The new millennium is bringing an epochal shift that is fundamentally altering the challenges facing the nation. Although there is broad awareness of many elements of this shift, the overall transformation is almost totally unrecognized.
From time immemorial, the central security challenge has been physical protection against attack by enemies. The United States achieved its independence by military means, and soon thereafter was fighting foreign invaders on its own soil. Subsequently, it fought in two world wars and then a conflict in Korea. The Soviet challenge, including direct nuclear threats to the continental United States, gave impetus to a strong military posture, which has continued in the face of the residual Russian challenge, a rising Chinese challenge, and emerging challenges from Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela.
U.S. military strength has been grounded in U.S. economic dominance, which also provided broad economic benefits. For over a century, economic conditions insured the industrialized world, led by the United States, received agricultural commodities and raw materials at bargain prices. The rise of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) put a serious crimp in the control of that one specific, though critical, commodity, but did little to change the overall favorable trade balance. By the end of the XX Century, the United States, with 5% of the world's population, consumed some 25% of its production. The U.S. standard of living set the standard for prosperity globally.
The strategic challenges of the XX Century had been military and the United States met them directly. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, the United States was able to rapidly lead a broad coalition in a short, intense, and overwhelmingly successful campaign. Entering the new millennium, it stood at the pinnacle of power, dominating the globe in a way few nations ever have.
But the new millennium has not been kind to U.S. primacy, bringing a host of challenges:
The U.S. military response proved to be both very costly and of questionable effectiveness in Iraq, where a trillion dollars, several thousand U.S. lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives have produced a fragile state strongly influenced by Iran. A parallel effort in Afghanistan is bogged down. And it is unclear just how military assets could be usefully employed against Iran, Venezuela or Pakistani radicals.
The United States faces only a minimal direct physical threat. Russia's remaining nuclear arsenal could undoubtedly decimate the United States, but it is hard to construct any scenario where that would happen. China's arsenal is much less capable of delivering a devastating blow; at any rate, China seems determined to be a regional rather than a global power. Iran and North Korea pose marginal direct threats. Terrorists pose a direct threat, but its only strategic dimension is with biological or nuclear attacks. In this regard, the stability of Pakistan is particularly troublesome due to the potential for radical Islamic elements to take control. While a strong U.S. nuclear posture deters nuclear challenges, it also gives nuclear weapons high salience. This promotes nuclear proliferation, intensifying the threat, rather than decreasing it. U.S. military assets are also the major element in global maritime security. But military force is also proving difficult to use in this sphere -- Somali pirates now hold some 30 seized vessels despite an international naval protection effort.
Overall, faced with growing global instabilities and uncertain conditions, there is a strong U.S. tendency to strengthen its military capabilities to be better prepared to meet unforeseen contingencies. Therein lies the problem -- the major contingencies of the XXI Century are not susceptible to military solutions, even for security challenges. Iraq and Afghanistan show its limitations, while turmoil in the Middle East, radicalism and instability in Pakistan, intransigence by Iran and North Korea, and Somali pirates all pose challenges that military force cannot adequately address. But the biggest problem is that the changing global situation poses new challenges for which military force is irrelevant. Globalization with a newly networked world means that that the United States can no longer dominate the global economy and enjoy a grossly disproportionate share of global resources. This has several major implications:
Global warming exacerbates this situation. Although catastrophic effects are unlikely, disruptive impacts are almost certain, including a modest rise in sea level, more severe storms, and major shifts in agriculture and rainfall. Food and water shortages will certainly worsen population pressures. Coastal destruction is already apparent in some areas and can only be expected to worsen. Global warming or not, few nations are prepared to address inevitable localized catastrophes, exemplified by Hurricane Katrina and the recent Sendai earthquake and tsunami, much less global calamities such as an unexpected pandemic or a solar flare destroying existing satellite networks.
