CFR Agrees - America Tanked because of the Military Budget (Thanks, NeoCons)
Kathleen
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Subject: CFR Agrees - America Tanked because of the Military Budget
(Thanks, NeoCons)
Date: Jan 4, 2011 4:03 AM
"Not only are Americans losing their appetite for foreign adventures,
but the U.S. military budget is clearly going to come under pressure
in this new age of austerity. The present paralysis in Washington
offers little hope that the United States will deal with its budgetary
problems swiftly or efficiently. The U.S. government's continuing
reliance on foreign lending makes the country vulnerable, as Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton's humbling 2009 request to the Chinese to
keep buying U.S. Treasury bills revealed. America is funding its
military supremacy through deficit spending, meaning the war in
Afghanistan is effectively being paid for with a Chinese credit card.
Little wonder that Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, has identified the burgeoning national debt as the single
largest threat to U.S. national security."
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01/02/think_again_american_decline?page=full
-------------------
Thanks, NeoCons, for the PNAC plan
to destroy America:
http://www.actionlyme.org/SECURING_THE_REALM_BY_FRAUD.htm
A job well-done. It only took
6 years!!!
And to boot, we got the Israeli-Paranoid-
Police-State on the "Homeland," further
crushing the budgets with the cops-on-
every-corner...
And now we will watch GOP further
demolish domestic programs because
they never get the word that we're
familiar with the propaganda of Big
Defense-in-Cahoots-with-Big-Oil-and
the-Realm-Securing (Zionism) Israelis!!!
Israel better start making happy-faces
at Russia, because they won't have us
any more.
http://www.actionlyme.org
------------------------------------------------------
"We've Heard All This About American Decline Before."
This time it's different. It's certainly true that America has been
through cycles of declinism in the past. Campaigning for the
presidency in 1960, John F. Kennedy complained, "American strength
relative to that of the Soviet Union has been slipping, and communism
has been advancing steadily in every area of the world." Ezra Vogel's
Japan as Number One was published in 1979, heralding a decade of
steadily rising paranoia about Japanese manufacturing techniques and
trade policies.
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In the end, of course, the Soviet and Japanese threats to American
supremacy proved chimerical. So Americans can be forgiven if they
greet talk of a new challenge from China as just another case of the
boy who cried wolf. But a frequently overlooked fact about that fable
is that the boy was eventually proved right. The wolf did arrive --
and China is the wolf.
The Chinese challenge to the United States is more serious for both
economic and demographic reasons. The Soviet Union collapsed because
its economic system was highly inefficient, a fatal flaw that was
disguised for a long time because the USSR never attempted to compete
on world markets. China, by contrast, has proved its economic prowess
on the global stage. Its economy has been growing at 9 to 10 percent a
year, on average, for roughly three decades. It is now the world's
leading exporter and its biggest manufacturer, and it is sitting on
more than $2.5 trillion of foreign reserves. Chinese goods compete all
over the world. This is no Soviet-style economic basket case.
Japan, of course, also experienced many years of rapid economic growth
and is still an export powerhouse. But it was never a plausible
candidate to be No. 1. The Japanese population is less than half that
of the United States, which means that the average Japanese person
would have to be more than twice as rich as the average American
before Japan's economy surpassed America's. That was never going to
happen. By contrast, China's population is more than four times that
of the United States. The famous projection by Goldman Sachs that
China's economy will be bigger than that of the United States by 2027
was made before the 2008 economic crash. At the current pace, China
could be No. 1 well before then.
China's economic prowess is already allowing Beijing to challenge
American influence all over the world. The Chinese are the preferred
partners of many African governments and the biggest trading partner
of other emerging powers, such as Brazil and South Africa. China is
also stepping in to buy the bonds of financially strapped members of
the eurozone, such as Greece and Portugal.
And China is only the largest part of a bigger story about the rise of
new economic and political players. America's traditional allies in
Europe -- Britain, France, Italy, even Germany -- are slipping down
the economic ranks. New powers are on the rise: India, Brazil, Turkey.
