While America was preoccupied with Afghanistan, and later Iraq, China took advantage of Washington's new focus to minimise tension with the superpower and enhance its standing and its influence with its Asian neighbours.
He said long-term relations with the superpower must be maintained.
It would also highlight the fact that a country that has remained silently "friendly" to the US can no longer sit on the fence, quietly benefiting from its arrangement with the superpower.
With that superpower mentality, Nigerians have the image of being incredibly brash and loud and trying to get 129 million of them to pull in the same direction is a thankless task.
The United States did not become a world superpower with a nonsense monetary policy.
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America may have looked the other way at some of Saddam's takings on the side because the smuggling took place with several of the superpower's Middle Eastern allies (and America was anyway preoccupied with keeping arms out of Iraq).
French fantasies of Paris becoming a superpower, with Jacques Chirac as a modern Sun King, are over.
Not even Germany can keep pace with the U.S. The superpower is expected to accelerate through the first half of the year, with growth of 0.1% in the first quarter and 1.5% in the second.
Then there is India, which has an agreement with Sri Lanka, signed in 1987, that gives the regional superpower an interest in any deal with the Tigers.
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Russia's full cooperation with the fight against terrorism has led to the allies believing the time may be ripe for taking a fresh look at the way NATO does business with the former iron curtain superpower.
America, for its part, needs Pakistan's help in Afghanistan, where the superpower is still struggling with a resurgent Taliban.
Now the French leader says that he, too, wants to avoid an adversarial relationship with the world's only superpower.
They will also have secured a close relationship with the world's only superpower.
The U.S. may be a superpower, but even with all our technical magic, we cannot make disappear what was never there in the first place.
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The U.S. remains the world's superpower, so how we interact with the rest of the planet may well be important enough to warrant a Nobel prize.
In 1990, Presidents Bush and Gorbachev wound up a superpower summit in the United States with agreement on a number of arms control and trade issues.
It is tempting to compare the present era with the 19th century, when Britain was the sole superpower.
Regional Settlements: The Bush administration has been assiduously working to develop agreements with Moscow that will end various regional conflicts between former superpower proxies now viewed by Washington as expensive throwbacks to the Cold War.
It gave them the support of a superpower whilst relieving them of a duty to resolve the quarrel with the Palestinians, even though their own long-term well-being must surely depend on solving that conflict.
He visits a Russian farm to look at the country's ambitions to be an agricultural superpower, checks out the Star City astronaut training center, meets with seven-foot boxing world champion-turned-movie star Nikolai Valuev and talks along the way with entrepreneurs and environmentalists working to make the city of Sochi home to green Olympics in 2014.
They realize that, with the possible exception of the Ottoman empire in its chaotic last decades, no superpower has ever pursued a more absurd strategy.
Mr. Laffer, chairman of Laffer Associates and the Laffer Center for Supply-Side Economics, is co-author, with Stephen Moore, of "Return to Prosperity: How America Can Regain Its Economic Superpower Status" (Threshold, 2010).
Even for a profligate superpower, that is a considerable stake, and America's recently expressed dissatisfaction with General Musharraf should be measured against it.
Since falling out with Eritrea and the port-state of Djibouti, Ethiopia, the region's landlocked superpower, has hit on Berbera as its easiest access to the sea.
With George Best as its icon Manchester United was on its way to becoming eventually the country's football superpower, challenged these days only by Chelsea, which can call on seemingly limitless amounts of Russian money, and Arsenal, with its French manager and stars.
The Netherlands is considered a contemporary-design superpower and has fostered a number of notable figures, whose limited-edition creations often combine industrial design with sculpture.
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This article is adapted, in part, from Selling Out a Superpower: Where the U.S. Economy Went Wrong and How We Can Turn It Around, with the permission of Prometheus Books.
That is especially bad news for Mercosur, an agricultural superpower, which is one of the few areas in the region not actively negotiating a bilateral trade agreement with the United States.
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