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The Crumbling of the Pax Americana
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The Crumbling of the Pax
Americana
Remarks at the Watson Institute for International and
Public Affairs, Brown University
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Senior Fellow, Watson Institute for International and
Public Affairs
4 February 2016, Providence, Rhode Island
[This is the first of three lectures on the
United States’ global role in the 21st century. The second will address American floundering
in the new world disorder. The third
will speak to the need for unprecedented agility in American diplomacy.]
In 1941, as the
United States sat out the wars then raging in both the Atlantic and Pacific,
Henry Luce penned a famous attack on isolationism in Life Magazine. “We
Americans are unhappy,” he began. “We are not happy about America. We are not
happy about ourselves in relation to America. We are nervous – or gloomy – or
apathetic.” Luce argued that the destiny of the United States demanded that
“the most powerful and vital nation in the world” step up to the international
stage and assume the position of global leader. “The 20th Century must be to a
significant degree an American Century,” he declared.
And so it
proved to be, as America led the world to victory over fascism, created a new
world order mimicking the rule of law and parliamentary institutions
internationally, altered the human condition with a dazzling array of new
technologies, fostered global opening and reform, contained and outlasted
communism, and saw the apparent triumph of democratic ideals over their
alternatives. But that 20th Century came to an end in 1989 with the fall of the
Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, and the emergence of the United States as
a great power without a peer.
As the Soviet
Union collapsed, we Americans celebrated our unrivaled military power and
unilaterally proclaimed ourselves “the indispensable nation.” But we failed to define a coherent vision of
a post Cold War order or an inspiring role for the United States within it. These essential tasks were deferred to the 21st
Century, which finally began in late 2001, with the shock and awe of 9/11. In the panic and rage of that moment, we
finally made choices about our world role.
These choices were intended to affirm our power but have instead defined
a new era in which – our complacently exceptionalist self-image notwithstanding
– the United States is ironically ever less geopolitically dominant, less
internationally competitive, less emblematic of equality of opportunity,
less faithful to the core values of our republic, and less looked
up to for leadership by foreigners.
Today Americans
no longer call the shots in the Middle East, where Arabs, Israelis, and Turks
now refuse to take direction from us, Iranians remain estranged, and Russians
are again active adversaries. When we
attempt to block China from creating new international financial institutions
like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, our allies, partners, and client
states ignore us and join with the Chinese.
Our global standing has been diminished not just by the rise of others
and the estrangement of allies but by structural changes in our economy and
ongoing disinvestment in education and research. We are becoming less competitive. Social mobility in America now compares
unfavorably with that in other industrialized democracies. (We have acquired a permanent, mostly
African-American urban proletariat.
Counting those who have dropped out of the labor force as well as those
still looking for work and thus officially unemployed, almost 103 million
Americans of working age are currently without jobs.)
Meanwhile, we
are defending our freedoms by curtailing them.
We ignore the separation of powers that is the foundation of our
constitutional order. We have suspended
much of our bill of rights. We are so
accustomed to a perpetual state of war that our Congress no longer bothers to
exercise its constitutional authority to authorize military interventions
abroad, but leaves these to presidential discretion. We have unraveled much of the fabric of international
law we wove with such effort in the last century. Our panicky reactions to the activities of
terrorists abroad are increasing the risk of terrorism at home, both homegrown
and imported. The military power of the
United States is universally acknowledged, but our moral authority, our
reputation for considering the interests and listening to the counsel of
allies, partners, and friends, and our luster as a just society with
aspirations to continuing self-improvement have all taken hits.
Post-constitutional
America is adrift. No one knows what we
stand for these days. Americans are
understandably unhappy about this. Many
are in denial. Few are at ease with the
state of our country. As the tawdriness
of our current political contests evidences, we are angry, or gloomy, or simply
confused. We blame everyone but
ourselves for our disquiet.
It is in this
context that I want to speak with you about the weakening of American power and
influence in the world, its causes, its consequences, and what must be done to
cure it. What accounts for our inability
to end our wars or achieve the foreign policy goals we set? Why is it that when we run up the flag ever
fewer allies, partners, and friends salute?
How is it that our statecraft has so obviously atrophied? I will be as brief as possible.
Power is the
capacity to make others do what they otherwise would not. Diplomatic power employs measures short of
war to persuade others that it is in their interest to do things our way rather
than the way they originally preferred.
But diplomacy demands a measure of guile, and it takes time. Americans have come to prefer the shock and
awe of war and the instant, if ephemeral, gratifications of bombing and
strafing to the protracted, often boring nonviolence of diplomatic
intercourse.
Perhaps this is
because our military power is so much greater than that of any other nation or
coalition of nations that we are always confident we will prevail on the
battlefield. Perhaps it is because,
until recently, no foreign society the United States has attacked has
retaliated against us in our homeland, making attacks on foreign countries and
peoples seem risk-free. Perhaps it is a
consequence of the U.S. preference for governance by elected and appointed officials
uncontaminated by experience in statecraft and diplomacy or knowledge of
geography, history, and foreign affairs.
Our politicians
tell us that our problems reflect a failure of the will. But no one abroad doubts the will or ability
of the U.S. armed forces to overwhelm any enemy foolish enough to mount a
direct military challenge to America. No
one outside our country considers the United States insufficiently
combative. On the contrary, foreigners
have come to expect Americans to bluster belligerently and to bully, bomb, or
zap recalcitrant adversaries. Da’esh –
the so-called “Islamic State” or “caliphate” – is skillfully exploiting
American bellicosity to incite normal Muslims to join it in counterattacking
what it portrays as a deepening American-led “Crusade” that features the wanton
killing of anyone professing Islam.
American
obduracy on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan and our willingness to
reinforce failure with troop surges have removed past doubts among allies about
U.S. resolve and staying power. But they
have also won the United States a reputation for a fatal attraction to “mission
creep” and for not knowing when to cut its losses and quit. Many abroad, including our closest allies,
have come to doubt America’s capacity to shape events intelligently through both
war and measures short of it.
After all, the
last time the United States both won a war and produced a better peace was in
1945, seventy-one years ago. In the 1950s, we held on but did not prevail
in Korea. In the 1960s and ‘70s, we were
humiliated in Vietnam. In 1991, we aced
the military contest in the war to liberate Kuwait but flunked the diplomatic
test of translating victory into regional peace and stability. We have just lost Round Two in Iraq . We are clearly headed for defeat in whatever
round we are currently struggling through in Afghanistan.
Far from
proving our military omnipotence, these interventions have underscored its
limitations. The U.S. armed forces are
indeed the world’s mightiest. But, while
our military power can remove regimes, we have demonstrated that it cannot
replace them, or subdue populist nationalism, or prevent determined enemies
from retaliating against our homeland or the homelands of our allies. Our expanding struggle with extremists in the
Muslim world is now showing that, if unguided and unaccompanied by diplomacy,
violent coercion is more likely to aggravate and enlarge conflict than to
circumscribe it.
Our ability to
enlist or bend others to the causes we espouse has clearly weakened. Our options for dealing with the challenges
we face are now more limited than they ought to be. None of this should be a surprise. There are many reasons for it.
To begin with,
America now suffers from what might best be called fiscal anorexia. People with anorexia imagine they are overly
robust. To reduce their fancied bulk,
they reduce their intake of nourishment.
This emaciates and weakens them.
Anorexia is a narcissistic syndrome that reduces the ability of those
who suffer from it to cope with everyday life, let alone more demanding
challenges. Like anorexics, Americans
have a neurotically distorted image of ourselves. We imagine that we are over-governed and
over-taxed.
We have decided
to cure our imagined bloat by cutting non-military spending, starving our
government down to size. But the ratio
of civilian federal government employees to population has fallen from one for
every 80 citizens under Ronald Reagan to one for every 117 under Barack
Obama. Public service is very modestly
compensated in the United States.
