Measured by Hobbes's test, the superpower looks less super.
Scroll down to read the first part of this...you'll see where it is. I refer to it as the original. But, as my answer to the end of the second paragraph, demonstrates, we are clearly seeing some results--so the superpower doesn't look less super, it's looks like it could kick your ass.
Its military has been stretched to the breaking point by the occupation of a single weak country, Iraq.
Now I know that this might sound a little pedantic, but what exactly is the breaking point? I mean, is there a definitive point at which this author can define for us when the US military has broken, and what exactly would that breaking look like? Last time I checked pretty much everybody but either the Air Force or the Marines didn't make their recruitment goals and that was the first time in many, many years. And they weren't off by very much. And to goad the issue by calling Iraq a single weak country is just unnecessary. That's the whole point really--that the enemy that we're facing is so radically different that we cannot make the mistake of calling them weak, even though inherently they are, we must never underestimate them, but instead, as all those Lieutenants returning from Iraq to the US and then returning to Iraq as Captains, we must learn from them. As I've said before, there are more of our platoon/company/brigade leaders who are returning to the field of combat than theirs are, and the longer time goes on the fewer of their mid-echelon leaders will remain, and the more of ours will have progressed up through the ranks, meaning that the lessons of this conflict will not be lost upon the US military. One thing America hates is losing, and one thing the US military hates is the idea of losing. So, right there, see ya.
Its economy is held hostage by Himalayas of external debt, much of it in the hands of a strategic rival, China, holder of nearly $200 billion in Treasury bills. Its domestic debt, caused in part by the war expenditures, also towers to the skies.
I've been meaning to do a huge long post on the nonsensical "Current Account Deficit" for along time and the nonsensical international currency system for a long time, so here goes. The first thing that we have to recognize that foreign investment is not a debt--foreigners invest their money in America because they want to earn more than they could anywhere else. We've got the best infrastructure, the most highly trained adaptable workforce in the world, and one of the world freest economies. So that aside, what precisely is external debt? External debt would have to be then the Treasury securities, bonds, T-bills, and other strange quirks of the post Bretton Woods currency regime. And the fact that China holds $200 billion in Treasury bills, bills that say that the US government guarantees the value of the dollar over the course of a given period and will reward that investment with interest of its own. The further fact that most of the "debt" that we have financed by allowing foreign governments and even individuals to purchase dollars as if they were at a futures market should bely the insanity of the current situation. The East Asian economies need the United States to consume from their massively export driven economies but the US can only do so if the dollar remains relatively strong and as long as the East Asian governments purchase dollars--conversely, many East Asian economies have pegged their value to the dollar, thus preventing the paradoxical free floating currency trading regimes that exist say between the dollar and the euro and any other currency in the world which is not pegged directly to the value of the dollar--but the dollar itself is not pegged to anything, which means that a great majority of the worlds currencies are nonsense. That's why the value of the euro has risen so dramatically despite no real economic reason for it's doing so. If the values are accurate, than it means that anywhere in Europe, the value of a given hour of work has suddenly become, by default, more efficient than an hour of work here, even though we know that productivity rates in America has been rising dramatically while advancing pathetically in Europe. The final and further trouble is the way that the Current Account Deficit is calculated. Everything coming is counted as an import. But not everything going out is counted as an export. This means that every American company that has production facilities abroad and that sends products to the US has those counted as imports. But this also means that the vast financial services sector is not counted as an export, even though we provide a huge amount of such services worldwide. So the entire program is poppycock because trade is never a win-lose situation--it can only be so if a person either received inaccurate information about the trade or were purposefull deceived--but otherwise, trade is a win-win situation. When you go to the store you don't want to pay more than you have to, and if you can find it cheaper somewhere else you will. The store doesn't want you to leave to go somewhere else, and so you both meet at the margin, voila, the price system. The price system does not suddenly disappear because the size of the trades increase--that's my greatest beef with economics, is the illusion of micro/macro differences--there are no micro/macro differences. Macroeconomic decisions are simply aggregates of many microeconomic ones, but that's for another post, another time. But what does all this mean, and why is not a sign of weakness? Many people point out that no country has ever been a debtor and a superpower--but the world depends on the dollar for growth to continue--the dollar is now for all intensive purposes gold--we've simply created a new, arbitrary currency that has replaced gold as the gold standard. For the world to change to another currency or to another system of currency trading would in the short term be disastrous and in the long term bleak. The East Asian economies will continue to finance the debt as long as we continue to buy their goods and they our services and media and everything else that we make that everyone seems to forget about. Oh, and finally, the historic levels of the federal budget deficit as a percentage of GDP are right about where they've been for the past sixty years or so, right around 4.5%, so, that's all poppycock too.
