In this episode, The Wall Street Journal tries to come to grips with failure
June 16th, 2003 at 1:59 pmTry and imagine a world in which the United States isn’t the globe’s pre-eminent superpower.
Try and imagine a world in which not everything America wants, America gets. Or a world in America spends itself into oblivion and then struggles economically to try and get itself out. Or one in which a foreign policy expressed solely in terms of militarism prompts other nations to re-examine whether doing business with this country is in their own best interests, or whether or not an American military adventure a year can be afforded in an era of sluggish economies and reduced tax bases.
Try, if you can, to imagine a scenario in which America’s current global trajectory ends up not in some shining worldwide version of Pax Americana in which the United States confronts “adversaries around the globe” while enjoying peace and prosperity here at home, but instead turns out to be some dark underpinning for a period of malaise and economic uncertainty.
For its part, The Wall Street Journal has. And, as usual, although it has a difficult time imagining anything really unpleasant or dangerous happening, in the spirit of fair and balanced reporting it does come up with a couple of niggling little problems that might end up causing some bumps in the road to American world domination.
Just to make sure we don’t think it’s a cakewalk or anything.
In an piece designed to discourage its core readership from wasting any of their time worrying about the direction the country may be heading, Journal staff reporter Bob Davis asks if America can afford its recent explosion of military activity, and comes up feeling pretty sure it can. Entitled “Pax Americana: Affordable, But Fraught With Challenge” (registration required), Davis recounts four possibilities wherein macroeconomic trends as a result of increased military spending could end up turning south on the country, including such absurdly-reduced concepts as “wars can go badly”, “foreigners turn bearish”, “a pullback could have disastrous effects”, and “trade flows slump”. All, it might be noted, in the space of only 730 words.
As it turns out, Davis, no doubt speaking for the entire WSJ crowd, can’t even bring himself to ask a straightforward question about the relationship between expansive American military activity abroad and its effect on the national economy, although that is, at least nominally, what the article is about. “Can the U.S. afford its expanding commitments to confront adversaries around the globe?” he asks, making sure to frame the question as a matter of self-defense. “Posed narrowly, the answer is certainly yes,” he assures us, pointing out that the Pentagon is requesting $380 billion in funding next year, which is “more than Russia, China and Europe combined spend on defense, (but) is still is only 3.4% of the U.S. economy.” Treating the cost of war as something akin to a family of four trying to figure out whether or not they could afford to splurge once a year on a Disney World vacation, Davis finds Niall Ferguson, an economic historian at New York University, who is quoted, somewhat jauntily, as encouraging such a devil-may-care attitude by saying “If wars cost $20 billion to $70 billion a throw, the U.S. could probably fight one a year with no macroeconomic impact if they are won in 21 days.”
But what, you might ask yourself, if the war isn’t over in “21 days”? Thankfully, Davis has already anticipated your never-ending liberal pessimism. For example, one of the possible “challenges” he finds to such a cheery outlook is the possibility that ‘wars can go badly’. But, not to worry, for in the entire history of human warfare, he could only find two examples of conflicts turning into examples of economic folly:
Besides, as the Journal so kindly points out, one of those conflicts was managed by a Democrat, Lyndon Johnson.
But what about the possibility that the rest of the world’s inhabitants, put off by the prospect of an America that settles its problems at the point of a gun, looks elsewhere to sell its German chocolate, Taiwanese electronics, Malaysian rubber, or Brazilian timber? Or, worse yet, stops sending us its Saudi Arabian petrodollars, Belgian currency speculators, or Japanese US Treasury bond investors? “The biggest danger isn’t that opposition abroad to a new U.S. military offensive would spark an organized campaign to dump U.S. assets. Such a possibility is remote,” the nation’s premier financial newspaper tells us. “The triggering event could be much more mundane: an assessment by investors abroad that the U.S. favors a sharp devaluation of the dollar to help pay off its escalating trade and budget deficits.” In other words, perhaps other countries, unwilling to get the short end of the stick more than once, just might be reluctant to help the United States pay off it’s rising costs from military expansionism with their own pocketbooks.
Which, as it turns out, is actually more likely to happen than we’d like to admit.
Can you see the problem here? Undoubtedly, its untrustworthy foreigners:
Apparently, insulting the French and Germans for being “weak on fighting terrorism” may not have been the best strategy after all.
But it is in the realm of “free trade”, that most capitalistic and American of pursuits, that the Journal sees some of the most damning possibilities for the future.
As far as I can tell, that means that there is the possibility that, as a result of being a world-class bully, we might end up having to buy and sell goods from the second-rate, discount stores of the world, and could find our credit at the fancier shops of Europe and Japan has, in the end, dried up. And, if examined in the right light and with the ability to read through the Journal’s coded attempts at alerting its readers to the world’s dangers without scaring them into shutting down their bank accounts, the possibility of winning the military battle while losing the economic war is laid out for all to see. After all, no potential outcome from America’s current attempts to “defend itself from its adversaries” around the globe could be more terrifying to the Journal’s hard-core mix of free-marketeers and strong-military types it counts on for its bread-and-butter readers as the cost of guns intruding on the right to make a profit of the price of butter. And so, in the spirit of objective journalism, the paper must feel it has to tell them the truth, even if it can’t exactly bring itself to say all of the words out loud.
