On the11th anniversary of 9/11, American embassies in Egypt and Libya were overtaken by violent mobs that murdered the US Ambassador to Libya and three other Americans.
The so-called Arab Spring may be turning into a cold, dark winter. And we are now forced to look beyond our own economic woes, take stock and consider afresh what role America should rightfully play in the world.
America’s indispensable role in the victories of World War I and II, and in vanquishing fascism and Soviet communism, lifted this nation to the status of the world’s lone superpower for a generation. But that was then and this is now.
Fact is, American power is ebbing not just in the middle east but around the world. Not only are Islamic fundamentalists, murderous enemies of all America stands for, seizing the levers of power in the middle east, but the economies of most of our allies in western Europe are in deep crisis, and China, still ruled by Communists, has become both an economic power and expansive military threat. And there appears to be little we can or will do about any of it.
Unlike the days of the cold war, when our enemy was powerful but measurable, the forces working against American interests are now dark and shadowy, or beyond our control. As we have discovered in a combined 20 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is an excruciating task to defeat an enemy whose hatred for America is manifest more in the hearts and minds of millions of ordinary people than in the rulers of nations. It is almost impossible to force our long time allies to make responsible economic decisions. And it is impossible to force China to do much of anything.
As we wrestle with what America’s role should be in this not so brave new world, the most important issue is not our military strength, but rather something not usually associated with America’s role in the world. Our national debt.
The debt, which just surpassed $16,000,000,000,000, is our greatest national security threat for a number of reasons. First, as a result of a failure by Congress and the president to reach an agreement on raising the debt ceiling last year, our defense budget is now threatened by a sequestration – or automatic reduction – of some 500 billion dollars after this year’s elections. Second, as the debt, projected to increase by trillions more as far as the eye can see, consumes more and more of the federal budget in interest payments, and we refuse to reform an expanding and economically ruinous system of entitlements that consume more than half of the budget, pressure for spending reductions is likely to fall even more on the military.
Evidence of this is in the numbers. Even though we spend just one dollar on defense for every five dollars we spend on entitlements, the automatic defense cuts are three times as large as those to entitlements.
The reality is that we’re broke. We’ve run out of money. We are a debtor nation. And to make things worse, we are presided over by an administration unwilling to even exploit our own plentiful energy resources to lower the rising costs of energy for every American and reduce our reliance on hostile and/or unstable sources of oil such as Venezuela, Iraq and other members of the OPEC cartel.
Debtor nations do not have either the economic or moral authority to lead, and pressure will mount for a foreign policy that will increase our isolation from the rest of the world.
As Condoleeza Rice pointed out in her eloquent speech at the Republican convention, our unwillingness or inability to lead will create a vacuum of power which will be filled either by forces unsympathetic if not downright hostile to America’s national interest, or by chaos.
How can a nation that is unable to keep its fiscal house in order exert leadership around the world? How can we help guide Greece or Spain or Italy to prosperity when we have so seriously compromised our own prosperity? And how can we expect the nations of the middle east or China to respect us when we have treated our own economic future with such disrespect by piling trillions of dollars of debt on our children and grandchildren?
Leading from behind is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. But absent the willingness of the American people to elect leaders who will make the hard decisions to right our economic ship, it’s about the best we can hope for.