Domestically, these looming problems are already causing rising internal friction. The ongoing budget crisis makes it clear that there are not enough assets to address crucial domestic needs, without even considering environmental disruption, occasional natural disasters, or a worsening international economic climate. The highest incarceration rate in the world starkly attests to disaffection within the United States, as do continuous reports of murder, misery and mayhem. Such disaffection can only be complicated by the worsening inequality of wealth distribution coupled with chronic unemployment and millions of illegal aliens. The 1965 Watts riots strikingly demonstrated the power of pent up frustration; two aspects are notable: the rioters burned their own neighborhoods and the events did not spread. But one can easily imagine, for instance, unruly mobs firebombing upscale neighborhoods and the example spreading to other localities. Alternatively, the 2002 sniper attacks in Washington showed how just two determined individuals could terrorize a city for an extended period. It is such internal disruption that could devastate the nation, and it is much more likely than a Russian nuclear strike.
The central fact of globalization is that a prosperous United States can only exist in a prosperous world. It is no longer external force that threatens to devastate the United States, but economic degradation. For the first time in history, military forces are not central to addressing the major challenges facing the nation. In fact, assets dedicated to nonproductive military use undermine the economic conditions necessary to avoid turmoil, both globally and inevitably domestically. Military missions need to be rigorously reassessed in terms of overall national security requirements, limited to directly addressing substantial current risks. As Afghanistan vividly illustrates, failure to promote development in a stable situation can rapidly lead to much larger nonproductive requirements. By shifting assets to developmental uses, the United States can set the example globally for reducing the arms trade and the extensive diversion of assets into nonproductive military uses. Indeed, such a shift in focus is essential if the world is to avoid a global meltdown in the coming decades.
Overall, the new millennium poses an entirely new challenge: shrinking national assets facing increasingly nonmilitary security threats that are much more amorphous, harder to even define, much less address -- global warming is a good example. So it is too easy to keep focusing on the kinds of threats we are more familiar with -- military challenges -- even if this means that larger issues go unaddressed.
Where will China. Russia and India replace 25% of their sales? It would lead to revolts in all of those nations. Most global investors are going to limit their investment in those nations as the global economy recovers. Keep in mind America is still number one in manufacturing but it is high automation products.
False. Independence is a way of thinking.
Read from the "Father of The US Constitution", then resign from the War College sir:
http://powertoxins.blogspot.com/2009/11/greatest-source-of-power-toxins.html
http://blogdredd.blogspot.com/2011/04/phase-five-of-currency-wars-2.html
Clearly you people lived in a bubble of like-minded group-thinkers.
The USA doesn't run the world and it never did. US Corporations, specifically, Big Oil, have herded our foreign policy into the mess that it is. Every aspect of our foreign policy is based on now flawed "Grand Area" idealism about the role of the US military in the world.
This con-job was carried out by Big Oil people in the US government. Jimmy Carter warned us all in 1980, why didn't you even bother to mention JC or the Grand Area policies?
Look, you must be paid to delude people.
The USA will soon not be able to pull-off the Grand Area farce that requires that we spend $1.2 TRILLION dollars a year (funded + discretionary) for much longer.
Please start writing the TRUTH.
http://blogdredd.blogspot.com/2011/04/momcom-mean-welfare-queen-2.html
Economics, world or single country means producing and selling products. On the world stage it means manufacturing, giving an extra value to the resources you use and selling it to other nations to gain their wealth. In America on point that has allowed this a hundred time more them jobs going over seas and the cut in wages is Free Trade. No matter what you may wish to call the practice North American, Pan American free trade means a destruction a lowering of the Americans workers ability to afford to live in America.
When the world see the single largest nation begin to destroy itself for greed they also see the military chance to nibble at the edges of that countries power. Remaking the American dream is the best way to destroy the strength of the radical religious movements. Will we ever destroy them? No. Will they be a danger to America? In the limited way of 9/11 yes! Can they defeat the USA? Only with the help of US business greed and two parties that have lost touch with what America is!
