Posted on 10/08/2002 12:10:32 AM PDT by Greybird
All we [in Canada] seem to do these days is argue about the United States. And the arguments are awfully sparse, aren't they? Either our neighbour is the most powerful nation on Earth, a menacing imperialist intruder that we must resist, or it's the most powerful nation on Earth, a beneficial force of democracy and peace that we must join and support.
Let me offer you a new way of thinking about America: Over.
Under this school of thought, the United States stopped being the world's dominant nation years ago, and has quietly collapsed into being Just Another Country. We haven't really noticed this, the theory goes, because most other countries still act as if the United States has its old military and financial power, an assumption that could be stripped of its invisible clothes in the event of a protracted Iraq war.
This is not a fringe theory. It comes from within the United States, from respected political scientists on the Ivy League campuses. Why does it get such little play? Both the left and the right have their entire houses built on the notion of a fixed and immutable American hegemony, pro- or anti-. Somewhere between these poles is this small community of thinkers, declaring that the end has already occurred.
"The United States has been fading as a global power since the 1970s, and the U.S. response to the terrorist attacks has merely accelerated this decline." So says Immanuel Wallerstein, the Yale University political scientist who is by far the most outspoken member of this camp. A gravelly old contrarian with little time for the orthodoxies of the left or the right, he may have gained his remove by teaching at McGill University in the 1970s.
In a forthcoming book, to be titled Decline of American Power, he describes his country as "a lone superpower that lacks true power, a world leader nobody follows and few respect, and a nation drifting dangerously amidst a global chaos it cannot control."
In his view, America gave up the ghost in 1974, when it admitted defeat in Vietnam and discovered that the conflict had more or less exhausted the gold reserves, crippling its ability to remain a major economic power. It has remained the focus of the world's attention partly for lack of any serious challenger to the greenback for the world's savings, and because it has kept attracting foreign investments at a rate of US $1.2 billion per day.
But if it comes to a crunch, the United States can no longer prevail either economically or -- here is the most controversial statement -- militarily. In Mr. Wallerstein's calculus, of the three major wars the United States has fought since the Second World War, one was a defeat and two (Korea and the Gulf War) were draws.
Iraq, he told me recently, would be an end game. "The policy of the U.S. government, which all administrations have been following since the seventies, has been to slow down the decline by pushing on all fronts. The hawks currently in power have to work very, very hard twisting arms very, very tightly to get the minimal legal justification for Iraq that they want now. This kind of thing, they used to get with a snap of the fingers."
You don't have to agree with Mr. Wallerstein's hyperbolic view to be a member of the Over camp -- and many do disagree: When he first brought it up in the journal Foreign Policy this summer, half a dozen editorial writers in the United States attacked him. But more moderate thinkers have joined the club, including Charles Kupchan at Georgetown University, whose forthcoming book The End of the American Era makes a similar point in more subtle terms.
Joseph Nye at Harvard, a friend of Henry Kissinger's, argues in his new book The Paradox of American Power that "world politics is changing in a way that means Americans cannot achieve all their international goals acting alone" -- a tacit acknowledgment of Mr. Wallerstein's thesis.
This is how great powers end: Not by suddenly collapsing, but by quietly becoming Just Another Country. This happened to England around 1873, but it wasn't until 1945 that anyone there noticed.
Outsiders do notice. Spend some time talking to a currency trader or a foreign financier, and you'll glimpse the end of the almighty dollar: Right now, about 70 per cent of the world's savings are in greenbacks, while America contributes about 30 per cent of the world's production -- an imbalance that has been maintained for the past 30 years only because Japan collapsed and Europe took too long to get its house together.
A Japanese CEO told me this in blunt terms the other day: "It was Clinton's sole great success that he kept the world economy in dollars for 10 years longer than anyone thought he would. But nobody's staying in dollars any more."
There are other signs: The middling liberals, who in the 1960s would have sided with the left in opposing U.S. imperialism, are today begging for an empire. Michael Ignatieff, the liberal scholar, argued at length recently that the United States ought to become an imperial force -- on humanitarian grounds. Would this argument be necessary if the United States actually dominated the world?
I'm not sure whether to fully believe the refreshing arguments of Mr. Wallerstein and his friends, but they do have history on their side. In their times, Portugal, Holland, Spain, France, and England all woke up to discover, far after the fact, that they were no longer the big global powers, but Just Another Country.
Like the bewildered Englishmen in Robert Altman's Gosford Park, they struggled to maintain their dignity while wondering just what those strange visitors from abroad were talking about.
