The end of US decline

ummm…strike “clearly” and choose a better vowel for “effect”

Pr Q said:

the decline of the US from its 1945 position of global pre-eminence has already happened. The US is now a fairly typical advanced/developed country, distinguished primarily by its large population[1]. Precisely because the US is comparable to other advanced countries in many crucial respects, there is no reason to expect any further decline.

I date the beginning of relative US decline – its loss of decisive global power – when Nixon took the USD off the gold standard, way back in 1971. Not surprisingly this was correlated with an adverse outcomes for the US in the Cold War (loss of Vietnam, SALT). And of course the Culture War raging on the urban areas was a key index of moral decline. Around that time Houston lost its dominance in the energy business and Detroit fell by the wayside in the car making business. This was followed by a decade of soul-searching and malaise.

In retrospect the Reagan-Clinton period was a false dawn of US revival and triumphalism. Victory in the Cold War and an early lead in the digital revolution was temporary, based on the blunders of other countries rather than “American exceptionalism”.

The US’s relative decline is masked by its continuing occupation of the top-dog status in most key areas of power. It is still the destination of choice for high-status achieving elites the world over:

Pentagon for military;
Wall Street for finance;
Hollywood for pop culture;
Harvard for academia;
Silicon Valley for IT;
New York for real estate.

I don’t know whether the US can maintain its high status in these key areas. The obvious next candidate for addition to the loser list (Houston and Detroit) is Wall Street. I can’t see how it can continue its monstrous parasitism and reckless spendthriftyness without a drastic hair cut. There will be no more bailouts when the next crisis hits.

Ultimately power is based on industrial productivity which in turn is based on human capital accumulation. The PRC has over one billion workers with IQ’s north of 100 and a fanatical educational ethic (“Tiger Mom”). That is a recipe for long term global dominance once the nerds find gainful employment.

Given the demographic trends of the U.S, the decline will continue. The U.S. is heading into Brazil/Mexico territory with a small group of elites and a large number of poor people.

As the U.S. becomes poorer, on average, the number of people who care about foreign affairs or competing in the world market place will decline.

It depends what we mean by “decline”. I would make a few points:
1) Americans receive more immigrants and have more children than virtually any other developed country. Developed Asia (Singapore, HK, Taiwan, RoK, Japan) and most of Europe have little immigration and fertility rates of 1.2-1.4. Their populations will shrink, the proportion of national wealth going to the old will grow, while the U.S. will bec0me ever-more massive, it “greying” somewhat slowed. The rest of the developed world will decline relative to America according to this trend.

2) America will “decline” relatively to the developed world.

3) America’s “power” and “wealth” are often not particularly enviable. So you’re richer, what does that mean? A more overweight, overworked, overmedicated population, a prison system more vast than the Soviet gulag, a vast environmental disaster, Brazilian levels of inequality, a totally defective political system (hostage to moneyed financers, an undemocratic Senate and a schizophrenic mass culture (anti-State, anti-tax rugged individualists, de facto pro-welfare)), and a MIC that buys them eternal war abroad (first the Cold War, now the GWOT).

So I would say that America’s material and demographic base points towards anything but decline. On the other hand, the way that power is used is so misapplied, the tendencies within the society and polity so self-destructive, that I often wonder if the thing is sustainable at all. Historically, the U.S. political system has been *structurally incapable of reform without the imminent threat of collapse*. I think of the end of slavery, the New Deal and the end of isolationism, each of which required effectively “the end of the world as we knew it” for the reactionary reflexes and vested interests to be overcome.

Given the continued wars abroad, the hostility to tax-raising and welfare-cutting, the growing and “hysterical” inefficiency of the medical system, who is to say that can go on forever? Who is to say that an episode of hyperinflation or in the event of a crippling terrorist attack (say 30,000-100,000 dead) that the Republic could be held together?

Jacob, no country with beer as delicious as Denmark (or salmon as delicious, for that matter) will ever be unimportant.