But for the rest of us, who aren’t caught up in the rock-ribbed ideology that says it’s okay to bomb someone into submission and then try to turn them and their global neighbors into a market for our consumer goods, the writing was always on the wall. And plain to see.
For we knew all along that such a policy, in the end, profited no one.
Well said. Especially this comment: And, if examined in the right light and with the ability to read through the Journal’s coded attempts at alerting its readers to the world’s dangers without scaring them into shutting down their bank accounts, the possibility of winning the military battle while losing the economic war is laid out for all to see. You stated what I thought.
And you’re right. The bully never actually gets to play in the playground because he is too busy acting tough and watching over his territory.
We all know that a strong arm is a long arm. But I’m also reminded of the one commercial years ago for Off! bugspray, where the well-honed male forearm reaches into the plexiglas box full of mosquitos, and you can almost hear their dinner bell clanging away in the little mosquito heads as they swarm and launch a full-proboscis attack on the guy. That said, it seems that the desire to make a buck precludes our caution as to who to make the buck from, and where. Like the junkie who doesn’t care that his coke is cut with all manner of dangerous powders. He needs to maintain the idea, the ritual, of getting high on the stuff, even if it’s not the same quality stuff that hooked him and made him all-knowing and all-saying in the first place. I submit that America’s entered this phase of addiction, where dangers are ignored, as long as the ritual is preserved. Indeed, the psychological ritual has entirely supplanted the physical need for the drug. Do we need to maintain economic superiority? Yes. At the cost of making sure we’re number one? Yes. Can we have the cake and sell it, too? No. Something has to give. An old math maxim comes to mind: To lengthen any one side of a triangle involves shorten at least one side to maintain the closed vertices that yield a complete polygon. Well, right now, two sides of the American trinity are too long, leaving a big gaping hole at one vertex. And the rot is seeping in.
First, terrorism is a far worse threat to the future of the human race than muscularly exported democracy. Nuclear hand grenades and nanobots will mercilessly slaughter and destroy anyone who stands in the way of a terrorist, be they islamic or christian, hindu or buddhist.
Secondly, the technical dominance of the US is supported by the only large-scale free-market engine left in the world. This ensures that relative to every other kind of government, our technical dominance will only get larger over time. Capitalism wins (as far as I am concerned, this is axiomatic, and supported by well over 100 years of proof). As long as european and asian governments wallow in the false nepenthe of socialism, they will continue to fall behind technologically, and become more dependent on the US over time, not less so.
To be somewhat fair to the idea of a neglible affect that large military spending has on the economy is the comparison that some have made that the US spends a small percentage of its GDP on military spending – just that the GDP is really, really big.
My understanding also is that the US is the biggest investor in R&D of any other industrialized nation, and the university system here, in terms of quality, is the envy of the world.
That having been said, the US is wholly reliant on the rest of the world as a marketplace and for capital investment. We can solve the problem of excess capital consumption (fiscal responsibility), but we will never be able to get around needing the rest of the world as a marketplace.
I consider terrorism to be, within the context of US history, a footnote (as opposed to westward expansion, Civil War, WWI, WWII, the Cold War, etc. – there is no comparison). To risk losing the international marketplace, jeopordize investment inflows and do nothing about rectifying the budgetary situation is the height of folly.
(Nanobots and nuclear hand grenades?)
Terrorism is a non-ism, an idea mined from old psychopathic political tracts by bad governments so they can have the non-purpose of waring on it. “Terrorism” is based on the principle that if you stand up and say “boo,” a population will be frightened into doing the bidding of the boo-sayer. If it really worked, “terrorists” would be on to something! The crimes of 9/11 were not terrorism. The atrocities against one anotehr by both the Isralis and the Palestineans have only been followed by worse, not better, behavior on the part of those whom the acts were allegedly intended to terrify. O.K., they promote anxiety and sell Prozak. But the killings are really the misguided attempts at retribution by the self-appointed wagers of justice. Justice wagers always pretend to think that by committing murder they are creating a deterrent to crime. This is just an excuse to murder. But countries with capital punishment tend to have more murders than contries that don’t. There is a cause and effect relationship at work. Captial punishment is just another name for a particular kind of murder. If it really worked…
Hey! That’s P-R-O-Z-A-C, bucko!
Why am I uncomfortable about seeming to have had the almost last word on this mix of crucial themes?
I read, “…, terrorism is a far worse threat to the future of the human race than muscularly exported democracy….”
I am not sure that is true. Terrorism per se, as policy, is so obviously absurd to anyone but a psychopath it will never gain popular acceptance with any constituency. If vengeance and misguided “freedom-fighting” are dubbed “terrorism” by corporate media pandering with their spin to governmental propaganda, they do not suddenly become real terrorism just to spare the spinning interest groups the guilt of being liars. Obscenity and terrorism exist in the minds of the beholders. Megalomaniacs on both sides of the power struggles know this and use every means at their disposal to fan the bush-fires of fear. (Drug companies that sell mind numbing agents, however spelt, have ample interest in funding political campaigns of all combatants!)
The social consciousness that produced the American Constitution was centuries in the making. The progression from Magna Carta to government by consent of the governed was a slow and torturous path. If democracy means government by the consent of the governed, the “muscular export” of it is an Orwellian travesty.