Salaries for the most senior officials are a mere fraction of what
private sector executives with comparable management responsibilities are paid. And 29 of 34 OECD member countries have
higher tax burdens than the United States.
The average tax rate in the world’s advanced capitalist countries is 36
percent. In the United States, federal,
state, and local taxes take just 27 percent.
In the OECD, only the Turks, Mexicans, and Chileans have lower taxes
than Americans.
Most Americans
are nonetheless convinced that the civilian side of government in the United
States is too big. Americans are against
big government unless it is in uniform. Non-Americans
marvel at this perception and our willingness to tolerate the deterioration of
government services that shriveled funding produces even as we borrow money to
bulk up our military. We treat the
defense budget as a jobs program or an end in itself. It has never been audited. The only fiscal policy the United States now
has is military Keynesianism.
This skewed
approach to resource allocation is the reason that American physical and human
infrastructure is no longer internationally competitive. It is also why American foreign policy is
so militarily muscular and
diplomatically puny. We spend more on
our armed forces than the next eight or ten great powers combined. It is said that there are more men and women
in U.S. military bands than in our diplomatic service. And the bands have undergone extensive
training to do what they do with superb skill.
The “diplomats” have not.
America’s
diplomacy is under-resourced and under-skilled.
It is led by amateurs, many of whom have bought their way into
government. They are unfamiliar with
government operations. They have no experience in conducting the
nation’s business abroad and no interest in building its long-term competence
at diplomacy. They are at least as
focused on the prospects for profitable exit from their government jobs through
the “revolving door" as they are on actually doing those jobs.
Our political
appointees to ambassadorships and senior foreign policy positions are in the
main hopelessly outclassed by their experienced, professional, foreign
counterparts. Our career diplomats are
nowhere near as well-trained as their military or foreign colleagues. Other than intelligence agencies like the
CIA, no civilian department has anything like the massive funding, patronage
power, or ability to dispense largesse that our defense department does. The views of our foreign policy elite are
shaped by think tanks and academic institutions funded and staffed from the
defense and intelligence communities, not diplomatic professionals.
This
necessarily skews Washington’s policies toward military and other coercive
means of influencing foreign nations. It
also results in the U.S. armed forces being asked to do things that other
countries expect their diplomats or development specialists to do. These tasks are not part of the military skill
set. Our armed forces have the money
but not the training to do them, so they rely on a huge, mostly ex-military,
cost-plus contract force of dubious competence to address them. This quite predictably results in prodigious
waste, fraud, and mismanagement. Quite
aside from the tens of billions of dollars that have gone missing in
Afghanistan and Iraq, the peace-building tasks that are central to
consolidating the results of the wars we have fought do not get done. The demonstrated incompetence of our
government in foreign affairs has become a serious national and international problem,
given the rise of other great powers and our country’s narrowing margin for
error.
Those who
cannot live by their wallets or their brawn must live by their wits. Americans could clearly afford less
threadbare, more professional and competent institutions to make and implement
both domestic and foreign policy. We
have decided we won’t pay the taxes needed to field such government. That means that we need to think our
way out of danger. But fiscal anorexia
and brain-dead politics preclude this.
This, effectively, leaves us to live by military brawn alone. That is proving not just inadequate but
grossly counterproductive.
Militarism is
the glorification of the armed forces as the embodiment of a nation’s virtues,
assignment of priority to military interests over those of others, and an
habitual inclination to use force rather
than measures short of war to address foreign challenges to national
interests. Joined to the uniquely
American impulse to redeem the world by democratizing it, this translates into
armed evangelism. Civic culture in
America speaks of democratic peace but celebrates the cult of the warrior at
all significant public events.
Militarism with
American characteristics seeks maximum funding for the armed forces and
military industrial projects regardless of other demands on the federal budget
and even when there is no tax revenue to pay for them. It sponsors aggressive intervention to
overthrow other peoples’ governments and reorder the world to the liking of
homegrown ideologues and academic theorists.
It sets U.S. military dominance of other regions and the global commons
as the supreme objective of American foreign policy.
