“America cannot escape the gravitational forces that history exercises over every power.”
By Gary Scarrabelotti
Far be it from me to declare that America is in decline – or even, if it’s momentarily yielding under the strain of imperial overstretch, that it won’t roar back soon enough to reclaim its full place in the sun.
America is the one imperium on which the sun will truly never set, right?
Because America is exceptional, OK?
We can tick off its list of assets, as strategic experts do.
Case for America
There’s American demography.
According to the CIA Fact Book, the current US birthrate sits at 2.06 births per woman (2.1 is generally considered the replacement rate) while the USA’s nearest competitors in the power stakes, Russia and China, are reportedly on 1.61 and 1.55 respectively.
Think of American higher education.
The USA, with its élite universities and research institutions, is the world leader in scientific discovery, technological innovation, and the conversion of these into weaponry and civilian products and services.
And look at American workers.
American can draw upon a deep pool of highly motivated, highly skilled workers; and, thanks to the GFC, they are looking competitive once more. Manufacturing is returning to the USA to reconnect with a workforce in large measure liberated from the constraints of unionization.
Consider the Greenback.
The US dollar is the world currency. Though it waxes and wanes in value and sometimes presents the symptoms of the gravest monetary disorders, yet for all that the American dollar has no rival.
Fear the incomparable US military.
The USA possesses the most powerful, technologically advanced military forces in the world. American spending on the military exceeds that of Russia and China together by more than two-and-a-half times (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute). In fact, US military spending exceeds that of the next 10 top military spenders in the world. Given that gross disproportion, a projected 20 per cent cut in US defence spending over the next decade hardly foreshadows of retreat from global military dominance.
And, finally, there’s all that fracking.
The tapping of new sources of gas and oil is stoking an energy revolution in the USA. In a major fillip to manufacturing, natural gas prices are falling. The strategic implications are great: America will worry less about whether the House of Saud survives or who might disrupt the flow of oil through the Persian Gulf.
These are the kinds of plusses that boosters of America point to when challenging the thesis that America has passed its zenith. There is simply too much pent up energy in the USA, they argue, to declare that America is on the wane.
The force of this argument is great. The end, indeed, may not be nigh. And yet all empires wither and pass away. America cannot escape the gravitational forces that history exercises over every power; every rise ends in a fall. America is not exceptional. That’s my first point.
Institutional paralysis
My second is this: American risks being crippled from within by the failure of its governmental institutions, by debt, by the culture of entitlement, and by the impoverishment and distrust of its middle class.
We have just witnessed the spectacle of a partial shutdown of the US government because the executive and the legislature could not agree on measures to bring under control the Federal government’s expenditure and indebtedness.
The compromise reached on October 17 to end the shutdown and lift the debt ceiling averted an immediate crisis but solved nothing. The debt ceiling will have to be revisited by February 7, 2014 and current spending levels have been approved until only January 15. The government of the United States of America is paralyzed. That’s the reality.
A national government with (roughly) $US3 trillion in revenue, a deficit on its current account of $US1 trillion and accumulated debt of $US17 trillion, with no plans to plans to claw its way back to solvency, is in a profound crisis.
A society half of whose citizens are too poor to pay federal income tax and in which nearly half of all its members receive some kind of federally-provided benefit, accounting for 70 percent of federal spending (cf. 2012 Heritage Index of Dependence on Government), and in which there is no agreement between the arms of government on how to stop the increase in dependence, let alone to decrease it, is in the dire trouble.
Given that US defence spending represents just 20 percent of the federal budget, a projected 20 per cent reduction in defence layouts in the coming decade, without significant cuts in federal welfare spending, will represent no change in present state of US indebtedness.
Social decay
Moving on to the nature of US society itself, one of the recurring contemporary themes, developed with increasing intensity, is the destruction of the American middle class and the transformation of America into a two class society.
According to a new book recently reviewed in “The Wall Street Journal”, Tyler Cowan’s, Average is over, America’s future
“… will bring more wealthy people than ever before, but also more poor people, including people who do not always have access to basic public services. Rather than balancing our budget with higher taxes or lower benefits, we will allow the real wages of many workers to fall and thus we will allow the creation of a new underclass. We won’t really see how we could stop that.… One day soon we will look back and see that we produced two nations, a fantastically successful nation, working in the technologically dynamic sectors, and everyone else.”
It’s just possible that such a population will be held in submission by the modern equivalents of bread and circuses. Imagine, however, an alternative scenario: millions of alienated men and women, many of them charged with the peculiar ornery spirit of old white America; imagine the countless embittered people culturally shaped to live their dreams … and nightmares; and imagine them armed as ordinarily they already are. Either way the internal strength and cohesion of the USA is compromised. Either way the societal sinews of empire atrophy.
America is a revolutionary power in world affairs and revolutionary powers invite the formation of counter-revolutionary coalitions.
Revolutionary power
My third and final point is this: America is a revolutionary power in world affairs and revolutionary powers invite the formation of counter-revolutionary coalitions.
Michael Ledeen is a brilliant and controversial American historian, foreign policy expert, and neo-conservative propagandist. He has served as an adviser to the US Defense and State Departments and to the National Security Council. He was for 20 years a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and presently holds a similar post at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
Writing in his 2003 book The War against the Terror Masters Ledeen described America’s role in the world thus:
“Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. Seeing America undo traditional societies, they fear us, for they do not wish to be undone. They cannot feel secure so long as we are there, for our very existence — our existence, not our politics — threatens their legitimacy. They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission.”
This zeal for America and its revolutionary destiny is worthy of a Danton or a Trotsky. The purple prose of a single missionary does not a foreign policy make. That’s obvious. But Ledeen identifies the primary energy that has fired the American enterprise since 1776. Notwithstanding its own countervailing conservative traditions, America has proved unwilling to contain its idea of freedom within one country.
The cost of America’s misplaced missionary forays since September 11, 2001, combined with its search for immunity from terrorist attacks, has proved a disaster in strategic terms for Project America.
The US has lost Iraq, it has lost Egypt and its alliance with Saudi Arabia has unraveled prematurely. Russia, already allied with Iran and Syria, is cutting arms deals with Iraq. The Saudis and Russians are reaching out to each other; they can’t agree over Syria, but they have agreed to co-operate in stabilizing the new Egypt: a regime spurned by America’s democratic puritans.
Back in Europe, the leaders of France and Germany have been humiliated by the surveillance activities of the US National Security Agency. Germany, increasingly discontented with the reluctance of Brussels to run the EU in the German interest, contemplates repatriating some of the power it has conceded to EU institutions and looks for a new relationship with Russia on whom anti-nuclear Germany increasingly depends for energy supplies.
It is only a shadow, not a coalition; but things are happening fast. Where they will end, who can tell?
Australia has done very well out of the US alliance. May it continue that way. Let’s not deceive ourselves, however, into thinking that the United States lacks vulnerabilities on the grand scale. Nor should we consider that enemies made in the name of America’s unending cultural reinvention are our own.
If the fire of the American Revolution were at last to burn out, like the French and Russian revolutions before it, an unprepared and naively pro-American Australia would find itself shockingly naked.