We need to lay down he mantle of empire. Stop the current wars, and bring the troops home then discharge them. Stop interventions into the affairs of other countries, and defend only our shores and the free passage of our shipping.
We also need to scrap the war powers act that allows the executive to get us into wars, and the military needs to abandon the idea of "limited war".
We were the worlds superpower due to our economy, not our military. Our military was a poor use of our economic outputs, while our allies were building economies we decided we wanted to be an empire.
We watch the Russian empire fail and we expanded our empire into the Middle East, Africa and middle Asia.
We defeated Russia using our economy then we wanted to be the new Russia, with troops fighting in wars all over the world, and going to areas that we have no business in.
We can still succeed, get rid of the active duty army, bring all our troops from all the bases and massively cut government spending, our economy will once again take off.
We were the ones with "troops fighitng in wars all over the world," not Russia. And it's been that way since WW II.
We both did, not a single war occurred between 1960 and 1985 that the US and Russia were not working against each other on.
Russia failed as they could not support it anymore, so we picked up the slack, and increased our military commitments around the world.
The Vietnam War has had reprecussions many are not aware of. Ont the military side, we missed an entire arms research development cycle. But the true damage was the reduced government investment in basic research. It is something we are feeling today.
If future posts disagree with our Constitution and our Constitutional rights, then I would urge you to move to a different country, revoke your citizenship, be silent, or actually help rebuild the fundamentals on which we were founded.....might be a really great thing.
I'm not very much an an intellectualist, so can't respond to those who consider themselves that, but I do, simplistically, believe that the men and women that founded our country were quite brilliant and should be listened to again in this year 2011....
Time to step up and say we want a non-consumer, production driven country back.
Looking forward to the comments, and find them very interesting as well:) Plese limit comments to what you think will help our Nation survive, not negative responses that cannot help all of us.
The health of every other business in that economic country depends upon these productive industries.
The only thing that will create/save US jobs, preserve/restore the buying power of the US Dollar is reversing the trade deficit, reducing government borrowing, and/or reducing government spending, to start re-building the USA gold reserves.
Only a positive balance of trade will restore the value of the dollar, and we must accomplish this by any means possible, or accept third world poverty for the majority of our citizens. The only way to do this is to produce and export more (dollar value of) things than we import.
The only way that we can accomplish exporting US made products is to re-industrialize and make these products, hopefully with mostly US materials & Labor. The only way that our products will be sold abroad is if these products are either technologically superior, or cheaper.”
I have visited Asia several times on Business in the last part of the last century. Crime, family abandonment, divorce, selling your own 12 year old (and younger) daughters for the equivalent of about $45 in the 1990's for 10 years of indentured servitude to brothels, selling your own 12 year old sons to rug weavers, and other bad things increase during these periods of economic difficulty, such as India before they industrialized.
By that I mean that the traditional manufacturing jobs, mineral extraction (mining, oil, gas), and agriculture all made use of a lot of people with limited intelligence and education. Becoming a neurosurgeon is not an option for those people. Or banker, etc.
It is nice to argue that all we need is lots of good education and all our job worries will be solved, but that is simply not true. All the education in the world will not turn an unintelligent (should I say unbrilliant?) student in to a particle physicist.
So, if we don't have manufacturing jobs, then what other kinds of work are potentially viable for the 80-90% of the population that is of limited intellectual capacity, regardless of their education level?
And even if we could bring those manufacturing jobs back from China, they would just go away again, because of automation. What then?
People don't understand that this is the real problem. Technology is developing a world that doesn't need/can't use a large spectrum of the population. Then what will we do?
The USA has lost the World Technology Leadership!
Yes, where are we headed and what happens when we get there. We need to get rid of all our foreign bases, get rid of our active duty army, and focus on our economy. We have the best education system in the world but not the best students. We have the best medical system in the world, but not the the long life span, we have the most capital in the world and produce very little.
The key is to get back to basic, and people have to accept the simple fact, we all have to work and only a small percentage of us can have a nice office job pushing paper and going to meetings, we need to produce products.