaii. The country possesses Puerto Rico and other territories in the Caribbean and insular areas (Guantanamo Bay, Cuba) in addition to several islands in the Pacific together with Alaska plus 48 contiguous states on the North American continent plus the District of Columbia, Washington D.C.
The Nation's motto is E Pluribus Unum or "out of many, one."
President Barack Obama aspires to bring fiscal order out of financial chaos in his role as the top plenary U.S. official in his overseas peregrinations; for sure, to be taken more seriously than his predecessor, but moreover to accomplish his seemingly impossible agenda: a new world order.
Perhaps out of many nations of the world...one. In all events, Mr. Obama must succeed well beyond the pundits’ faint praise and low expectations. If not right away, then eventually and at a level not governed by political conventions, finding free zones for negotiation within those iron parameters of strong-willed heads of state buried within their own rigid paradigms but persuaded by the U.S. president's willingness to listen and universal likability.
The "real" Captain America must be articulate, face up to (and, no doubt, live with) disappointment, spelling out exactly how he will save the world. President Barack Obama, suited up and ready to do battle, has no commercial imperative at the box office. His big fight will be no action extravaganza. However, the final act cannot be a letdown. There have been missteps and disappointments to burnish his deservedly vast reputation—the Obama administration maneuvering itself into an illogical and uncomfortable place at home with ill-considered cabinet appointments, tough love for carmakers but "a pillow for Wall Street." For a well-regarded “American hero” avoiding defeat by saving the world, hope is forever; but for an American president, it’s an ever-growing measure of political prestige. Still, unlike Captain America who never suffers from overblown angst or deep concerns about a one-term presidency, or the Realpolitik of focusing on considerations of power and not ideals, morals, and principles, time will go by and the strain to "win the day" will start to show.
Marvel Studios had been facing a similar dilemma with 
The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan
