Open letter from Gorby to Georgie

I am writing to you as a citizen of our planet and someone who beholds the last remaining superpower. Can there be any doubt that the United States plays a major role in guiding our world? Only a fool could disregard that fact. To acknowledge this is a given, even though American spokesmen are perhaps somewhat overly inclined to press the point home to the rest of the world. For while America’s role is acknowledged throughout the world, her claim to hegemony, not to say domination, is not similarly recognised. For this reason, I hope, Mr Bush, as the new American president, that you will give up any illusion that the 21st century can, or even should, be the ‘‘American century’’.

Globalisation is a given — but ‘‘American globalisation’’ would devoid of meaning and even dangerous.

I would go even further and say it is time for America’s electorate to be told the blunt truth: that the present situation of the United States, with a part of its population able to enjoy a life of extraordinary comfort and privilege, is not tenable as long as an enormous portion of the world lives in abject poverty, degradation and backwardness. For 10 years, US foreign policy has been formulated as if it were the policy of a victor in war, the Cold War. But at the highest reaches of US policy making no one has grasped the fact that this could not be the basis for formulating post-Cold war policy.

In fact, there has been no ‘‘pacification.’’ On the contrary, there has been a heightening of inequalities, tension and hostility, with most of the last directed toward the United States….