The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of this site. This site does not give financial, investment or medical advice.
How great a burden can even an unrivaled superpower carry before it buckles and breaks? We may be about to find out.
Rome was the superpower of its time, ruling for centuries almost the entirety of what was then called the civilized world.
Great Britain was a superpower of its day, but she bled, bankrupted and broke herself in the Thirty Years War of the West from 1914-1945.
By Winston Churchill’s death in 1965, the empire had vanished, and Britain was being invaded by a stream of migrants from its former colonies.
America was the real superpower of the 20th century and became sole claimant to that title with the collapse of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991, an event Vladimir Putin called “the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century.”
Has America’s turn come? Is America breaking under the burdens it has lately assumed and is attempting to carry?
Today, at the presidential library of Richard Nixon, who ushered Mao’s China onto the world stage, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is laying out a strategy of containment and confrontation of a China that is far more the equal of the USA than was the USSR.
Writes Hudson’s Institute’s Arthur Herman:
“In the 1960s, manufacturing made up 25% of U.S. gross domestic product. It’s barely 11% today. More than five million American manufacturing jobs have been lost since 2000.”
China controls the production of 97% of the antibiotics upon which the lives of millions of Americans depend. She provides critical components in the production chains of U.S. weapons systems.
Beijing commands more warships than the U.S. Navy and holds a trillion dollars in U.S. debt. Moscow never had this kind of hold on us.
Writes Herman: “Since 2000, America’s defense industry has shed more than 20,000 U.S.-based manufacturing companies. As the work those companies once did domestically has shifted overseas, much of it has gone to China. From rare-earth metals and permanent magnets to high-end electronic components and printed circuit boards, the Pentagon has slowly become dependent on Chinese industrial output. Asia produces 90% of the world’s circuit boards — more than half of them in China. The U.S. share of global circuit-board production has fallen to 5%.”
Decoupling from China and re-industrializing America would be an immense undertaking. But unless and until we do it, we remain vulnerable.
Another decades-long struggle, this time with China, like the Cold War that consumed so much of our attention and wealth from the 1940s to 1991, is not the only challenge America faces.
Through NATO, the U.S. is still the principal protector of almost 30 European nations. And despite Donald Trump’s promise to end our forever wars, 8,500 U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan, 5,000 in Iraq, hundreds in Syria, thousands more in Kuwait and Bahrain.
There are other huge new claims on America’s time, attention and resources. Some 145,000 Americans have perished in five months of the coronavirus pandemic, more U.S. dead than all the Americans soldiers lost in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
A thousand Americans are dying every day, a higher daily death toll than in World War II and the Civil War combined.
The U.S. economy has been thrust into something approaching a second Depression. The 2020 deficit runs into the trillions of dollars. Our national debt is now far larger than our GDP and soaring. Tens of millions are unemployed. And the shutdowns are beginning anew.
From the protests, riots, rampages and statue-smashing of the last two months, it is apparent that millions of Americans detest our history and heroes. Though nowhere in recorded time have 42 million people of African descent achieved the measures of freedom and prosperity they have in the USA, we are daily admonished that ours is a rotten and sick society whose every institution is shot through with “systemic racism.”
The racial divisions are almost as ugly as during the riots of the 1960s in Harlem, Watts, Newark and 100 cities that exploded after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King.
In the numbers of citizens now shot and killed every week, great American cities such as Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit and Chicago are looking more like Baghdad.
The Democratic Party is promising to take up the issue of racial reparations for our original sin of slavery. The first order of business, we are told, is ending inequality — of income, wealth, educational attainment and health care. The racial disparity in police arrests, prosecutions, incarcerations and school expulsions, must end.
But if the trillions we have spent to address these inequalities since the Great Society days have failed to make greater progress, why should we believe that we even know how to succeed, absent the imposition of a rigid socialist egalitarianism of results?
The Old Republic is facing a stress test unlike any it has known since the Union was threatened with dissolution in the Civil War.
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of this site. This site does not give financial, investment or medical advice.
STUPIDITY
“nowhere in recorded time have 42 million people of African descent achieved the measures of freedom and prosperity they have in the USA”
Virtually all Afro-Americans live in poverty among the lower-half of society, those who do all the manual labor known as the 50% working-poor. Surely, to be black in America is to suffer the misery of economical slavery in a police state that needs over a million employed in law enforcement to prevent rebellion.
