China: China yesterday assailed the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive action, saying the Iraq war had ruined the global anti-terror coalition and blamed arrogance for problems dogging the United States worldwide.
A searing commentary in the China Daily newspaper written by a senior policymaker was as close to a position on the US presidential election as China has come. The article published yesterday made no mention of Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, the Democratic Party's challenger to President Bush in today's presidential contest.
"The current US predicament in Iraq serves as another example that when a country's superiority psychology inflates beyond its real capability, a lot of trouble can be caused," wrote Mr Qian Qichen, one of the main architects of China's foreign policy.
"But the troubles and disasters the United States has met do not stem from the threats by others, but from its own cocksureness and arrogance."
The United States was dreaming if it thought the 21st century was the American century, said Mr Qian, a former foreign minister who is credited with breaking China out of diplomatic isolation after the crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
The invasion of Iraq "has made the United States even more unpopular in the international community than its war in Vietnam", he said in the unusual commentary.
"The Iraq war has also destroyed the hard-won global anti-terror coalition," Mr Qian added, saying it had caused a rise in terrorist activity around the globe and widened a rift between the US and Europe.
Mr Qian predicted the US strategy of pre-emptive strikes would bring insecurity and ultimately the demise of the "American empire".
Analysts say China has a slight preference for the incumbent in the US election, realising that US policy towards China has changed little from administration to administration. But China, growing in economic and political clout, has expressed its aversion to Mr Bush's unilateralist tendencies and sided with France and Germany in opposition to the Iraq war.
An article in the state-run Liaowang magazine noted that both Mr Bush and Mr Kerry had avoided criticising China over human rights because the US rights record was so bad.