The United States has dramatically failed to make progress in its main declared foreign policy objective, the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction:
I had to break this sentence into its constituent phrases because something annoys me about it. One of our main "declared foreign policy objectives" are the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The nonproliferation. Not the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The phrasing is in insidious. By focusing on the negative aspect of the policy, the writer is able to convey a sense of the improbability of proliferation. After all, it's a NON. I always thought that one of our main foreign policy objectives was to STOP the proliferation of WMD, not nonproliferation. Do you not see how clever the Left is with language? Clever, clever, clever...
While searching fruitlessly for nuclear programs in Iraq, where they did not exist, it temporized with North Korea, where they apparently do exist, and now it seems at a loss for a policy that will stop Iran from taking the same path. The President has just announced that the "end of tyranny" is his goal, but in his first term the global democracy movement suffered its greatest setback since the cold war -- Russia's slide toward authoritarianism.
Ah, the belief in total information awareness. Our searches in Iraq were not "fruitless" nor is it surprising, nor should it be unbelievable that in all the available time to Saddam that he didn't some exporting of his own to cover up anything that he might still have had tucked away, and if he didn't, oh well. It's so easy to say that because we didn't attack North Korea that we don't tangle with nations that have nuclear weapons, when we didn't attack North Korea ever since the Korean war! The situation on the Korean peninsula is a completely different one, and while the nuclear component is important, it is not he all important one, i.e., that North Korea has ten of thousands of artillery pieces within firing distance of Seoul. That pretty much makes a pre-emptive attack highly, highly, highly unlikely. The South Koreans aren't interested, and probably would require some mild cajoling even if they were attacked by the North Koreans. As for the Iranians, there is no good answer but leasing the Israelis a few B-2's for the night and letting them take care of it. Russia's slide toward authoritarianism? I didn't realize that anyone ever got off the authority bus in Russia, and don't start saying that before Putin things were hunky-dorey. Besides, every conflict has setbacks and reversals--the important is perserverance, not this trite.
The shaky foundations of America's power were on display in the President's recent travels
What this sentences should have read was "the collapsing foundations of European power were on display in the US Presidents recent travels."
Shortly before Bush landed in Brussels, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany quietly but firmly repudiated the President's militarized, US-centered approach to world affairs. NATO, he heretically announced, should no longer be "the primary venue" of the Atlantic relationship. Did that mean that Europe would continue to take direction from Washington through some other venue? Hardly: He was, he said, formulating German policy "in Europe, for Europe and from Europe." The superpower's penchant for military action was also rejected. The chancellor said, "Challenges lie today beyond the North Atlantic Alliance's former zone of mutual assistance. And they do not primarily require military responses."
Translation: we know that we can't defend ourselves any longer and aren't a threat to anyone or anything because we just want to conduct our dirigiste business and wait until we're a nation of seniors all on permanent vacation. Oh, and, we don't want to participate really in NATO anymore because we know we can't even help you because we don't have the technology to help. Yes, those challenges that require the relatively easy modern ability of air travel, which every NATO member but the UK is dependent upon the US for. Yes, yes....
Schröder was standing on solid ground at home. A poll in the German newspaper Die Welt revealed that "Vladimir Putin is seen as more trustworthy than George W. Bush, France as a more important partner for German foreign and security policy than the United States. Closer harmonization of German foreign policy with America is not wanted, either."
Our relationship with FrancoGermaniaBeneluxSpain is like an adult to a poorly behaved, ill mannered young adolescent. What they need and what we never really gave them was a good collective spanking. At a certain point though, you have to let the adolescent make their own mistakes, or they will never learn from them. Look at how we tried to educate the FrancoGermanianBeneluxiansSpanish about how to conduct civil society and look what it got us. This hogwash. As faras I'm concerned the position of FrancoGermaniaBeneluxSpain becomes only more and more irrelevant as each day goes by.
Meanwhile, offstage, in an apparent extension of constitution-building at home, Europe was taking the lead in building cooperative global instruments, including the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and the International Criminal Court.
This blind and ignorant belief that all international treaties and "cooperative global instruments" are all good and are all beneficial and are the panacea to all our of problems is sickening. Yes, Europe has taken the lead in forcing their economies into permanent stagnation, their citizens at the whims of foreign judges, and their futures on a document that is so complex it's not a Constitution, it's an OSHA pamphlet. Yeah, doing real well.
No sooner had the President arrived in Europe than an economic trapdoor seemed briefly to open beneath his feet when the South Korean Central Bank stated that it intended to move some of its holdings from the dollar to other currencies, causing a 174-point drop in the Dow Jones average. The next day, the bank disavowed its report and the dollar recovered, but not before the fragility of America's economic position in the world had been revealed.
