【英文报刊翻译090523】 势力不均衡

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Op-Ed Columnist

translated by Kevin.Ren

There has been much debate in this campaign about which of our enemies the next U.S. president should deign(屈尊, 俯就) to talk to. The real story, the next president may discover, though, is how few countries are waiting around for us to call. It is hard to remember a time when more shifts in the global balance of power are happening at once - with so few in America's favor.

下一任美国总统到底应该放下身架和我们的哪一位敌人交谈？在这次竞选中对这一问题一直争论不休。然而，下任总统或许会发现真实的情况却是并没有几个国家在等我们去召唤。很难想起在全球的力量均势体系中，还有那一个时期会同时发生更多的转变，而且其中没几项是对美国有利的。

Let's start with the most profound one: More and more, I am convinced that the big foreign policy failure that will be pinned on（把某事归咎于某人） this administration is not the failure to make Iraq work, as devastating（毁灭性的）as that has been. It will be one with much broader balance-of-power implications - the failure after 9/11 to put in place an effective energy policy.

先说影响最深远的变化吧。我越来越相信这届政府未来最受诟病的外交政策失误并不是它将伊拉克弄得一团糟，虽然造成的破坏已经够大的了。这一失误与影响更深远的力量均势格局有关，也就是在911事件之后政府并没有实施行之有效的能源政策。

It baffles me that President Bush would rather go to Saudi Arabia twice in four months and beg the Saudi king for an oil price break than ask the American people to drive 55 miles an hour, buy more fuel-efficient cars or accept a carbon tax（烟尘排放税）or gasoline tax that might actually help free us from what he called our "addiction to oil."

一直令我困惑不解的是布什总统宁可在四个月中两度造访沙特阿拉伯，乞求沙特国王降低石油价格，也不愿意敦促美国民众以时速55英里的速度驾车，购买更多节油轿车，接受烟尘排放税或汽油税，而这些举措或许真的可以帮助我们从被布什总统称之为"对石油的嗜好"中解脱出来。

The failure of Mr. Bush to fully mobilize the most powerful innovation engine in the world - the U.S. economy - to produce a scalable（可攀登的;可升级的）alternative（取舍, 抉择, 可供选择的事物）to oil has helped to fuel the rise of a collection of petro-authoritarian（权力主义的, 专制的）states - from Russia to Venezuela to Iran - that are reshaping global politics in their own image.

布什没有充分发动起世界上最强大的创新引擎（即美国经济）生产出一种可行的石油替代品，这促成了一些依赖石油的专制国家的崛起(比如俄罗斯，委内瑞拉，伊朗等国)，这些国家此时正以其自身形象重塑世界政局。

If this huge transfer of wealth to the petro-authoritarians continues, power will follow. According to Congressional testimony Wednesday by the energy expert Gal Luft, with oil at $200 a barrel, OPEC could "potentially buy Bank of America in one month worth of production, Apple computers in a week and General Motors in just three days."

But that's not all. Two compelling new books have just been published that describe two other big power shifts: "The Post-American World," by Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International, and "Superclass" by David Rothkopf, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment.

但那并非事情的全部。最新出版的两本令人注目的新书则描述了另两个大的权力转移，一本是由《新闻周刊》国际版编辑Fareed Zakaria 所著的《后美国世界》，另一本是由卡耐基基金会访问学者David Rothkopf所著的《超级阶级》。

Mr. Zakaria's central thesis is that while the U.S. still has many unique assets, "the rise of the rest" - the Chinas, the Indias, the Brazils and even smaller nonstate actors - is creating a world where many other countries are slowly moving up to America's level of economic clout and self-assertion, in every realm（领域; 范围）. "Today, India has 18 all-news channels of its own," notes Zakaria. "And the perspectives they provide are very different from those you will get in the Western media. The rest now has the confidence to present its own narrative, where it is at the center."

Zakaria的中心论题是：尽管美国依然有许多独特的资产，然而"其余世界的崛起"即中国，印度，巴西甚至更小的非国家角色的崛起正创造出这样一个世界：许多其他国家的经济影响力以及在各个领域自我彰显的程度正慢慢上升至美国的水平。Zakaria 注意到"今日之印度拥有十八个新闻频道。"而且他们的视角和你在西方媒体看到的截然不同。其余世界现在有信心在其居于中心地位的事务上彰显其自身的叙述方式。

For too long, argues Zakaria, America has taken its many natural assets - its research universities, free markets and diversity of human talent - and assumed that they will always compensate for（赔偿, 补偿损失）our low savings rate or absence of a health care system or any strategic plan to improve our competitiveness.

Zakaria声称，太长时间以来美国一直在消耗它众多的自然资产：研究型大学，自由市场以及多样性的人力资源，美国认为这些自然资产总会弥补我们储蓄率低，缺少医保系统，没有战略计划改善竞争力这些缺陷。

"That was fine in a world when a lot of other countries were not performing," argues Zakaria, but now the best of the rest are running fast, working hard, saving well and thinking long term. "They have adopted our lessons and are playing our game（帮某人大忙）," he said. If we don't fix our political system and start thinking strategically about how to improve our competitiveness, he added, "the U.S. risks having its unique and advantageous（有利的） position in the world erode as other countries rise."

Zakaria认为，"当许多其他国家还没有登台表现时，这并没有什么。"但 如今其余世界的佼佼者正步履如飞，努力工作，他们储蓄充足并在为将来做着打算。"他们已经效仿我们的经验，现在在给我们帮忙。"他这样说道。如果我们不校 正我们的政治体制，对如何改善我们的竞争力开始做长远打算的话，他补充说，"那么随着其他国家的崛起，美国在世界上独特而有利的地位便面临着日益侵蚀的危 险。"

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