Our use of this
approach to foreign affairs in the post-Cold War era has caused the United
States to have worse relations with each of our great power rivals than any of
them has with any other. Our allies are
not against us, but even they are often no longer with us. Militarism has become a potent threat not
just to America’s aspirations to global leadership but to its national
security, well-being, and domestic tranquility.
In this
century, applied to West Asia and North Africa, militaristic – that is to say,
diplomacy-free – foreign policy has already added more than $2 trillion to the
U.S. national debt, and unfunded liabilities from these misadventures will add
another $4 trillion in the decades to come.
The United States has lost two major wars while sacrificing the lives of
almost 7,000 of our military professionals and permanently maiming at least
another 50,000. Almost one million have
claimed war-related disabilities.
U.S.
interventions and other coercive measures – like sanctions, drone warfare,
support of Israel’s and now Saudi Arabia’s brutal efforts to terrify their
neighbors, and the knock-on effects of these actions, including the sectarian
warfare they have initiated – have meanwhile killed as many as two million
Muslims in other lands. One does not
need an elaborate review of the history of European Christian and Jewish
colonialism in the Middle East or American collusion with both to understand
the sources of Arab rage or the zeal of some Muslims for revenge. In the Middle East, the United States is now
locked in a death-filled dance with fanatic enemies, ungrateful client
states, alienated allies, and resurgent
adversaries. Terrorists are over here
because we are over there.
In Europe too,
the American attempt to build a post-Cold War order purely on NATO’s military
foundations has backfired on hopes for stability and peace. The failure to contrive politico-economic
processes to end historic antagonisms
between Europe, Russia, and Turkey has made it all too easy for Russia to
revert to type and Turkey to drift away from the West. Instead of seeking to build a new concert of
Europe, the United States thoughtlessly encouraged the continuing treatment of
Russia as a defense problem and abetted the rebuff of Muslim Turkey by European Christendom.
Moscow first
imagined the worst. It then acted in
ways that fulfilled its paranoia by provoking the United States and
others. For its part, Turkey abandoned
its centuries-old effort to adopt a European identity and sought renewed
association with the Muslim societies of West Asia and North Africa,
downgrading its previous role as NATO gatekeeper for the Middle East. It did so just in time for U.S. invasions and
drone attacks in the region to catalyze state collapse and sectarian warfare
from Afghanistan to Syria and the Sahel.
Invigorated by the spread of civil strife, Islamist terrorism with
global reach has incorporated itself as a so-called “caliphate” spanning Iraq
and Syria, with a proliferation of outposts in other states subjected to U.S.
or NATO intervention. Europe now faces
destabilization by an avalanche of refugees fleeing the wars and anarchy that
U.S. invasions and covert actions helped ignite.
The alienated,
European-born Muslim extremists who perpetrated the November 13 attack in Paris
justified it as reprisal for French and other Western intervention against
their co-religionists in the Middle East.
As they hoped it would, their terrorism unnerved the West and provoked a
panicked, paranoid response. The
“caliphate” and its fellow travelers have today’s Americans and Europeans
pegged. We prefer dramatic
media-fostered narratives to uninspiring facts.
That means we can be played.
Since 9/11,
over 400.,000 Americans – almost 27,000 per year or 73 each day – have died by
gunfire in the United States. From 9/11
to date, a total of 45 – or about 3 per year – have been killed by
jihadis. The December 2 mass shooting in
San Bernardino – the 353rd officially tabulated domestic U.S. gun
massacre since 9/11 – was the first in 2015 to involve a Muslim immigrant
couple rather than the “normal” disgruntled white male perpetrator acting on
his own. And yet San Bernardino did not
lead to demands to control sales of weapons to psychopaths, criminals, or gun
nuts. Instead, it galvanized
Islamophobic demagoguery focused on shutting down Muslim immigration. It also led, quite predictably, to rising
pressure for escalated military intervention in the Levant. That’s precisely what the extremist
“caliphate” wants. Its success in evoking
this response from Americans has global implications.