And why did the South Korean Central Bank change its "intentions"? Because they realized, "haha" if the Americans don't buy our worthless pieces of plastic then who well? Again, see the illogic of the current international currency regime above.
In an atmosphere of programmed smiles and brittle celebrations, the presidential dinners and toasts compensated for local public sentiment rather than reflecting it. The less popular Bush was in a given country, it seemed, the jollier the summit meeting. Even in little Slovakia, where the festivities seemed more spontaneous than elsewhere, an opinion poll showed that a majority believed that the United States, not Russia, was the most worrisome threat to democracy.
How much more cynical can you get? Programmed smiles? Brittle celebrations? And for the record, no respectable journalist or writer should ever use public opinion polls to validate an argument. Ever. They are simply the most inaccurate things around. And they should be ignored.
In his meeting with Putin, Bush seemed almost obsequious, repeatedly referring chummily to an unresponding, scowling Putin (it's an expression that settles naturally on his face) as "my friend Vladimir." As for democracy in Russia, the man who would "end tyranny" everywhere in the world could only muster, "I was able to share my concerns about Russia's commitment in fulfilling these universal principles."
Is it a common trait of all reactionaries (remember the Left is now the reactionary force in the world, and the Right is now the progressive force) to be unable to understand strategery? You do what you can and you do your best trying and if all else fails, try something else. In just one century, the majority of the world has gone from living in repressive, tyrannical, despotic regimes, to for the first time in human history, a majority of people now live in relatively free societies that allow their citizens to do pretty much what the wish. And you know, so what Bush doesn't have the foggiest idea how to have a press conference or what to call Putin--what's important is that Bush was able to say to Putin what he wanted and to let him know that there will be consequences in the future. What's wrong with that? The point: understanding strategy means knowing when to give a little, and when to push hard.
A portrait of a peculiar relationship with Europe emerged. To Bush's Don Quixote, tilting, at God's command, against imagined evils, Europe played Sancho Panza, humoring the Knight Errant but mocking him behind his back. Or perhaps it was more like that other great inverted relationship between master and servant, P.G. Wodehouse's upper-class twit Bertie Wooster and his sagacious, potent butler Jeeves, who contrives to get Wooster out of his ceaseless ridiculous scrapes in high society. The difference is that Europe's rescue is only feigned. Yes, France will help in Iraq -- with one officer, who will stay at NATO headquarters in Europe.
Awwww. How cute. An allusion. And the differences is that first of all, just like the 101st Airborne Division trapped in Bastogne in the winter of 1944, we don't need to be rescued, and, the Europeans are in no position to go rescuing anyone. That would be the equivalent of sending a nonswimmer to save a drowning bear. Who needs France?
In history, the rise of imperial pretenders has usually led to military alliances against them. Such was the case, for instance, when a previous imperial republic, Napoleon's France, conquered most of Europe but then was defeated by an oddly assorted alliance of Britain, Russia and Austria-Hungary
Well, that nature, it abhors a vacuum. But, what's an imperial pretender, and didn't alliances form against empires as well? A previous imperial republic? Is this guy implying that we're an imperial republic? What the hell is an imperial republic? Napoleon conquered most of Europe using conscripts he acquired in each of the nations he conquered as he went and then was destroyed by everyone who was left standing, not an odd alliance. The British and the Russians has been on cordial terms for a long time, and the last thing the AustroHungarians wanted was a powerful France, so nothing really odd there.
Such is not the case today. Europe seems determined to bypass rather than fight the American challenge. And power? The American kind is poor in "future goods." There is rivalry in the air, but it no longer takes a martial form. Instead, Europe seems bent for now on building itself up economically and knitting itself together politically -- readying, it appears, another kind of power, based more on cooperation, both within its own borders and with the world, and less on military force.
Such is not the case today indeed because Europe is incapable of fighting us, or even indirectly challenge us. The First Customs Union will come crashing down because of currency problems, but that's another story. Cooperation is all fine and good, so long as the person you're cooperating with isn't a mass murdering fanatic capable of just about anything and you're his bunkmate. And the Europeans can have all the cooperation they want because in twenty years they're going to poorer, older, and less able to do something than they are now.
I'm amazed that this article got published. I'm more amazed that this guy, what's his name, Johnathan Schnell, has a book out. I just looked at the amazon link and it looks to be a riveting ride through hippy heaven. Where has this guy been for the past ten years? We're not evolving toward a point of total war, but rather, toward a point of focused, directed, highly coordinated, accurate, and lethal warfare that focuses on destroying only targets that matter, not the indiscriminate total warfare of the World War I and II that were brought on by desparation, not choice. Unbelievable.
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