Copyright © 2002 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved
Now I wonder if it'll last the decade. Especially since we'll be occupying the Mideast for that decade. Against protests, I offer three words as counterargument: Germany, Japan, Korea. The legions haven't come home, and at this rate, they never will -- voluntarily. Afghanistan is well on its way to joining them on the list of might-as-well-be-permanent garrisons. Next year, Iraq.
You forgot Germany and Japan.
America is only now becoming the 'empire' that our wannabe Euros to the north are talking about. Driving the stake through the heart of the UN is only a start - as is Iraq. There are going to be other temporary destinations in the War on Terrorism, some close by and others far away. China and Cuba come to mind.
Militarily, this author is obviously a Canadian. Few NATO nations make France look like a military juggernaut, either in attitude or hardware, but Canada does. The chances for a 'protracted war' in Iraq are about equal to that of the DemonRats obeying election laws. Doom and gloom using the reality challenged left as the source gives this one a 'Dry Heaves Alert'. No offense, Greybird, but I can understand your agreement with this one. Post anything positive about the US lately?
But not on this watch.
Sodom only needed to find ten righteous men in order to survive. When "America" gets to that point, when there are no longer ten righteous men left, we won't be here and we won't care that the time has come, because it won't be America any longer.
It is our duty in this time to work to prevent that.
You know, it's possible that what the founders intended is not what God intended when He brought forth this nation.
When we ordered the B-52 we ordered 600. The B-1 we had 76 and we just moth- balled half of them in the last six months. When we ordered The B-2 we where going to get 60 I believe, we cancelled half because of cost and ended up with 30. When Regan took office we had about 70 over sea military bases now I believe we are down to just 15.
We use to have an active Army for each section of the country four of them. Now we just have one active and half of it is made up of reserves. Our Navy fleet was reuduced by at least one-third in just 8 years of Clinton. I know we have good technology but most of our military planes are 30 years old and you can only recondition and update the same frames so many times.
Am I saying we are washed up, not hardly we still have the most powerful military in the world. But we are just a shadow of what we where even in the gulf war.The doctrine that we have to be able to fight two seperate wars has been done away with and while we are under a republican president.
When GW took office I expected a big build up and I think so did he. Then I heard we need to wait and do a study and then I heard we need a new type of military that is leaner ,lighter and more mobile. Sure we need to modernize but what I also afraid it means is we can no longer afford a large one. How can we when 2 of those B-2's cost us more than all 600 of the B-52's?
Bullshit. Wallerstein is a socialist, through and through - apparently having a new spin on socialism is enough to make you an independent-minded centrist in the eyes of the Globe and Mail. Which is, in turn, enough to reveal the worthlessness of this article - if the only people who can be found discussing the downfall of the US are the same people who have been (incorrectly) predicting it since the early 1970's, there's no particular reason to believe they're correct now, is there?
Wallerstein ought to title his next work "Still Wrong After All These Years"...
Sodom couldn't have had a population of more than a few thousand, if that. The US has what now? 350,000,000? I don't think there's any particular significance to the number ten other than in the specific case. Not ten righteous out of 350,000,000? Don't be silly.
I also don't think we're under any special protection as a country in the first place. More a question of actions having consequences.
He's just jealous. Somebody give him some Kleenex.
Britain thought that General Kitchener's use of the Maxim machine gun to slaughter the Sudanese put them on top, as well. That and a host of other innovations, such as in shipbuilding, were still not enough to preserve its empire.
One item that the article I posted doesn't mention is the worldwide transparency of scientific discovery. Almost none of that U.S.-financed military research is under absolute wraps, without discussion of basic science supporting it and much of the technology that results. (The last such notably successful example of secrecy, I'd say, was the A-bomb's Manhattan Project.)
What the controversy over Clinton's disgraceful leaking of U.S.-taxpayer-funded research to the Chinese ignored was that this accelerated what would have happened eventually. That certainly doesn't excuse it -- but the U.S. government wouldn't be the first world power to underestimate the power of the diffusion of research through the worldwide scientific community. Britain certainly did.
Every decent man, as Mencken said, is ashamed of the government he lives under. I extend that in equal opportunity to both halves of the statists whom we allow to rule us. Disgusting spectacles such as today's California gubernatorial debate -- Davis's slimy tyranny versus Simon's earnest tyranny-lite -- don't give me any reason to stop.
That figures ... and then it slithered over here.
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