http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0511/hanson.php3
May 26, 2011 22 Iyar, 5771
Back to the Pre-American World
By Victor Davis Hanson
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Is America's preeminent world role over?
That's what a recent New Yorker essay, based on interviews with presidential
advisers, claimed. It characterized the new Obama foreign-relations style as
"leading from behind" -- given the supposed inevitable American decline and
growing unpopularity. The president is said to agree with pundits such as
Fareed Zakaria and Tom Friedman, who have often outlined the parameters of
what the post-American world would look like.
But if American abrogates its preeminent leadership position of the last 65
years, wouldn't the world look a lot like it did in the pre-American days of
the 1930s? Then, a Depression-era United States was just one of many powers
and reluctant to assert leadership abroad.
Eighty years ago, a newly Westernized and anti-democratic Japanese
powerhouse, in the fashion of today's rising China, was carving out
uncontested Asian spheres of influence. An oil-, rubber- and iron-hungry
imperial Japan claimed it needed more natural resources to fuel its
industrial revolution, and so spread an authoritarian Asian co-prosperity
sphere of influence as an alternative to alliance with an economically
depressed and psychologically withdrawn America.
Most Americans then were tired anyway of overseas commitments. Our ancestors
felt that their considerable sacrifices in World War I either had gone
unappreciated or had solved little -- not unlike the way we are becoming
exhausted by Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya.
A newly confident, united and ascendant Germany was growing angry at other
European countries. It nursed a long list of financial grievances over
feeling used and abused. Sound familiar? A weak Britain and France had
almost no confidence in their own declining militaries -- sort of like the
sad spectacle of their impotence in Libya that we have witnessed over the
last two months.
Much-vaunted international institutions, like the bankrupt League of
Nations, were about as effective in the role of world watchdogs as the
corrupt United Nations is today. Europe and America were emerging from the
nightmare of financial insolvency.
The so-called international community cared as much in the 1930s about
rising, aggressive totalitarian states in Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia
as it does today about ascendant China or Iran. Millions of Jews, then as
now, heard crazy threats of their annihilation, and desperately -- and in
vain -- looked to the protection of the United States.
In other words, the post-American world could look a lot like the rather
terrifying pre-American version of seven decades past. Why in the world
would we wish to return to it?
The declinists insist we have no choice. Globalization has spread power.
America has depleted its resources, both natural and financial. And our
prior leadership abroad is something worthy of apology rather than pride
anyway. Think of receding postcolonial Britain around 1946 as our model, not
the confident, rising postwar United States of Harry Truman and Dwight D.
Eisenhower.
But decline is always a choice, not an inevitable fate. America's known
fossil-fuel reserves -- natural gas, oil, coal, shale, tar-sands -- are
larger than ever. The problem is not finding more energy but marshaling the
will to use the vast new sources of energy we have recently discovered.
Our military is not just larger than the alternatives, but vastly larger and
ever more lethal. Given the enormous size and productivity of the U.S.
economy, we have the means -- but not yet the will -- to rapidly pay down
our huge debt. In a world short on food, America is the world's greatest
agricultural producer.
Other industrialized populations age and decline; ours is still growing.
America is widely criticized abroad even as it remains by far the favored
destination of global immigrants. Diverse religious practice is still
vibrant in the United States. Elsewhere, it is fossilized in Europe,
nonexistent in China, and intolerant in the Middle East.
While riots, strikes or revolutions sweep southern Europe and the Middle
East, the United States remains stable and quiet -- despite far greater
racial, ethnic and religious diversity. Globalization is still mostly a
phenomenon of American innovation and originality to be licensed and
outsourced abroad.
There have been plenty of thugs who threatened their neighbors over the last
30 years. Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Manuel Noriega and the Taliban
were all deposed from rule only by American power. The "lost" war in Iraq
resulted in a democratic and, for now, still viable government in place of
genocide. Afghanistan is depressing, but the medieval Taliban still have
remained out of power for nearly a decade.
In short, the old pre-American world was as unstable and dangerous as would
be a new post-American update. But both retrenchments were choices that an
unsure and depressed United States made -- not symptoms, then or now, of
inherent weakness or inevitable decline.
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