Calls for a
U.S. military “pivot” to Europe and “boots on the ground” in the Middle East
imply a detour from yet another primarily military approach to shifting
strategic circumstances, the so-called “rebalance” to Asia. This is intended to preclude the loss of
post-World War II U.S. naval hegemony in the Western Pacific. But even if the resources were there to do
this (which they are not), China’s return to wealth and power is an ineluctable
reality that must somehow be accommodated by its neighbors as well as balanced
by them and the United States.
The emergence
of the Indo-Pacific as the global center of economic gravity clearly justifies
greater policy attention to the region. But
economic challenges require primarily economic, not military or even political,
responses. China’s centrality in its
region’s economy and its global economic weight cannot be neutralized by
additional military deployments or by the belated export of U.S. legal and
financial norms envisaged by the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Military challenges to China’s rise
inevitably evoke Chinese military responses.
They do not halt China’s accretion of power. They simply focus the Chinese state on
building military capabilities that can counter the threats it perceives from
the United States. It stimulates China
to flank those threats by using its growing economic prowess to gain leverage
in places previously dominated by the United States.
American global
and regional interests demand cooperation with other countries, including
China, to address common challenges ranging from climate change to nuclear
non-proliferation to international respect for the rule of law. Military rivalry does not foster attitudes
conducive to cooperation.
But even if the
United States can gain China’s support for our objectives, we cannot retain a
leading position in either the Indo-Pacific or on the global stage without
addressing flaws in our country’s current socioeconomic system. The problems we have developed are
complex. They include our contracting
domestic labor market, the widening gap
between our rich and poor, and the deterioration of social mobility in
our society. We need a peaceful
international environment for domestic reconstruction. It will demand introspection and processes of
domestic reform that are even more politically difficult than those that China
and, to a lesser extent, India are now carrying out.
Getting
America’s act together will require repairing and reversing the damage to our
human and physical infrastructure that decades of neglect and disinvestment
have wrought. Diverting more capital to
the U.S. military-industrial complex, as virtually all our politicians demand,
will not offset that damage so much as compound it. The ultimate foundation of American global
influence is not our ability to bomb or assassinate foreigners. It is our capacity to enrich them and
ourselves through trade and investment.
It is our potential to inspire them by our example to want to emulate
and cooperate with us, not shun or injure us.
We are strongest abroad when we are most just and prosperous at home.
Since 1875 or
so, the United States has had the largest economy on the planet. We are about to lose that status. How much power to shape world events we
retain will depend on how well we reinvigorate our economy and society by
drawing upon the astonishing natural and human bounty that geography and
history have bestowed on us. It will
also depend on the extent to which we exemplify the values we have long
professed. Adding to our already
enormous military capabilities at the expense of other priorities will not help
us rebuild our ebbing influence.
Almost 40
percent of the U.S. industrial base already depends in whole or in part on
funding from the defense department and related military spending in other
parts of the federal budget. High levels
of government spending on “defense” and the dollar’s status as the global
currency as well as our own have masked the hollowing out of the U.S. economy
by deindustrialization and outsourcing.
The “Fed” has printed all the money Americans have needed to sustain
high consumption despite a low savings rate and the inability to set national
priorities.
The growth of
the U.S. financial sector inflates the apparent size and role of the U.S.
economy in global terms. Financial
operations (not counting insurance) now account for over 9 percent of GDP, up
from 3 percent a couple of decades ago.
Financial engineering – as opposed to the real kind – is where the
rake-offs are, so it is what the best, brightest, and greediest young Americans
now want to do. The IMF estimates that
such parasitic over-financialization now siphons off 2 percent of annual growth
in GDP in the United States.
In terms of
competitiveness and national resilience this is not reassuring. De-dollarization of the global economy is
slowly gathering speed. When the
monetary tide goes out, Americans are likely to be revealed to have been
swimming naked.
