America’s biggest growth industry: declinism

Susan Glasser
Oct 17, 2011 11:06 EDT

By Susan Glasser
The opinions expressed are her own.

The Amerislump is upon us.

Conservative agitator Pat Buchanan’s new book says America might not survive until 2025; it’s called “The Suicide of a Superpower.” Even less alarmist observers are suddenly sounding a lot like Buchanan, as economists now predict that China may surpass the United States as the world’s largest economy a lot sooner than we thought, and important conferences are convened to deal with what Fareed Zakaria memorably dubbed “the post-American world.”

Over at Foreign Policy, my colleague Joshua Keating (coiner of the “Amerislump” phrase) has taken to tracking all the gloom-and-doom punditry under the heading “Decline Watch” on our website—and not a day goes by without a classic example, from the poverty-stricken new muppet on Sesame Street who doesn’t have enough to eat, to the supposed cocaine slump on Wall Street and the new government initiative to attract Chinese shoppers here — so they can buy Made in China goods, but at the cheap prices caused by our undervalued dollar.

The zeitgeist about America is so bleak that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even begins her speeches these days being forced to remind audiences that the U.S. economy is still the world’s largest and its workers by far the most productive. Clinton, no declinist, invariably does her best to convince us that America is not retreating from the world at a time of national angst. Or at least that it should not.

“Beyond our borders,” she wrote in a recent piece for Foreign Policy that argued that the United States should make a strategic pivot away from the wars of the Middle East and toward the economic opportunities of Asia, many now question “America’s intentions — our willingness to remain engaged and to lead. In Asia, they ask whether we are really there to stay, whether we are likely to be distracted again by events elsewhere, whether we can make — and keep credible economic and strategic commitments, and whether we can back those commitments with action.”

Clinton’s answer is a resounding yes, but the questions themselves are revealing — even extraordinary — coming from a sitting Secretary of State, and the context is pretty clear: These are angst-ridden times to be an unabashed advocate of America’s role in the world, when everyone from Tea Partiers at home to financial markets abroad wonders about the staying power of this humbled superpower.

Sixteen years ago, when another sitting Secretary of State wrote for Foreign Policy, the world looked like a starkly different place to a top American official — a post-Cold War mix of opportunities and threats, bound together not so much by anything except the promise of American leadership. Indeed, said Warren Christopher, “the simple fact is that if we do not lead, no one else will.” It was an age, and one that now seems quaintly outdated, of America the indispensable nation.

Flash forward to today, when the United States struggles to assert its continued leadership in the world — or even its commitment to remaining there.  Which makes it all the more depressing to listen to the early debates of the 2012 presidential campaign, where the rest of the world by and large doesn’t figure at all — except for the increasingly shrill protestations of some Republican candidates about their belief in America’s special destiny to lead the planet.

Consider Mitt Romney’s recent speech on foreign policy, before an audience of cadets at The Citadel, there to serve as an enthusiastic, uniform-clad backdrop while he questioned President Barack Obama’s patriotism. “God,” Romney lectured, “did not create this country to be a nation of followers.” Obama’s supposed sin? Not being sufficiently believing in the high church of American greatness, because, in 2009, he said, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect the Brits believed in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

In the reductionist boilerplate of presidential politics, this has been translated into an alleged lack of faith in America. “I believe we are an exceptional country with a unique destiny and role in the world,” said Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who has enlisted a who’s who of Republican foreign policy heavyweights drawn heavily from the Bush administration to support his candidacy and casts himself as a classic GOP politician of the muscular internationalist type. “In Barack Obama’s profoundly mistaken view, there is nothing unique about the United States.”

Now, this might seem like a difficult charge to make stick against Barack Hussein Obama, the African-American son of a single mother who rose against all odds to become the nation’s first black president. But no matter: the more depressing point to me is simply that this is the debate Romney and others are determined to have, following in a long line of patriotic chest-thumping, rather than offering a real robust conversation over what to do for America at this time of troubles—or what sort of role America should play in the world.

But Romney’s problem is not just Obama and his multilateralist-loving, we’re-not-number-one-anymore-and-it’s-okay party, but many inside his own GOP. Americans in both parties, as surveys have consistently found, are simply fed up with bearing the costs of global security that come with being the world’s only superpower. Tell an audience that the United States currently spends more on defense than all the other countries in the world combined, and see what the reaction is. It’s no accident that the biggest applause lines at the GOP debates this year have been when candidates like Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman call for withdrawal from Afghanistan — as soon as possible.

