When the think-tank chappies ponder “decline,” they tend to see it in geopolitical terms. Great powers gradually being shunted off the world stage have increasing difficulties getting their way: Itsy-bitsy colonial policing operations in dusty ramshackle outposts drag on for years and putter out to no obvious conclusion. If that sounds vaguely familiar, well, the State Department reported last month that the last Christian church in Afghanistan was razed to the ground in 2010. This intriguing factoid came deep within their “International Religious Freedom Report.” It is not, in any meaningful sense of that word, “international”: For the last decade, Afghanistan has been a U.S. client state; its repulsive and corrupt leader is kept alive only by NATO arms; according to the World Bank, the Western military/aid presence accounts for 97 percent of the country’s economy. American taxpayers have spent the best part of half a trillion dollars and lost many brave warriors in that benighted land, and all we have to show for it is a regime openly contemptuous of the global sugar daddy that created and sustained it. In another American client state, the Iraqi government is publicly supporting the murderous goon in Syria and supplying him with essential aid as he attempts to maintain his dictatorship. Your tax dollars at work.
Advertisement
As America sinks into a multi-trillion-dollar debt pit, it is fascinating to listen to so many of my friends on the right fret about potential cuts to the Pentagon budget. The problem in Iraq and Afghanistan is not that we are spending insufficient money, but that so much of that money has been utterly wasted. Dominant powers often wind up with thankless tasks, but the trick is to keep it within budget: London administered the vast sprawling fractious tribal dump of Sudan with about 200 British civil servants for what, with hindsight, was the least worst two-thirds of a century in that country’s existence. These days I doubt 200 civil servants would be enough for the average branch office of the Federal Department of Community Organizer Grant Applications. Abroad as at home, the United States urgently needs to start learning how to do more with less.
As I said, these are more or less conventional symptoms of geopolitical decline: Great powers still go through the motions but increasingly ineffectually. But what the Council on Foreign Relations types often miss is that, for the man in the street, decline can be very pleasant. In Britain, France, Spain, and the Netherlands, the average citizen lives better than he ever did at the height of Empire. Today’s Europeans enjoy more comfortable lives, have better health, and take more vacations than their grandparents did. The state went into decline, but its subjects enjoyed immense upward mobility. Americans could be forgiven for concluding that, if this is “decline,” bring it on.
But it’s not going to be like that for the United States: Unlike Europe, geopolitical decline and mass downward mobility will go hand in hand. Indeed, they’re already underway. Whenever the economy goes south, experts talk of the housing “bubble,” the tech “bubble,” the credit “bubble.” But the real bubble is the 1950 “American moment,” and our failure to understand that moments are not permanent. The United States emerged from the Second World War as the only industrial power with its factories intact and its cities not reduced to rubble, and assumed that that unprecedented preeminence would last forever: We would always be so far ahead and so flush with cash that we could do anything and spend anything and we would still be Number One. That was the thinking of Detroit’s automakers when they figured they could afford to buy off the unions. The industrial powerhouse of 1950 is now a crime-ridden wasteland with a functioning literacy rate equivalent to West African basket-cases. And yes, Detroit is an outlier, but look at the assumptions its rulers made, and then wonder whether it will seem quite such an outlier in the future.
Take, for example, the complaints of the young Americans currently “occupying” Wall Street. Many protesters have told sympathetic reporters that “it’s our Arab Spring.” Put aside the differences between brutal totalitarian dictatorships and a republic of biennial elections, and simply consider it in economic terms: At the “Occupy” demonstrations, not-so-young college students are demanding that their tuition debt be forgiven. In Egypt, half the population lives in poverty; the country imports more wheat than any other nation on the planet, and the funds to do that will dry up in a couple months’ time. They’re worrying about starvation, not how to fund half a decade of Whatever Studies at Complacency U.
Maybe the decline in the middle class is a benefit in the long run.
For 30 years or so, we have been informed that the materialistic, consumption driven lifestyle of Americans has been the key contributing factor to the environmental destruction impacting Earth (Gaia).
That is the US represents just ~5% of the planet’s population yet we use ~25% of its resources. So the progressive OWS-types should be pleased that the US middle class consumer is being squeezed.
The "using 25% of the world's resources" is not a verifiable figure. Much ot the world's use of resources is undocumented (Chinese peasants digging their own coal, Africans burning wood etc.). At best you can say 25% of the resources traded on the international market.
Afghanistan: "its repulsive and corrupt leader is kept alive only by NATO arms ... Western military/aid presence accounts for 97 percent of the country’s economy. American taxpayers have spent ...half a trillion dollars and lost many brave warriors ..."
It makes one wonder whether Ron Paul's foreign policies are all that bad.