“The number of places in the world where the US can directly determine, or even substantially influence, political outcomes is approximately zero – nothing like what might be associated with an old style Great Power, let alone a superpower or “hyperpower”.”

I have a hard time thinking of a less plausible statement than that. The US military power and political power causes a stranglehold on countless domestic powerbalances in countless countries and regions. It is not so much that the US dictates policy (it does that too, sometimes) but that it blocks real initiatives for real change in power and towards equality.

Have you even heard of latin america? Africa? The middle east? The US has military presence all over the world. The US has large military and economic ties to key power clusters in all the major regions.

Millions of relatives to people drone bombed to death, tortured at “rendition sites” or just stripped of their right as small pawns in some grand US chess move would strongly disagree with you. Billions likely have their privacy rights online systematically violated directly or indirectly by by the US surveillance state.

As the saying goes, the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn’t exist, the world including even commentators on progressively leaning blogs.

What you do with the power you have is always the same: trying to hold on to it, and gain more.

When it feels like it’s going to be lost anyway, someone gets a chance to become Great Man of History, like Gorby or de Klerk, but I don’t think the US is anywhere near that point.

John Q. –

Starting with “Features on which the US is an outlier . . .” and continuing though that and the two following paragraphs, you give an extensive sorry litany of reasons why the U.S. can and should expect a great deal of further decline. The economic considerations are especially ominous and onerous.

Why do you discount this information?

JzB

“and stop thinking a top dog position is something we’re somehow guaranteed, rather than having to work for.”

And which we need like we need a hole in the head (which I sometimes think we have).

We’d do better overall if we could break the power of the financial industry and stop paying a trillion dollars a year in rent to the medical sector. Cutting the MIC would also be good. I’m not holding my breath.

If the decline has already happened and we’re on some new plateau, then we wouldn’t expect any big shifts in the future. But I’m not sure about that. What about in the ME where the US basically insulates Israel from the need to reach a reasonable compromise? Can that be maintained? In 1956, the US pulled the plug on the continued attempt by Britain (and France) to act as great powers, but threatening to pull the financial rug from under their feet. Isn’t the moment coming when China could credibly threaten to do the same?

Dan Nexon 01.30.11 at 3:57 pm

“…but it makes it a bit annoying to listen to lectures from Europeans who are free-riding on our large military budget.”

If the elites in the USA actually thought that somebody else was free-loading, they’d do things differently.

@19: sadly, no, they wouldn’t and don’t. See “industrial complex, military”; “electoral politics”; and “electoral engineering, weapons systems.”

I hate to keep on sending quick comments, but two things: I want to be clear that (1) I don’t think the US should be spending what it does on its military, (2) it is really easy to underestimate the degree to which US defense policy–through alliances, bases, partnerships, expenditures, presence, stab ops, nuclear umbrellas, LIC, etc.–structures the current international system. Whethe that impact is “good, “bad”, or more complicated is certainly up for debate. That it depresses many other states military expenditures is, I think, pretty clear.

as well as areas of relative weakness (consumer goods, fashion and so on)

Fashion, sure, but what’s weak about American consumer goods? I can imagine some senses in which this is accurate, but also many in which it’s not, so I’m curious what you were trying to get at.

@27: I don’t claim to be unbiased. But “security umbrella” is an analytic concept, not a normative one. Whether or not accepting the Baltic States into NATO was “benign” or “expansionist” is certainly an interesting question. It left them feeling more secure, Russia less. I expect that it had no impact at all on Russian military expenditures, nor that it has led to significant changes in Russian policy elsewhere. There’s a tendency in these discussions to ignore the savviness of Russian policymakers, who actually mean what they say when they describe NATO as a danger rather than a threat.

Thanks Dan, I understand. Still, your assertion that with US military spending scaled back we would see much higher military spending in Europe, and other places – it doesn’t seem unreasonable, but it doesn’t seem that obvious either. Would China be building an aircraft carrier? Iran continue its nuclear program (assuming it has a military component)? Who knows. It just seems, intuitively, that things could settle to an equilibrium with a much lower level of armaments.