The (private) prison has just replaced the plantation.
Poverty is much better for slavery than chains,
as no burden is there to care for the elderly.
You can always tell when an article like this is designed by the super-intelligent rich to keep our laboring-class feeling hopeless and helpless.
As it communicates only the misery of a problem, being most careful to not enlighten as to the root cause of the problem, least we organize a solution and give the rich a real problem.
I WONDER WHY ?
Not a word in this article about the fact that the author enjoys living among the more educated and mostly white upper-half of society, the privileged and exceptional half that hoards all the land, wealth and healthcare.
I wonder why?
I have an idea. Why not just award Masters degrees en masse to the underprivileged from the university of their choice, no matriculation required.
If everyone had the intelligence to achieve a Masters degree,
who would do all the manual labor now performed by my slow
of thought laboring-class?
If everyone earned the same income, such that compassion,
charity and gratitude were emotions impossible to experience,
than why not replace humans with robots?
“… my slow of thought …”
In other words, stupid…
Stupid is the height of gullible pride,
stupidity being the reverse of enlightened humility.
Gee, you’re really stupid… 🙂 🙂 🙂
Unless of course, you are the stupid one,
for in that case I hold the moral high ground.
The greatest challenge for the US is avoiding war with China. “Decoupling” and “re-industrializing America” are, as Pat Buchanan says, not easy. Furthermore, both countries need to create jobs and wealth for their peoples – but also export markets. The aims of national prosperity have them on course for war. This is not a new cold war: it’s worse. Today’s China “is far more the equal of the USA than was the USSR”. It is unwilling to abandon the strides it has made in the last forty years. Russia is weaker than its Soviet predecessor, yet has a massive nuclear arsenal.… Read more »
Unfortunately the US has a big mouth and not much more since its depleted its military options by engaging in expensive and useless wars. Its arsenal mostly consists of aging hardware that is being pushed to its limits both on sea and in the air. It lacks sufficient troops levels to undertake any large operations for any length of time. Maybe if they attacked Granada again they could get away with it, but not China. Those nice images on TV of the fleet steaming towards the disputed islands are just that nice images. If the US cannot go to war… Read more »
Gee, John Ellis, I wonder why so many blacks in America live in poverty? Why do so many have such policed neighborhoods? Why are so many in prisons? Could it be “systemic raceism” or could it be something to do with being 13% of the population and 56% of all violent crime?
Your hilarious talk of “rich white people” too. I wonder why they are so rich and crimeless? I wonder why they have better countries and better tech? Could it be, that they are just better?
Ah, now we’re back to the verboten nature vs. nurture issue. Best to forget that and just award Masters diplomas en masse.
If you do that, then your class will have to start doing
their fair share of the back breaking manual drudgery.
I can’t understand why all those black illegal immigrants are flooding into America. Don’t they realise what appalling oppression, racism, white privilege and genocidal racism they face there, where “blacks are literally hunted on the streets”?
They’re surely 100 x better off in Haiti or anywhere else. They need to be told to stay there for their own welfare, surely.
Funny thing, in all the news videos of brown illegal
aliens, we don’t see a black face among them.
Problem is, wealth is the excess property we hoard above what is needed for a comfortable, wealth is the rightful property of starving children and your class having possession of all the wealth, this gives you all the guilt.
‘Biden’s “peaceful protesters” in Portland just set fire to the federal courthouse. Militants have been targeting the structure all week.’
Biden immediately sent his son Hunter to the courthouse, expecting that the protest organizers would offer him a no-show seat on their board of directors.
White power symbols, black power symbols……no matter. Anything’s good for a burn down.
Cindy McCain chimed in with regrets that her father missed the highjinks and wasn’t able to take the podium to egg the burn down on and suggest molotov cocktails might do the job better, or maybe even a few rooftop snipers.
SLAVE DRIVERS — CAN THE RICH LIVE WITHOUT THEM?
It now takes 1 million of the middle-class working in law enforcement to keep the lower-half of society enslaved as the 50% working-poor.
And so, come November when the working-poor grow from 50% to 75% of society, will the rich, the 25% most wealthy, will they be able to do their own slave driving?
Fuck Da Police!
Kill De Whites!!
Kill Whitey!!
Dat Be Reparations, Bro!!
“Through NATO, the U.S. is still the principal
protectoroccupier of almost 30 European nations.”