"We are in a multi-polar world now," Robert Gates told a Washington Post columnist within a year of his taking over the Pentagon in early 2007.
Such an assertion sounds banal today, nearly three years after the outbreak of a global financial crisis that would underline Washington's relative decline vis-a-vis China and other emerging powers and bolster the perception that the 21st-century was unlikely to be as "American" as the last one.
But, at the time, it was anathema to the neo-conservatives and other hawks, led by Dick Cheney, the vice president who, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, drove the US into two costly wars and doubled a defense budget that was already greater than the combined spending by the world's next 20 biggest militaries in order to affirm that the world was in fact "unipolar".
For Gates, who replaced the strutting, no-nonsense - but ultimately clueless - Donald Rumsfeld, it was one of a number of statements designed to nudge his country into a more realistic understanding of its place in the world, and, more precisely, the limits to its vast military power.