US dominance during the Cold War had a lot to do with its willingness to take the lead against Communism, not only militarily, when Western European governments couldn’t be seen to suppress all pro-left feeling. Obviously, there were intellectuals who thought the traditional European concern with the balance of power or the idea of the decline of the West were more important. Now that the Cold War is over, it’s difficult to say what will happen. Oil doesn’t seem to work as a replacement, and neither (unfortunately for Putin) does the threat of Islam.

If we are going to refer to the US as a diplomatic 800lb gorilla, perhaps we should reflect on how seldom gorillas are viewed as masters of diplomacy.

Quiggin

I couldn´t disagree more. I think you view on geopolitical capital is to narrow: weaponry, nuclear weaponry, money and economy. Although the americans have been declining for a long time, they have accumulated a huge geostrategical capital, in the for of client states, militarely dependent states (Japan).

They´ve done something no other country could do alone (maybe Israel): invade Iraq a big, well armed country which today it can barely handle alone. This shows how they are still unmatched, even if wasting their capabilities. The reach of american tentacles is beyond the possibilities of any other country, and as the leaks show us, they are everywhere: collecting Paraguai´s president DNA, handling others nuclear develpments, influencing Venezuelas politics with money for the oposition, handling two wars, trying to solve the Palestine issue (ok, maybe not)

It´s unthinkable that economic superpowers Germany and Japan had a similar agenda. Also Russia knows it can´t go very far. China has a similar behaviour, but is still far from, say, meddling in the Americas (though I´m sure it´s meddling in Africa)

Last, I´d say your conclusion is also quite wrong. Americans will face the shock of having to say “we´re number two” in aproximately a decade, when China´s GDP surpasses them (The Economist estimate). We know how the average american will react to this (the South Park Beijing Olympics episode is quite ilustrative)What the world has to ask itself is what consequences this resentment brings to an already unstable world.

While the precise pattern may change, I don’t see any reason to suppose that the US will either decline or advance dramatically in comparison to other developed countries.

Is there even agreement on what might constitute decline or advance?

The main implication of all this, for me, is that Americans should stop worrying about relative “decline”, “competitiveness” and so on, and start focusing on making the US a better place to live.

Again trying to battle nationalism with the voice of reason? Fat chance.

fn2. As other countries catch up to the advanced group that includes the US, those in that group might be said to have declined in relative terms. But this doesn’t seem to me to constitute “decline” in any important sense.

That’s not how nationalists see it.

Iraq

Actually I think that this ten year old example could be better trotted out as a cause of the US’ decline. Blew a whole lotta international political capital (as well as a lot of real capital) on that one.

And for the one word example, I give you the one word counter-example:

Afghanistan

Maybe the term “cultural DNA” hasn’t crossed the pond yet. In any case from
Cultural DNA

What is “Cultural DNA,” when should you change it, and how do you change it? Print Email

* Cultural DNA is the accreted structure of a successful culture that recreates internal and incoming leaders and employees in its own image. This means that they tend to take on the values and beliefs, interests, and mental models and information of the organization or community over time.

It may be true that the American appears in $PPP to live like a third world king, but under the pressures of globalization first world working conditions in terms of wages and hours may worsen to the point the the first world working class can’t reproduce itself, that is, to show up fit to work, to save for a basic retirement and to raise the next generation of workers who can operate in a modern workplace. Wages fall below–Marx alert!– the value of labor power, especially for younger workers having to subsidize social security. Birthrates fall. Some combination of demographic crisis and structural unemployment makes the first world unstable to the point of political chaos. Think Children of Men.

For all the wishful thinking in Ithaca and Berkeley, there has never been a line of americans saying they’d rather be Danish or Dutch.

It’s pretty fortunate for the service industry that Americans don’t seem to understand there are better places to live.

