United States in Decline?
Read this article from the New York Times Magazine:United States – International Diplomacy – Economic Trends – World Economy – Politics
This subject: the increasing decline of US world power relative to the other great powers, is the true motivating issue underlying the upcoming presidential election. The complications of the last three decades of imperial America are coming home to roost. Reality is intruding into that perpetually sunny Reaganist vision of supreme US domination of the world. Reaganism is dead. It was based upon false analysis. It gave little credence to Chinese emergence; it belittled European cooperation; it totally misunderstood its own mythology; it misread both the cause and the meaning of the fall of the Soviet Union; and it overvalued its military capacity.
China has rapidly emerged as a world player able to vie effectively with American and European diplomacy around the world. It is not a world power built on militarism [yet] but on economic growth: the Chinese are acutely aware that to grow they need to secure world resources, which they have done masterfully with diplomatic and economic deals around the globe. America, instead, has annoyed its suppliers by bullying them and has frittered away the last thirty years by acting like a school yard thug imposing its unilateral vision of world order. The US has failed to get even its own hemisphere to go along with economic cooperation and is about to annoy its largest neighbor by closing its borders as a result of some imaginary immigration crisis.
America belittled the early efforts at European cooperation. Yet after decades of small and often contentious progress the European Union is alive and well and has a larger economy than America. More to the point its currency has emerged as a challenge to the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Of even more subtle damage to America is that the notion of liberal democracy is now more of a European concept than an American one, and it is the European Parliamentary system, not the American Presidential one, that is copied around the globe when countries adopt democracy.
I am not as pessimistic as the author of the article is: I still believe that America can maintain more that a third share of world power. But to do so it must reject the “Disney-like” fantasies of its mythology: it is not special; it is parochial and needs to become joined to the world; its institutions need overhauling to become more adaptable; it must eschew force and embrace cooperation; it must sort out its fiscal house; and it must attract foreign talent once again. It is easy for Americans to forget that their country became a world leader in the 1950’s when the rest of the world was devastated and when it was the safe haven for a whole generation of European brain power displaced by World War II; that advantage went by the late 1980’s but no one here took notice because of the apparent victory America won on the “Cold War”. That victory, upon which the reputation of Reaganism was built, was a chimera: it was won on debt and the transference of its cost to the generation now graduating from college. It was hollow. It was based upon the illusion that wars can be costless to the population that basks in the glory of the win. That has never been true. Bush’s catastrophic regime was built on the same quicksand, and burdened by the failure of Reagan to realize that it is economic strength, not military strength, that builds empires, it was destined to accelerate the fall.
This election is epochal: the wrong answer will confirm the decline of America. The right answer at least gives it a chance.
