The End of the American Century

I might be going at things a little backwards. Most people concerned about our involvement in Iraq are probably looking for something positive to agree with. There isn’t much out there, ranging from the president’s most recent iteration of “stay the [ever-changing] course” to the Democratic rebuttal: “pull out now,” or “at least pretty soon.” Both options seem to offer great risks and only minimal chance of success.

When neither extreme offers an answer, reasonable folks look for someplace in the middle to find a compromise. This is happening in Congress as moderates from both parties try to build consensus around a plan for accelerated withdrawal that falls somewhere between Bush’s acknowledgement that his plan has large numbers of Americans in Iraq for decades and the anti-war Dems’ plans, which would have the troops home for Christmas, or at least Valentine’s Day.

For me, all sides seem to offer some compelling arguments, but only when they’re attacking the other sides. In other words, it seems clear to me that no matter what we do, it’s going to turn out badly. In other words, we’re pretty much fucked here.

To the Iraqis, “Oops.”

Imagine this as a platform for one of the dozen or so presidential candidates: “I promise [insert sound bite that substitutes for a complex military and political strategy], and I believe the results will be disastrous for the United States and for Iraq. Still, that’s what I plan to do.” But if you add up all the stark assessments of recent days, it’s hard to believe much of anything else. Petraeus, for all his confidence in the surge strategy, won’t project anything further than about a year out. Such projections, he concedes, have been unreliable in the past. Additionally, he’s afraid he just can’t say if the war in Iraq is making America safer.

This is a far cry from reaching Berlin by Christmas. Now that was a war that lent itself to calendar references.

What’s clear to me, and to most Americans, is what an unqualified disaster Iraq is right now. What seems unclear, or possibly just unacceptable to most everybody else, is that there’s nothing we can do about it. In fact, all sides make compelling arguments about how bad it will be if we do what the other side wants

Does this make me a pessimist? Probably, but maybe not entirely.

For a few years now, I’ve been thinking of these later years of my life as “The End of the American Century.” It’s coincidental that our American century happened to occupy roughly the 20th century and the end of a millennium, but it feels fitting somehow that the new millennium is going to look very different from the last one, America-wise. This suggests that the American empire was remarkably short lived. The Mayans, after all, had three thousand years, and they didn’t even have the wheel. We had everything from Silly Putty to manned space flight and we could barely squeeze out a century.

None of what I’m suggesting is particularly farfetched or even cynical. It’s obvious in Iraq, as it was in Vietnam, that American military power is unsuited for and ineffective against determined little insurgencies. But that can and should be seen as a good thing. We might even come to feel some gratitude to Bush 43 for so clearly illustrating in so short a time that American military domination is no longer an effective tool of foreign policy. In the end, if we want to have much influence on the world stage, it’s going to have to be as one nation among equals. The best hope for Iraq might be an international effort to rebuild, not destroy. We might try to get something started on that.

Or not. In any case, Iraq’s future is beyond the influence of American military determinism, as is the future of, say, Iran and Syria. The fundamental neocon principle of projecting American power abroad has been shown to be more than just a failure. It might, dare we hope, be America’s last such failure. In its place might arise a new American foreign policy of cooperation for mutual benefit, not premised on military threats. The possibilities are quite exciting, really. We’d just have to be patient with the rest of the world if they were suspicious for awhile.

American economic dominance also pretty much ended with the stroke of Y2K. The smart money for the new millennium is on China and India, but the millennium is still just a baby. Again, cooperation instead of domination might lead to possibilities that are difficult to visualize but not that farfetched. Imagine a significant part of our military budget going into education, and it’s possible to see an American economy that can still compete with the rest of the world. And imagine an economic theory based on cooperation rather than competition.

Personally, I think capitalism and competition are way over-rated.

If we weren’t spending all of our time and effort on world domination, we might be able to do a better job at home on some basics such as true universal health care, which by itself could save more lives than a dozen wars on terror. We might turn our creativity and determination toward developing energy sources which are cheap, clean, and entirely renewable. This would eliminate the risk losing Middle East oil.

Wouldn’t if be fun to thumb our noses at the sheiks and sultans? We could do the wave from coast to coast and find a way to hook that up to the grid.

The end of the American century does not necessarily mean total social collapse, as happened to the Mayans. Just as most countries have adjusted reasonably well to a post-colonial era, America could adapt well to a post-imperial era. We could be like France. Okay, Denmark then, but warmer.

But collapse is possible, as Jared Diamond documents in his book of that title. It could be triggered by an oil crisis, climate crisis, credit crisis, or an as-yet unidentified crisis. Like the Mayans, it could happen very quickly. In the end, perhaps our future depends on our ability to rethink ourselves into a new paradigm.

The American Century is over. Long live the new world order, whatever it turns out to be. Despite my tendency towards cynicism, I’ve been thinking of the last few years as a beginning.