_billions of people in other countries can dream that their children can get educated in the US, get a career, and one day have their grandchildren become President of the US. That can’t happen in China or Germany, regardless of their GDP or healthcare system …_

What’s the claim here, that in other countries the people with foreign grandparents can’t be head of state or something? That’s rather obviously false. France, for example. And in the UK there are several prominent politicians with foreign parents or grandparents who attained senior positions: Michael Howard and Michael Portillo, to name but two. (All this off the top of my head, I guess that if we sat down with a list of countries and prominent politicians in them, this particular claim to US exceptionalism would be even more clearly demonstrated as the bullshit that it is.)

But that still leaves China and Germany, right?

I don’t see this at all. As far as I can see, the US and EU negotiate on roughly equal terms across a broad range of economic and social issues – the US has some strengths as a unitary state, but that’s offset much of the time by the inability of the executive to control Congress. Certainly, I can’t think of many examples where the US has been able to prevail on a diplomatic issue where the EU, Japan etc disagreed

This is all so intangible – “broad range of issues”, “I can’t think of many examples”… – that it is hard to get a grip on. Let’s have a list of concrete, named, examples.

What’s the claim here, that in other countries the people with foreign grandparents can’t be head of state or something?

Hey, in JQ’s and my country you have to have foreign grandparents to be head of state. Sure they have to be from one particular family (The Saxe-Coburg -Gothas, aka Mountbatten-Windsors), but they’re all foreigners to us.

… a bit annoying to listen to lectures from Europeans who are free-riding on our large military budget.

I think someone has forgotten whose troops are helping out whose misbegotten wars in the Middle East. The Warsaw Pact’s long gone. European (and for that matter Australian and various other allied) troops are, at this very moment, fighting under US command in wars that were begun and are directed entirely by the US. They’re doing jobs that would otherwise have to be done by American soldiers. The free-riding is now going in the other direction.

54: it’s perfectly possible for someone anywhere in the world to dream that their grandchildren could be Kings of Britain. You just have to dream that your child marries an heir to the throne. There’s no barrier at all to a foreign Queen, or indeed a foreign Prince Consort.

There’s no barrier at all to a foreign Queen, or indeed a foreign Prince Consort.
Actually, I think the current British policy is that women will be princess consort, not queen. That’s good for equal rights, and it makes sure Camilla won’t be queen.

So no foreign kings or queens anymore in Britain. The Netherlands on the other hand will almost certainly have an Argentinian queen in the near future, and Denmark an Australian. Commoners too.

People are being unfair to Map Maker. He clearly claimed that you can’t move to China or Germany in the expectation that your grandchild might become President of the US.

Don’t be too harsh on Camilla. It is bad enough to have a mother-in-law who thinks she is the Queen of England. Hers actually is.

zamfir, that was presented as a one off in the case of Mrs Parker Bowles, who is not currently Princess of Wales either. It was a deal struck to get the Church of England to sign up for Charles (divorced, but fortuitously relieved of the embarrasment of his ex-wife by a drunken driver) marrying a divorced woman without renouncing the succession. There’s no suggestion that F/Lt Wales and Ms Middleton won’t be King and Queen eventually.

I think the analogy of dominance hierarchies in other species of mammals is useful here. The alpha can’t actually beat every other animal at will in a fair fight, certainly not without getting hurt itself. But the fact that the other animals believe it to be the most dangerous establishes patterns of behavior that moderate conflict within the group. (Most of the time, intraspecies conflict is conducted without significant injury.) Now, if the alpha goes around picking fights, as some might argue the US has done in recent years, it is likely to endanger its position in the hierarchy– and makes real violence much more likely.

This reminds me to watch Episode 9 of Trials of Life again sometime, apparently available for free on the internets: http://www.veoh.com/collection/trialsoflife/watch/v323603ACq9qMp3

Has anyone done empirical work on the cost of labor reproduction? It doesn’t seem there’s any reason people who really wanted to couldn’t keep working past the point where it seemed they didn’t really have enough coming in from outside to maintain themselves, and couldn’t provide lots and lots of labor even when the price of each unit of labor had dropped below a fair value. (That’s what entrepreneurs do, after all.)

