Unerringly Racing Toward Destruction

The United States is playing with fire. The entire world worries that the fighting roosters in Washington won’t reach an agreement. But obviously neither Republicans nor Democrats know themselves whether they can defuse the situation in time and that would be a catastrophe for the global economy.

We’ve had more than enough crises this past year. For a long time, the Europeans were seen as the troublemakers with their unstable euro currency threatening global prosperity.

But the U.S. budget dispute has brought a whole new dimension to a world already replete with economic crises. It’s almost exactly five years since the United States plunged countries on every continent into a financial and economic crisis. Then it was a willful act of catastrophe. The architecture of the euro may have serious deficiencies but the Europeans didn’t precipitate this crisis on purpose; they stumbled into it.

Those responsible in the United States know they’re racing toward the abyss. They could easily stop in time. All they have to do is agree. Nobody has the right to take the entire world hostage as the Republicans in the United States are doing. They are blocking a vote on a new budget in order to stop what they consider to be misguided health care reform. Neither issue has anything to do with the other. If they can’t understand that, they will cause an economic disaster. But the political reverberations will also be enormous.