Here's a bit of the foreign reaction to Hurricane Katrina's devastating impact on Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. In an editorial entitled "The Humbling of a Superpower" (yikes), The Daily Mail writes:

Here is a superpower that can crush at will a tinpot dictatorship - but then becomes so bogged down in the grisly aftermath of war that it finds itself unable to respond to anything like adequately to the plight of tens of thousands of its own citizens engulfed by a natural calamity.