But the fact that the other animals believe it to be the most dangerous establishes patterns of behavior that moderate conflict within the group.

Humans are different, and perhaps it’s more like Mafia, as seen in movies/TV shows. To maintain the prestige, the boss needs to kick someone’s teeth in, every so often. See Tom Friedman’s “Well, Suck. On. This.” speech.

…And of course it’s risky to say this, because it all plays into the paranoid identification of liberals as some kind of traitorous fifth column, rather than people who would like the country to be better and are expressing frustration at the difficulty of changing things.

I think it’s become a commonplace observation among coastal US liberals that Canada’s better in a lot of ways

Looking out my window at piles of snow as high as my head . . . yeah, I want to move 5 or 6 hours farther north. My muscles just aren’t sore enough yet.

Also, of course, the picture of Canadian politics associated with these fantasies is highly idealized.

At least this snow is getting me some exercise that I probably need.

Bianca Steele:
“I don’t know anyone who moved from here to Canada who wasn’t born in Canada in the first place”
Then you don’t know very many people. I myself know several.

This book is justly getting a lot of attention in IPE circles

America’s Global Advantage: US Hegemony and International Cooperation [Paperback]
Carla Norrlof

It was just published by Cambridge, and I read the three middle chapters which are excellent. The regime theory chapter made me yawn.

I am trying to read Eichengreen’s America’s Exorbitant Privilege on my kindle, but that is providing impossible. Will have to buy a hard copy.

But those are the two most recent topics that I would read on American hegemony. There is also DeLong’s End of Influence from a year ago.

Let’s see. Matt McIrvin asks us to take his word for it that everyone knows that Democrats in the most liberal part of the country can’t stand how right-wing things are where they live and want to move someplace where they don’t know anyone and won’t be allowed to work, because everyone knows Canada meets every American liberal’s ideal. “MPAVictoria” asks us to take his/her word for it that knowing “many” people makes it certain one would know a good number of people who have moved from my area to Canada, apparently in support of Matt McIrvin’s point. At least I know where one of them actually lives.

MPAVictoria: bianca steele asks us to accept her anecdotes while refusing to consider those of others

“Then you don’t know very many people.” Which one of us said that?

because everyone knows Canada meets every American liberal’s ideal

Um, actually, Matt didn’t say anything resembling that, but whatever…

bianca, it’s unclear what it is you’re quibbling with (or why), but I didn’t find Matt McIrvin’s comment the least bit surprising. “Moving to Canada” — with varying degrees of seriousness — is indeed a recurring topic of conversation among lots of my fellow left-leaning (and/or LGBT) USians whenever national politics comes up. There sure as hell was an uptick in it during the GWB years.

My partner and I have discussed it at length and are in agreement that in the event of a Palin or Huckabee presidency, it will be time to stop talking and start doing.

Yes, purely anecdotal. If you have evidence to the contrary that’s more empirically grounded, I’m all ears.

Uncle Kvetch:

my quibble is with generalizations like it’s become a commonplace observation among coastal US liberals and to say that this isn’t a strain in American culture is to just go along with the far right, and secondarily with the condescension of They may not really want to move, because moving is hard, but there are the usual flee-to-Canada fantasies.

Maybe this is the case in Somerville, Mass., the second- or third-most bohemian part of metropolitan Boston, or where you live. Maybe people in Somerville (in fact, at the center of a big sea of blue) think people like them are typical of “coastal US liberals,” and they’re entitled to their opinion. They’re even entitled to say they think I’m really a right-winger, if that’s how they feel. And in Matt McIrvin’s case, he’s put up his bio, and I know exactly where he’s coming from and exactly what he means. But it isn’t at all common to make generalizations and call them anecdotes (much more common to make generalizations and pretend you have a source somewhere), and I’m not sure why my comments have gotten so much hostility from you or from anyone else.