But even if Americans can be convinced to keep bearing the costs — and that is very likely, given that this extraordinarily rich nation still spends just under 4 percent of GDP on defense and has had to make few sacrifices to maintain its military through a decade of post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — it’s still got a huge, and growing, image problem in a world where the decline narrative has set in. Recently, we asked a group of foreign writers and thinkers to play a game of Madlibs, and fill in the blank on this question: “The United States is…..”  Here’s a sampling of what they said: “Not the promised land anymore.” “A sick superpower—but still a superpower.” “Facing a long spell of painful adjustments.” “Its own worst enemy because it refuses to recognize its most severe flaws and then address them.”

The last comment may be the most relevant of all. There’s much that ails America today, from schools that stink to collapsing infrastructure and a bloated financial system nowhere near finished dealing with the results of the burst housing bubble. But the bigger problem may be this: a political system that rewards bloviating over American greatness but not those whose hard work or big ideas might ensure Americans actually still have something to crow about.

PHOTO: A man waves an American flag in the upside-down distress position in front of a U.S. Bank building as Occupy Los Angeles protesters march in the Protest Against Corporate Greed on their International Day of Action in Los Angeles, California October 15, 2011. REUTERS/David McNew

COMMENT

Let’s review the past 2 decades. One can see a whole of lot bubbles, debt, .com & .house, recklessness, other runaway cancerous growths such as health care cost, etc.

What is the basis of all these ‘growths”?

I will pin the whole thing down to one thing. After the fall of the USSR, America got religious. Really religious. Yes there are TV evangelicals galore, Christian fundamentalism, Creationism, God this and Jesus that. But one religion, as it turns out, trump them all and contributed towards the sure path of national suicide.

Americans began to worship themselves. And when you worship yourself, you believe you can get away with anything. ANYTHING.

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The wars America doesn’t talk about

Susan Glasser
Sep 12, 2011 10:40 EDT

By Susan Glasser
The opinions expressed are her own.

Last month was the deadliest for U.S. troops in Afghanistan in the ten years of the war there, with 67 killed, nearly half of them Navy SEALs in the downing of a Chinook helicopter — the deadliest single incident in this, the longest war in American history. More promisingly, it was also the first month since the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 that not a single U.S. soldier was killed there.

And yet these startling facts received almost no notice: the president never mentioned them, Congress was silent. When it comes to these drawn-out conflicts, both American political parties are increasingly determined to say nothing at all.

The silence is especially striking among the Republican political establishment, on whose watch these wars were launched. At last week’s debate of the 2012 presidential candidates at the Ronald Reagan presidential library, Afghanistan rated barely a mention. It came up only twice, once when libertarian Ron Paul complained that it costs “$20 billion a year” to provide air-conditioning for U.S. troops in the wars and demanded that the U.S. pull the plug, and a second time when the Utah politician-turned-diplomat Jon Huntsman urged a complete withdrawal: “This is not about nation-building in Afghanistan. This is about nation-building at home,” he said. “We’ve got to bring those troops home.”

The response? Loud applause from the audience, and a brief protest from former senator Rick Santorum. The frontrunners were resolutely silent, including ex-Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney—the same Mitt Romney who as a Republican presidential candidate in 2008 vowed not only to bolster the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan but to wage what amounted to an extensive nation-building campaign as well.

And Democrats, if anything, are even more resolutely determined both to get out of Afghanistan and Iraq as quickly as possible – and to avoid talking about it before they do. President Obama’s calculation here seems purely political; how else to explain the deadline of September 2012—just a couple months before the presidential election, rather than a couple months after, as his generals recommended–for U.S. troops to officially “end” the surge he began last year to much-disputed effect? In Iraq, a similar calculus seems to be taking effect; Obama, the New York Times reported a few days ago, is now prepared to allow just 3,000 or 4,000 troops to remain after the end of this year, down from the approximately 50,000 still there now—and far below the 10,000 said to be under consideration until recently.

At the same time that silence reigns over these two long-running conflicts, America’s foreign policy elite is falling in love all over again with a new model of war, one that supposedly beckons with modest investment, no boots on the ground, and a convenient narrative of freedom toppling dictatorship. Yes, I’m talking about Libya.

For even as dozens of American soldiers were being killed in Afghanistan, August was also the dramatic breakthrough in the nine-month-old, NATO-assisted Libyan revolution, when AK-47-wielding rebels charged into the capital of Tripoli and, aided by precision-guided Western missiles dropped from the sky, toppled the Gaddafi regime that had terrorized and overwhelmed them for the last three decades. Members of Congress, even those who had been criticizing the intervention weeks before, were eager to talk about this war, as was the Obama White House, which touted it as a model of the kind of regime change—without American boots on the ground—it would prefer to undertake.