They each have their own foreign-policy preferences, which
collectively constrain America's ability to shape the world. Think of
how India and Brazil sided with China at the global climate-change
talks. Or the votes by Turkey and Brazil against America at the United
Nations on sanctions against Iran. That is just a taste of things to
come.
Reuters/Brennan Linsley/Pool
"China Will Implode Sooner or Later."
Don't count on it. It is certainly true that when Americans are
worrying about national decline, they tend to overlook the weaknesses
of their scariest-looking rival. The flaws in the Soviet and Japanese
systems became obvious only in retrospect. Those who are confident
that American hegemony will be extended long into the future point to
the potential liabilities of the Chinese system. In a recent interview
with the Times of London, former U.S. President George W. Bush
suggested that China's internal problems mean that its economy will be
unlikely to rival America's in the foreseeable future. "Do I still
think America will remain the sole superpower?" he asked. "I do."
But predictions of the imminent demise of the Chinese miracle have
been a regular feature of Western analysis ever since it got rolling
in the late 1970s. In 1989, the Communist Party seemed to be
staggering after the Tiananmen Square massacre. In the 1990s, economy
watchers regularly pointed to the parlous state of Chinese banks and
state-owned enterprises. Yet the Chinese economy has kept growing,
doubling in size roughly every seven years.
Of course, it would be absurd to pretend that China does not face
major challenges. In the short term, there is plenty of evidence that
a property bubble is building in big cities like Shanghai, and
inflation is on the rise. Over the long term, China has alarming
political and economic transitions to navigate. The Communist Party is
unlikely to be able to maintain its monopoly on political power
forever. And the country's traditional dependence on exports and an
undervalued currency are coming under increasing criticism from the
United States and other international actors demanding a "rebalancing"
of China's export-driven economy. The country also faces major
demographic and environmental challenges: The population is aging
rapidly as a result of the one-child policy, and China is threatened
by water shortages and pollution.
Yet even if you factor in considerable future economic and political
turbulence, it would be a big mistake to assume that the Chinese
challenge to U.S. power will simply disappear. Once countries get the
hang of economic growth, it takes a great deal to throw them off
course. The analogy to the rise of Germany from the mid-19th century
onward is instructive. Germany went through two catastrophic military
defeats, hyperinflation, the Great Depression, the collapse of
democracy, and the destruction of its major cities and infrastructure
by Allied bombs. And yet by the end of the 1950s, West Germany was
once again one of the world's leading economies, albeit shorn of its
imperial ambitions.
In a nuclear age, China is unlikely to get sucked into a world war, so
it will not face turbulence and disorder on remotely the scale Germany
did in the 20th century. And whatever economic and political
difficulties it does experience will not be enough to stop the
country's rise to great-power status. Sheer size and economic momentum
mean that the Chinese juggernaut will keep rolling forward, no matter
what obstacles lie in its path.
STR/AFP/Getty Images
"America Still Leads Across the Board."
For now. As things stand, America has the world's largest economy, the
world's leading universities, and many of its biggest companies. The
U.S. military is also incomparably more powerful than any rival. The
United States spends almost as much on its military as the rest of the
world put together. And let's also add in America's intangible assets.
The country's combination of entrepreneurial flair and technological
prowess has allowed it to lead the technological revolution. Talented
immigrants still flock to U.S. shores. And now that Barack Obama is in
the White House, the country's soft power has received a big boost.
For all his troubles, polls show Obama is still the most charismatic
leader in the world; Hu Jintao doesn't even come close. America also
boasts the global allure of its creative industries (Hollywood and all
that), its values, the increasing universality of the English
language, and the attractiveness of the American Dream.
All true -- but all more vulnerable than you might think. American
universities remain a formidable asset. But if the U.S. economy is not
generating jobs, then those bright Asian graduate students who fill up
the engineering and computer-science departments at Stanford
University and MIT will return home in larger numbers. Fortune's
latest ranking of the world's largest companies has only two American
firms in the top 10 -- Walmart at No. 1 and ExxonMobil at No. 3. There
are already three Chinese firms in the top 10: Sinopec, State Grid,
and China National Petroleum. America's appeal might also diminish if
the country is no longer so closely associated with opportunity,
prosperity, and success. And though many foreigners are deeply
attracted to the American Dream, there is also a deep well of anti-
American sentiment in the world that al Qaeda and others have
skillfully exploited, Obama or no Obama.
