You may have noticed that I've been scarce online recently. The political silly season is upon us and even partisans such as I are fed up...for a while. Kerry is too easy a target to be satisfying. So today's effort is a few of my thoughts about what happens next. I think we all know that whoever is elected in November much of our policy will not change as it is being driven by outside events. However it is worth considering what comes after, when ideology begins to drive the agenda again, will it be pragmatism, isolationism or idealism?
As we approach the 60th anniversary of D-Day, Americans are beginning a serious internal debate over our role in the world, what we want or expect from it in the near term and the future. Since 9/11 the “debate” over a pre-emptive foreign policy has become increasing polarized and vicious as the hate America crowd gleefully predicts our decline and ultimate withdrawal as the world’s police.
I think they’re partially right, America is ideologically split, half wish to create to a utopian world government, and the other half is fed up with spilling blood and wasting treasure on ingrates and lost causes. The upshot is that we will incrementally retreat from the world political stage. We will invent and adapt our way out of fossil fuel dependency, we agree on the necessity to do so as quickly as possible. Our technological lead and the world-wide brain drain will continue fuel our economic expansion, intellectual and global financial influence. America is still dynamic; we are replacing our population, by a steady native birth rate and immigration, at a sustainable rate.
Europe is not; birth rates have fallen below a sustainable rate and by mid-century Europe will not be able to sustain production and social programs. Europe’s current comity will devolve into the old hatreds and grudges. Russia will ascend to a dominant position, having lost the cold war, Russia’s hard liners will settle for governing the EU and the Mediterranean rim. NATO will be disbanded by common consent and an American unwillingness to fund it, replaced with an EU defense force. There will never be another Normandy or Kosovo. I think that is the one policy area Americans now agree upon.
Once we withdraw economically and strategically from the Middle-East, Israel will resolve its dilemma, if it has not done so by that time. However, that doesn’t mean that Islamic theocracies will rise to fill a power vacuum in the Middle East. Once the West no longer requires oil, the Arabic world will have little income and will fall further into poverty, anarchy and further behind the technology curve. Ironically, our decline of influence in the region magnifies theirs a hundredfold.
One only needs to look to whom the French are sucking up to in order to see where the next power rises: in the East. Anyone who thinks Islam will survive the inevitable “clash of civilizations” with China is delusional.
The latter part of the 21st century and perhaps most of the next will be dominated by the sheer weight of China's population, economic engine and the blind ambition of its government.
Hate America? Can’t wait for you to meet China.
So let's think about where we go next, how we steer this country towards a proactive isolation that allows the US to live in relative peace and proseperity. The first step is to re-elect George Bush, for we cannot cede the war on terror, if we do then the rest is academic.
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Islam has declared war against the West, and I fear that even if we get past our dependence on oil and withdraw, we're in for several more decades of this war. And they will continue to be funded by oil because the developing world is increasing its demand far more rapidly than it is converting to other sources of energy.
Posted by: GE at May 26, 2004 11:39 AMOh I agree with your assessment, in the short term, but I was thinking out 50 years ...if we are not off fossil fuels by 2050 then the problems we face today will seem miniscule by comparison.
Posted by: feste at May 26, 2004 02:58 PM
Other than fire, folks in
the Stone Age were off fossil
fuels.
;)
Posted by: jaspar at May 26, 2004 07:31 PM