China’s
manufacturing output is already one-and-a-half times America’s, which stands at
less than 12 percent of our GDP. This is
a more relevant indicator of competitiveness in international affairs than the
fact that the United States devotes about 20 percent of our GDP to health
care. Ours is a system designed to
ensure the profits of pharmaceutical oligopolies and huge insurance companies
rather than to maximize the efficiency with which it delivers medical
care. (Other advanced capitalist societies
spend about half what Americans do on health care but secure considerably
better results.) The World Health
Organization (WHO) rates health care in the United States as the world’s 37th
best, just below that of Costa Rica and above Slovenia. (France is number one. Myanmar brings up the rear at number
190.)
As the health
sector quintessentially illustrates, the American economy is increasingly
dominated by rent-seeking and rate-setting monopolies, monopsonies, and
oligopolies. Their managers are a donor
class before whom our politicians shamelessly abase themselves. The legions of lobbyists these private sector
bureaucracies employ ensure that U.S. laws, taxes, regulations, and
administrative practices protect their profits and make it as difficult as
possible for new market entrants to challenge them.
For the most
part, our corporate conglomerates now grow not by creating new businesses but
through mergers and acquisitions. They
collectivize retail and services businesses by replacing them with franchises,
reducing independent operators to a status like that of contractors or
employees with no benefits. The ability
of giant corporate bureaucracies to produce and procure goods and services
anywhere in the world enables them to crush competition from small and
medium-sized domestic enterprises. Their
size enables them to dictate the price of most of the goods and services they
purchase and remarket.
With profits
essentially assured, they have no greater incentive than public utilities to
invest in productivity or improved services.
And, for the most part, they don’t.
Stock buy-backs rather than investment have become the norm for large
corporations. Like U.S. government
spending on research and development, corporate spending on it is falling.
As a result,
the United States is gradually yielding leadership in global innovation to
others in a widening range of arenas. We
are now number four in numbers of patents issued, behind south Korea, Japan,
and China. Last year, Bloomberg ranked
American workers 33rd internationally in technical competence. We are now 19th in the proportion
of research personnel to others and 11th in the percentage of GDP we devote to
R&D. We have fallen to 10th
place in innovation in manufacturing.
Community banks
were once a reliable source of capital for new enterprises throughout
America. They have been displaced by
banks that are both too big to fail and too big to bother with startups and
small businesses. Entrepreneurs seeking
capital must now look to financial engineers associated with venture capital
groups and private equity funds. These
“masters of the universe” lend sparingly while snatching equity for the
plutocrats and fund managers whose money they manage. The result is a business culture in which,
rather than seeking to grow the businesses they have created, entrepreneurs now
seek an early, profitable exit from them
Not surprisingly, small and medium-sized enterprises are no longer
creating desirable jobs in the United States at the rate they once did.
Meanwhile, the
concentration of capital and business activity in the hands of corporate
oligopolies ensures that all malls look alike, with a big-box store or two,
lots of nationally franchised shops and restaurants, and only a few locally
owned independent businesses. A parallel
process is at work online. Merchants who
sell on the internet are increasingly subsumed in the marketing systems of
comprehensive online vendors like Amazon.com.
This is an
economic structure that invites corporate behemoths to collect rents and set
rates at will, with little if any countervailing pressure from their employees,
shareholders, or customers.
Management-level corporate bureaucrats are free to maximize their own compensation
while minimizing pay and benefits to lower level hires. As a result, real incomes have flatlined for
ordinary Americans but the United States has the highest ratio of CEO to
employee compensation in the world – and in human history.
All this means
that, in today’s America, for the most part, those who have lots of money can
be confident they will get more. Those
who don’t have money won’t. This is a
devastating reproach to the promise of equality of opportunity that was for so long
the hallmark of America. A tax structure
that allocates funds for education in proportion to local property values
rather than need ensures that those whose parents are poor are not taught the
skills they must have to escape poverty.
Fractured government at the local level creates redundant and overlapping
jurisdictions that over-regulate economic activity. Ever more elaborate and comprehensive local
licensing procedures, building codes, zoning, work rules set by guilds like
teachers’ unions, and environmental safeguards protect vested interests by impeding
innovation and the adoption of more efficient ways of delivering basic goods
and services to the public.