“The fact that it is Libyans marching into Tripoli not only provides a basis for legitimacy for this but will also provide contrast to situations when the foreign government is the occupier,” Ben Rhodes, the White House deputy national security advisor, told me and a colleague recently. “While there will be huge challenges ahead, one of the positive aspects here is that the Libyans are the ones who are undertaking the regime change and the ones leading the transition.”

In other words: Here’s a war that works. And by the way, did we mention how different we are than George W. Bush, pushing regime change at the barrel of an American gun?

For many liberals, this is a long-awaited vindication of their own deeply held beliefs in the need, at least occasionally, for a form of internationalism that allows for the possibility of armed intervention and a just war. Bush and his neocon-driven foray into Iraq on a false pretext had seemed to discredit, once and for all, the exercise of such American power; Libya, maybe, sort of, brings it back.

But it’s hard not to see the perils in this way of thinking. “When did you drink the Kool-Aid?” a friend asked a longtime human rights activist, after listening to him make the case for the democratic bona fides of the Libyan rebels, never mind the rounding up of dark-skinned Africans taking place in Tripoli or the other acts of vengeance sure to follow.

I was in both Afghanistan and Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the American invasions that swept tyrannical regimes from power. I remember all too well the initial—but sadly fleeting—euphoria that greeted the disappearance of the police state. I walked through the jail cells and torture chambers of Basra with former prisoners who showed me how they had worked, and listened as a tearful doctor recounted the way Saddam’s men had forced them to cut off the ears of military conscripts who deserted. In Afghanistan, I met brave women who had immediately returned to working in school as teachers after years of whispering their lessons to young girls in underground classrooms banned by the Taliban. These are scenes achingly similar to those playing out today in Libya, ruled by the bizarre dictates of Muammar Gaddafi for nearly four decades. But freedom isn’t the only story there. Ending the war, really ending the war, and making a new peace never happened in either Afghanistan or Iraq – that is the unfinished business that keeps American soldiers there.

Which is why I keep thinking of Tim Heatherington, a journalist who died covering this short Libyan war. A couple years ago, Heatherington made a powerful documentary, “Restrepo.” It offers a harrowing portrait of a team of American soldiers fighting vainly to keep their outpost in Afghanistan’s remote Korengal Valley. At the end of the movie, after all the heart-thumping patrols and bloody mistakes, the dead comrades mourned and the piles of discarded ammunition littering their mountain aerie, a chilling sentence scrolls across the screen: The U.S. military withdrew from the Korengal a year later. In other words, it was all in vain.

PHOTO: Afghan workers watch as U.S. soldiers from Task Force Bronco take part in a memorial run to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, at a U.S. military camp FOB Shinwar in Nangarhar, Afghanistan September 11, 2011. REUTERS/Erik De Castro

 

 

 

 

COMMENT

Despite some similarities in the first days after regime defeat, between Libye and Iraq-Afganistan, the beginings of the battle were very different and they will surely reflect in the near and long future. Wait and see.

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The broken promises of Russia’s second revolution

Susan Glasser
Aug 8, 2011 08:20 EDT

By Susan B. Glasser
The opinions expressed are her own.

When Hosni Mubarak was wheeled in to his courtroom cage last week, gasping out his not-guilty plea from his sickbed-behind-bars as his son tried to shield him from the cameras, Egypt seemed to have produced the ultimate photo-op of revolutionary upheaval: the pharaoh brought low before the people’s tribunal. But I couldn’t help thinking about an unlikely character: Russia’s strongman leader Vladimir Putin. While the Middle East struggled to absorb the meaning of how quickly its mighty had fallen, Putin was busy contemplating a return to the Russian presidency, posing with scantily clad girls and trashing the United States for “living like a parasite off the global economy.” If it seemed like a line out a Soviet script, well, it was.

Where revolutions start is not always where they end up.