Ron Paul believes we are to blame for being targeted by Islamic fascism. Obama and his predecessor Carter permitted friendly middle eastern countries to become militantly hostile regimes. Clinton attempted to treat acts of war as common criminal matters. Ron Paul may be economically conservative but his foreign policy is stridently George McGovernite when what is needed is George S. Patton.
Ron Paul's foreign policy is to the extreme, Dennis Kucinich Left. Its Humanistic and has no basis in Conservatism, ever. Fortunately the US has never, ever, followed anything remotely close to RP's leftist ideology on foreign policy.
Exactamundo. And it's Wilsonianism that got us into the pickle we are in now. Actually, without ol' Woody, the US never would have entered the Great War. That means no collapse of Imperial Germany, no rise of Nazism, no Holocaust, no expansion of Communism and maybe a 100 million lives saved. The road to hell is really paved with good intentions.
I dislike Wilson as much as the next thinking man, but this indirect causal connection is simply counterfactual, and suffers, as many such pronouncements do, from making the assumption that the only actor capable of any consequential actions is the counterfactual subject of the hypothesis, in this case Wilson. To presume that Communism would not have spread, or that Imperial Germany would not have collapsed, or that National Socialism would not have risen, and thus the Holocaust's thirteen million (including those oft-cited six million jews) would not have died, and to blame the eventual death of all those who died in WWI, part deux, on "wilsonianism" is simply arrogant presumption. The US intervention to end WWI saved lives. It was the various European nations failure of will and inability to find solutions for their own problems that eventually enabled Europe to roll itself in flames for a second successive generation, not the imposition of a Wilsonian nanny-state, which, after all, was never actually imposed.
Wilson's intentions may well have paved a road to hell, but the various Europeans took a path all their own to get there. One paved not by good intentions, but by cultural laziness and a willingness to allow the ship of state to remain rudderless.
The stock market crash of 1929 probably had more to do with successful assumption of power for the Nazis than any other single factor. In the late twenties Germany was beginning to finally prosper in spite of the ineffective leadership of the Weimar Republic.
Wall Street banks were overflowing with money. The reparations that Germany was paying to France and England were in turn being paid back to the Wall Street banks that had loaned large sums of money to those countries to finance their war effort against Germany. Wall Street was in turn loaning the money back to German companies.
Businesses were taking off, the Nazis were declining at the polls and running out of money. When the Wall Street collapse came in 1929, the effect on Germany was devastating, actually worse than what happened in the US. The Nazis fortunes were reversed as the Weimar Republic was completely unable to cope with the magnitude of the disaster.
The same conditions that brought FDR to power in 1932 brought Hitler to power in 1932, both by legitimate means.
"Ron Paul believes we are to blame for being targeted by Islamic fascism"
I think he was just reading and understanding the 9-11 commission report and also reading what was published by CIA analysts who came to the same conclusion. For all those out there that despise central planning at the federal level when it comes to education, the economy, the EPA, why in the world do you think geopolitical central planning from DC would work? There are unintended consequences to ALL central plans. And for the blame Carter crowd about Iran, (ie Santorum et al) have you ever studied history prior to 1979? Of course Carter was a disaster, McGovern was a disaster, but Bush was a disaster and so is Obama. And any president who tries to central plan the middle east from DC will also be a disaster. Reagan got out of Lebanon after the marine bombing and guess what? No more marines died in Lebanon after they left. Imagine that.
Geopolitical Central Planning? What libertarian pipe dream are you living in where national policy set by the national government in the national capital by the national governing executive through those means established by a national constitution are equated to "geopolitical central planning"?
It's utterly ridiculous statements such as this that relegate Dr. Paul to the far fringe of reality, and make his followers/acolytes only slightly more serious than the tinfoil hat brigade. But only slightly.
Nuclear weapons are the only thing wrong with his proposed policies. It's hard to imagine where the world is headed when religious zealots "own" the bomb. But, it looks like we are failing there also, so, like you said, what's the point.
Unfortunately for Ron Paul fans, his foreign policies are born of oikophobia and willful naivete. Like the Left, Mr. Paul states that all the World's horror is the fault of America and the West He believes that America should do nothing to defend herself, and those that wish to do her harm are either justified or non-existent.
Further, the idea that nuclear weapons in the hands of a terror exporting, theocratic regime like Iran is benign one should give everyone pause if not the urge to turn the page on Mr. Paul.
"...for the man in the street, decline can be very pleasant." Sure. But like the Ponzi scheme du jure of Social Security, only the first ones in get the pleasantries.
Mr. Steyn, I just finished the book last night, and it truly is a "must read" for anyone who cares about this country. In fact, NRO should buy a copy for every legislator in DC. Keep up the good work!
Follow
