Easy Come, Easy Go

For years (since the fall of the Soviet Union, in fact) the U.S. has enjoyed its position as the superpower that won the Cold War; the one that survived; the only superpower left. We got complacent. We felt secure in the knowledge that we were the biggest kid left on the block and no one would dare challenge us.

Any time you feel that way, it might be a good idea to turn around and have a look at who might be gaining on you.

Georgia On My Mind

(I’m talking about the country that used to be in the Soviet Union, not the state that Ray Charles used to sing about.)

I’m sure that you all remember that last month Russia invaded Georgia, and despite promises of withdrawal and treaties that require withdrawal, they’re still there. I’m not going into the internal politics of Georgia or Russia (you can go here for background on the conflict), but I am going to talk about the U.S.

Did you notice what we did in reaction to Russia‘s aggression? You probably didn’t, because we didn’t do much. Couldn’t do much, in fact, what with so much of our military resources occupied with occupying Iraq. (For more information, try this article in the Washington Post.) So much of our military hardware, material and personnel are committed in Iraq that if Russia had invaded Atlanta we’d have had a hard time responding in a timely fashion. With so much of our resources tied up in the desert we can’t possibly respond to any military action by anyone else anywhere else in the world. And our foreign policy has been so dependent upon saber-rattling that we hardly know what to do when our sabers are stuck so deeply in the sand.

Russia was able to walk right in to Georgia without fear of what the U.S. might do, because the U.S. couldn’t do anything. If this remains the case (and if McCain has his way we’ll be hopelessly tied down in Iraq for years to come) then the U.S. could be exposed to the world as impotent, and we stand to lose every scrap of prestige and influence that George Bush has left us with. And that ain’t all that much.

Saber-rattling doesn’t work so well if all you can do is shake an empty scabbard.

Made in China

These days, damn near everything is made in China. This should come as no surprise; the Communist nation is now the strongest economy, the largest manufacturer, and the largest market in the region, and one of the largest of each of these in the world. If this sounds like the U.S. of a couple of decades ago, it should; that’s the position that we enjoyed for so long.

China defies all the old rules that said what Communism was and wasn’t. They have successfully combined a rigid, inflexible political system with a free market industrial economy, something that pundits of thirty years ago would have said could never happen. Couple this with China’s vast pool of labor (which grows every day as their diminishing agrarian economy forces more of China’s poor to join the workforce) and you see China emerging as an economic power to be reckoned with.

(China’s economy is a complex and difficult thing; here is an overview of the subject.)

I don’t have to tell anyone that our economy is anything but strong; at least, it’s not nearly as strong as it once was. While we’re still the biggest consumer nation in the world, we hardly make a thing here. Most of our consumer goods are made in China or other places in the Pacific Rim where labor and materials are much cheaper.

But China's influence over us goes beyond that, into the world of internatiional money markets, currency trading, and high finance in general. With our economy so bad and theirs so good, is it any wonder that China is buying up a lot of America? It shouldn't be; after all, the same thing happened when Japan became, for a few years, the world's major economic powerhouse (a role they couldn't sustain). One of the things they're buying is our debt. (Did you know that we live in a world where debt can be traded as an asset?) How are we supposed to excercise any influence over China when we owe them so much money? What can we do, threaten not to pay? We're not strong enough, economically, to stand on our own; where do we turn the next time we need a hand-out if we destroy our credit by defaulting on our massive debt to China?

In Conclusion

The world is changing. We are neither the economic nor the military powerhouse we once were. Other nations have stepped in to fill those roles. Perhaps they can’t do so in the long term; perhaps they can. How China and Russia react to their changing roles is a matter that, ultimately, we can only observe. Our presence on the world stage is diminishing, and as long as we hold to the old "toughest kid on the block" paradigm then it will continue to diminish, and our ability to influence world events can only diminish with it.

Maybe it’s time (well past time, perhaps) we found some other way to relate to the rest of the world. I realize that it’s somewhat natural for the biggest kid on the block to become the neighborhood bully, but we’ve all gotten older now and some of the other kids have gotten a lot bigger. Maybe we should try to be something besides the neighborhood bully before the choice is taken away from us.

The Blues Viking

The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.