Twenty years ago this month, the Soviet Union was experiencing the 1991 equivalent of the Arab spring, all youth and democracy and optimism about a future free from central planning and the dead hand of the security-obsessed authoritarian state. And yet for more than half the time since the hardline coup of Aug. 19, 1991, spelled the effective end of the Soviet Union, Russia has been ruled by Putin, the former KGB colonel who famously called the breakup of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”

The remark is well worth remembering today, against the backdrop not only of a new era of revolutionary tumult in the Middle East but also in the context of a post-revolutionary Russia that has retained an outsized geopolitical importance in a world where its vast energy resources, strategic location, nuclear missiles and U.N. Security Council veto are too important to ignore.  This Russia may matter, but it is a nation whose course is still very much adrift a full two decades after the Soviet collapse Putin so lamented.  Across the broad swath of the former Soviet Union, the U.S. NGO Freedom House finds not a single country outside the European Union members in the Baltics that ranks anything better than “partially free” today. Elections are a sham, economies are either almost entirely resource-dependent, as in oil-rich Russia or natural-gas-blessed Azerbaijan, or disastrous basket cases like turmoil-plagued Ukraine or isolated Uzbekistan. And the revolution that got them there?

Not only unpopular, but deeply misunderstood. In the West, we have tended to view the breakup of the Soviet Union as a blow for freedom and democracy which, while followed by the regrettable excesses of the Boris Yeltsin era of free-for-all governance and gangster capitalism, will over time result in a better, more open society. That is not at all how Russians, even those most supportive of the revolution, view it.

Gennady Burbulis was one of those supporters. A top aide to Yeltsin at the time of the coup, Burbulis was a philosopher-turned-democratic reformer; he believed in a different course for Russia. And yet consider his acerbic account in a special issue of Foreign Policy, the magazine I edit, devoted to the Soviet collapse two decades later: “The coup” of August 1991, he wrote, “was the political Chernobyl of the Soviet totalitarian empire. Like the meltdown of a faulty nuclear reactor, the failed putsch blew the country apart, scattering the radioactive remnants of the Soviet system throughout the country. . . It spoiled the promise of a democratic Russia before it had even begun.”

Meanwhile, we should all be pondering the question of why the Russian revolution exploded when it did—a mystery still decades later, just as enigmatic as the present day debate over why a self-immolating Tunisian fruit-seller or some protesting students in Tahrir Square triggered a revolution when so many other indignities over decades of corruptive, repressive rule did not. In the case of Russia, as Leon Aron, a Soviet émigré and biographer of Boris Yeltsin wrote in the special edition of Foreign Policy, “everything you think you know about the collapse of the Soviet Union is wrong”: it was not Reaganite saber-rattling or oil prices crashing or crushing military expenditures from the losing Soviet war in Afghanistan that did in the communist regime.  Yes, those problems–and many more–plagued the Soviet Union in its later days, but then again, as the scholar Peter Rutland memorably put it, “Chronic ailments, after all, are not necessarily fatal.” Instead, Aron argues, it was a radical break in consciousness, “an intellectual and moral quest for self-respect and pride” that “within a few short years hollowed out the mighty Soviet state, deprived it of legitimacy, and turned it into a burned-out shell that crumbled in August 1991.”

Still, what makes this so relevant to today is what happened next. As Aron perceptively notes, such a tide “may be enough to bring down the ancien regime, but not to overcome in one fell swoop, a deep-seated authoritarian national political culture. The roots of the democratic institutions spawned by morally charged revolutions may prove too shallow to sustain a functioning democracy in a society with precious little tradition of grassroots self-organization and self-rule.” Which is why Putinism has proved so attractive–when the former spy came to power a decade into the revolution, he pledged to make Russia a great power again. Attention activists of the Arab Spring: Hauling the old dictator into court is a lot easier than avoiding creating the conditions for a new strongman to emerge.

And so we have in Egypt today not only Mubarak hauled into court, but a wary standoff between the student activists who brought the revolution to Tahrir and the military generals who were the bulwark both of Mubarak’s regime and of the current government, with a devastated economy, massive joblessness, rising sectarian tensions, and huge uncertainty about both whether genuinely free and fair elections can take place in the country–and if they do, whether the results will do much to improve the conditions that triggered the revolution in the first place.

And in Russia, two decades later? Talking with Aron the other day, he made a most un-Russian argument: optimism. Think of the French revolution of 1789, he said. It took Napoleon’s wars, the terror, the restoration, and several generations of street battles before the French returned to the original democratic ideals of the revolution in 1848. “It took France 50 years,” he told me. “And Russia is only twenty years in.”

PHOTO: Participants pass a poster of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin during his visit to the summer camp of the pro-Kremlin youth group “Nashi” at lake Seliger, some 400km (248miles) north of Moscow, August 1, 2011. REUTERS/Mikhail Metzel/Pool

COMMENT

as with so many other lazy journalists, you’ve quoted Putin out of context. there was a considerable proviso before he said what he said – and you ignored it to suit yourself.

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