Great Powers never see their decline coming. It took Britain thirty years after its devastating losses in the First World War before it began seriously to dismantle its empire. The collapse of the United States as a Great Power will happen so much more swiftly, because its wounds are self-inflicted. Yet there is no certainty that awareness of its plight will occur any faster than it did in Britain.
Current political discussion in the United States finds absolutely no one among the pundits or politicians facing up to the awful reality confronting America. It is as if the U.S. still holds unrivaled hegemonic power across the globe, as if its military power is as puissant as it is feared, as if its economic strength towered over all other nations, and as if its moral standards can be regained and polished to their former luster.
These are illusions on every single count. America’s soldiers and marines have been stalemated by Saddam’s insurgents and their home-made IEDs, and America’s air power has shown itself to be a counter-productive force of destruction, matched in intensity and affect by car bombs and suicide bombers. Decades of wasteful domestic consumption and the dismantling of its manufacturing base have been accompanied by staggering amounts of internal and external debt. America as a beacon of personal liberty and defender of freedom is like a maiden who has lost her virginity but insists on lecturing all others about her moral superiority.
What is especially revealing is the fantasy that prevails in the U.S. that a country can commit its most catastrophic foreign policy decision, yet avoid catastrophic consequences. Even critics of the war who foresaw its vile results still insist that the U.S. must do everything it can to avoid the break-up of Iraq into a failed state that will become an even more hospitable training ground for terrorism than Afghanistan under the Taliban. Supporters of the war insist that “if we pull out of Iraq now, we will just be back there in ten years battling an even worse enemy.”
How is this battle to be joined? If the country was not ever willing to discuss enforcing conscription in the face of “World War IV” and its “greatest enemy since Hitler and Stalin”, where is it going to get the strength now or ten years from now to raise the 500,000 troops it will need at a minimum? And even if it did, how are these average Americans, steeped as they are in complete ignorance of the world outside their borders, and utterly unfamiliar with any other language or culture, going to be successful in fighting an insurgency in the Middle East? If the U.S. military is right that it takes at least ten years to overcome an insurgency, where is the plan here and now to educate tens of thousands of Americans in Arabic to prepare for living a decade or longer in a foreign culture?
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