How much
agility and resilience these structural changes in the American socioeconomic
system and instances of regulatory sclerosis have cost the U.S. economy is
something only time will tell. There can
be no doubt that the United States is now performing well below its
potential. Yet Americans continue smugly
to assume that we remain at the forefront of science, technology, and industry
and have little if anything to learn from foreigners. This complacency, the economic rise of other
great powers, and the entrenchment of dysfunctional government in Washington
are major reasons for the ebb in U.S. global competitiveness and prestige.
As an American
brought up to believe that my country was or should be “number one” in all
things, it is a shock to discover that the United States is now 17th
internationally in per capita GDP, 17th in productivity growth, and
17th in the speed with which a sick person can expect to gain
treatment for illness. Americans are 10th
on the human development index, which measures the overall quality of life in a
given society, and 40th in life expectancy, just below Cubans. It is no consolation to learn that we have become
number one in both our obesity rate and the number of our prisoners per
capita. (With roughly one-fourth the
population, the United States has a prison population one-third larger than
China’s.) Nor do the educational
attainments of the next American generation inspire confidence. Young Americans are dead last among OECD
member nations in numeracy and at their mediocre median in scientific knowledge
and literacy.
It would appear
that, notwithstanding our propensity for gazing admiringly at the many elements
of our imagined superiority to others, we Americans have an urgent need to get
our domestic act together. Part of this
surely involves learning from foreign best practices. A little humility would go a long way.
A country that
can no longer conduct a civil dialogue, agree about domestic priorities or
adjust revenue and spending to achieve them, ratify a treaty, or develop
coherent foreign policy objectives and strategies to attain them has no
business pretending it is entitled to lead internationally or can do so. Repairing the causes of our domestic
political and economic distress is necessary to reaffirm our purposes as a
nation: to “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common
defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to
ourselves and our posterity.” Returning
to the pursuit of these benefits for ourselves rather than attempting to confer
them on others – whether they want us to do so or not – would go a long way
toward fixing what’s wrong with us as well as reestablishing American
international prestige and influence.
There is
absolutely nothing wrong with America that American decisions to face up to our
problems and adopt better policies cannot fix.
Despite all our afflictions, the United States clearly has what it takes
to get our groove back. We are very large, richly endowed by nature, remarkably
diverse in ethnic origins and talent, and possessed of a healthy amount of
greed and entrepreneurial drive, even if we are not notably agile or wise at
present. We continue to enjoy the superb
defensive advantages of a uniquely favorable geopolitical position. As Bismarck observed, “the Americans are truly
a lucky people. They are bordered to the north and south by weak neighbors and
to the east and west by fish.” Sadly,
the fish are mostly gone. But the
neighbors are still meek. The United
States has a greater margin for error than any conceivable ally or rival.
Our endowment
and heritage ensure that America is and is likely for a long time to remain primus inter pares in international
politics. What hand we play in world
affairs depends on the extent to which we cure partisan dysfunction and restore
civil discourse in Washington. We must
address neglected domestic agendas like the need for investment in education
and physical infrastructure. We must
reform our banking system, tax code, and regulatory structure to promote
entrepreneurship, innovation, and social mobility rather than to protect vested
interests.. We must bring our nation’s
foreign policy objectives and commitments into balance with the resources we
are prepared to devote to them. And we
must focus on correcting the defects in our own society and its performance
rather than on imposing our ideas on other societies.
The United
States played a central part in crafting the modern world. To play a comparable role in shaping the
world of the future to our advantage, Americans must regain an accurate
perception of ourselves. We must learn
from the ways in which others now often outperform us. Knowing ourselves and those with whom we are
competing is the key to once again breaking out of the pack. There is an obvious role for our universities
in restoring such awareness.
To identify
what needs to be done is simple. To do
it is not. Yet our current problems were
mostly made in the U.S.A. They must be
fixed here. The question is not whether
that can be done. It can be. The question is whether we Americans will
muster the vision, courage, and determination to do it. That is entirely up to us.
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