As for the U.S. military, the lesson of the Iraq and Afghan wars is
that America's martial prowess is less useful than former Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others imagined. U.S. troops, planes,
and missiles can overthrow a government on the other side of the world
in weeks, but pacifying and stabilizing a conquered country is another
matter. Years after apparent victory, America is still bogged down by
an apparently endless insurgency in Afghanistan.
Not only are Americans losing their appetite for foreign adventures,
but the U.S. military budget is clearly going to come under pressure
in this new age of austerity. The present paralysis in Washington
offers little hope that the United States will deal with its budgetary
problems swiftly or efficiently. The U.S. government's continuing
reliance on foreign lending makes the country vulnerable, as Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton's humbling 2009 request to the Chinese to
keep buying U.S. Treasury bills revealed. America is funding its
military supremacy through deficit spending, meaning the war in
Afghanistan is effectively being paid for with a Chinese credit card.
Little wonder that Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, has identified the burgeoning national debt as the single
largest threat to U.S. national security.
Meanwhile, China's spending on its military continues to grow rapidly.
The country will soon announce the construction of its first aircraft
carrier and is aiming to build five or six in total. Perhaps more
seriously, China's development of new missile and anti-satellite
technology threatens the command of the sea and skies on which the
United States bases its Pacific supremacy. In a nuclear age, the U.S.
and Chinese militaries are unlikely to clash. A common Chinese view is
that the United States will instead eventually find it can no longer
afford its military position in the Pacific. U.S. allies in the region
-- Japan, South Korea, and increasingly India -- may partner more with
Washington to try to counter rising Chinese power. But if the United
States has to scale back its presence in the Pacific for budgetary
reasons, its allies will start to accommodate themselves to a rising
China. Beijing's influence will expand, and the Asia-Pacific region --
the emerging center of the global economy -- will become China's
backyard.
China Photos/Getty Images
"Globalization Is Bending the World the Way of the West."
Not really. One reason why the United States was relaxed about China's
rise in the years after the end of the Cold War was the deeply
ingrained belief that globalization was spreading Western values. Some
even thought that globalization and Americanization were virtually
synonymous.
Pundit Fareed Zakaria was prescient when he wrote that the "rise of
the rest" (i.e., non-American powers) would be one of the major
features of a "post-American world." But even Zakaria argued that this
trend was essentially beneficial to the United States: "The power
shift … is good for America, if approached properly. The world is
going America's way. Countries are becoming more open, market-
friendly, and democratic."
Both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton took a similar view that
globalization and free trade would serve as a vehicle for the export
of American values. In 1999, two years before China's accession to the
World Trade Organization, Bush argued, "Economic freedom creates
habits of liberty. And habits of liberty create expectations of
democracy.… Trade freely with China, and time is on our side."
There were two important misunderstandings buried in this theorizing.
The first was that economic growth would inevitably -- and fairly
swiftly -- lead to democratization. The second was that new
democracies would inevitably be more friendly and helpful toward the
United States. Neither assumption is working out.
In 1989, after the Tiananmen Square massacre, few Western analysts
would have believed that 20 years later China would still be a one-
party state -- and that its economy would also still be growing at
phenomenal rates. The common (and comforting) Western assumption was
that China would have to choose between political liberalization and
economic failure. Surely a tightly controlled one-party state could
not succeed in the era of cell phones and the World Wide Web? As
Clinton put it during a visit to China in 1998, "In this global
information age, when economic success is built on ideas, personal
freedom is … essential to the greatness of any modern nation."
In fact, China managed to combine censorship and one-party rule with
continuing economic success over the following decade. The
confrontation between the Chinese government and Google in 2010 was
instructive. Google, that icon of the digital era, threatened to
withdraw from China in protest at censorship, but it eventually backed
down in return for token concessions. It is now entirely conceivable
that when China becomes the world's largest economy -- let us say in
2027 -- it will still be a one-party state run by the Communist Party.
And even if China does democratize, there is absolutely no guarantee
that this will make life easier for the United States, let alone
prolong America's global hegemony. The idea that democracies are
liable to agree on the big global issues is now being undermined on a
regular basis. India does not agree with the United States on climate
change or the Doha round of trade talks. Brazil does not agree with
the United States on how to handle Venezuela or Iran. A more
democratic Turkey is today also a more Islamist Turkey, which is now
refusing to take the American line on either Israel or Iran. In a
similar vein, a more democratic China might also be a more prickly
China, if the popularity of nationalist books and Internet sites in
the Middle Kingdom is any guide.
ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images
"Globalization Is Not a Zero-Sum Game."
Don't be too sure. Successive U.S. presidents, from the first Bush to
Obama, have explicitly welcomed China's rise. Just before his first
visit to China, Obama summarized the traditional approach when he
said, "Power does not need to be a zero-sum game, and nations need not
fear the success of another.… We welcome China's efforts to play a
greater role on the world stage."
But whatever they say in formal speeches, America's leaders are
clearly beginning to have their doubts, and rightly so. It is a
central tenet of modern economics that trade is mutually beneficial
for both partners, a win-win rather than a zero-sum. But that implies
the rules of the game aren't rigged. Speaking before the 2010 World
Economic Forum, Larry Summers, then Obama's chief economic advisor,
remarked pointedly that the normal rules about the mutual benefits of
trade do not necessarily apply when one trading partner is practicing
mercantilist or protectionist policies. The U.S. government clearly
thinks that China's undervaluation of its currency is a form of
protectionism that has led to global economic imbalances and job
losses in the United States. Leading economists, such as New York
Times columnist Paul Krugman and the Peterson Institute's C. Fred
Bergsten, have taken a similar line, arguing that tariffs or other
retaliatory measures would be a legitimate response. So much for the
win-win world.
And when it comes to the broader geopolitical picture, the world of
the future looks even more like a zero-sum game, despite the gauzy
rhetoric of globalization that comforted the last generation of
American politicians. For the United States has been acting as if the
mutual interests created by globalization have repealed one of the
oldest laws of international politics: the notion that rising players
eventually clash with established powers.
In fact, rivalry between a rising China and a weakened America is now
apparent across a whole range of issues, from territorial disputes in
Asia to human rights. It is mercifully unlikely that the United States
and China would ever actually go to war, but that is because both
sides have nuclear weapons, not because globalization has magically
dissolved their differences.
At the G-20 summit in November, the U.S. drive to deal with "global
economic imbalances" was essentially thwarted by China's obdurate
refusal to change its currency policy. The 2009 climate-change talks
in Copenhagen ended in disarray after another U.S.-China standoff.
Growing Chinese economic and military clout clearly poses a long-term
threat to American hegemony in the Pacific. The Chinese reluctantly
agreed to a new package of U.N. sanctions on Iran, but the cost of
securing Chinese agreement was a weak deal that is unlikely to derail
the Iranian nuclear program. Both sides have taken part in the talks
with North Korea, but a barely submerged rivalry prevents truly
effective Sino-American cooperation. China does not like Kim Jong Il's
regime, but it is also very wary of a reunified Korea on its borders,
particularly if the new Korea still played host to U.S. troops. China
is also competing fiercely for access to resources, in particular oil,
which is driving up global prices.
American leaders are right to reject zero-sum logic in public. To do
anything else would needlessly antagonize the Chinese. But that
shouldn't obscure this unavoidable fact: As economic and political
power moves from West to East, new international rivalries are
inevitably emerging.
The United States still has formidable strengths. Its economy will
eventually recover. Its military has a global presence and a
technological edge that no other country can yet match. But America
will never again experience the global dominance it enjoyed in the 17
years between the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 and the financial
crisis of 2008. Those days are over.
Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images
KMDickson
Dennis
why would you listen to them?
Kathleen wrote:
> Subject: CFR Agrees - America Tanked because of the Military Budget
> (Thanks, NeoCons)
Thanks, con. (In the French sense of that word.)