UK@90: No, the conversation wasn’t about me. It was about what “American liberals and leftists” think. Clearly that means “male Boomers who probably live for who-knows-what reason in someplace like Houston” and nobody else. Or we could both shut up and leave the topic to sociologists in Manchester who have real data, which is what I’m going to do now.

I don’t live in Somerville.

I’ve lived in one of the most liberal neighborhoods in New York for fifteen years, work in an industry dominated by liberals, have friends who are, almost without exception, liberal, and the only person I know who has ever even talked about moving to Canada was someone who had a chance of working for EA Sports in Vancouver. I’m sure among an incredibly thin slice of crunchy American bohos, you could find a few people who had contemplated fleeing the country. But it’s a vanishingly small percentage, and not one that tells you anything interesting about liberals or the supposed problems with the U.S.

I know quite a few Americans who’ve lived in Canada, as well as Canadians who’ve lived in the US. Academics in the sciences are a cosmopolitan lot. Stepping aside from the touchy thing with bianca, how common is living outside ones native country in general? Language and cultural roots are pretty deep, and I’d be surprised if it was common at all even in Europe except in cases of severe domestic deprivation (e.g. Mexico vs. the USA, and even there only a minority of Mexicans have ever been in the USA; I got 9.8 million in the US compared with 110 million in Mexico , or about 1/12.)

I am pretty surprised that the percentage of Canadians in the US isn’t higher than the percentage of Americans in Canada. I mean, there are warm places there.

The (non) problem with US power is that it is finite use. Contrary to the neo-con ideology, it is diminished rather than strengthened each time it is used.

Ten years ago the US was an unquestioned super-power. Now thanks to the unforced blunder of Iraq, the US has proved itself incapable of occupying one of the smaller medium sized countries.

Obama could probably force Mubarak out, but doing so would make it harder to play the same role in future. If dictators get the idea that the US is going to oust them, they are going to go looking towards Russia or China in future. At the moment the US position seems to be that it is willing to smooth the transition but is not going to force Mubarak out.

The realists like to pretend that military power is somehow necessary to ensure access to various raw materials. I find that analysis to be rather ridiculous. The bloated US military is by far the largest consumer of the exotic raw materials that they are putatively guaranteeing access to. Downsize the military to a rational size and the budget is back in balance (a rational size being about 10% of the current one).

But the problem with militarism is not just the fact that military power has little utility, the military has in recent years made the US less safe and more likely to end up in unnecessary war. When the US has appeared weaker than possible enemies, a militarist has appeared insisting that the US must go into debt to build up the military. When the US has appeared to be stronger, an idiot has appeared to start an unnecessary war.

If the US military had been half the size that it was when Bush II took over, the Iraq war would not have looked like ‘a cakewalk’ and would have been much harder to sell to the US people. As a result the invasion of Iraq would not have occurred and the US military would be considerably stronger. It is quite likely that without the blunder of Iraq, that the business in Afghanistan would have been completed long ago. There would certainly be more international support.

The claim that “The US is now a fairly typical advanced/developed country, distinguished primarily by its large population” is simply bizarre.

America remains wildly atypical other advanced/developed countries. Let’s a take a look at the evidence:

[1] America spends 1.45 trillion dollars per year on its military, yet the American military can’t even win a war against barefoot 15-year-old boys who are armed with bolt action rifles.

[2] America spends absurdly more than any other developed country for health care, yet America is one of the worst developed countries in the world on health metrics like infant mortality, child malnutrition, etc.

[3] America has the largest per capita prison population by far…yet we persist in expanding our insanely counterproductive war on drugs to include new penalties, more ferocious assaults on medical marijuana dispensaries, and so on.

[4] Tuition for American colleges is climbing at such a rapid rate that it is radically unsustainable — and the 1998 bankruptcy “reform” act that prevents students from ever discharging their debt condemns American college students to a lifetimeof indentured servitude, unlike any other developed nation in the world.

[5] One entire American political party is committed to total global warming denial — bizarre outlier found nowhere else in the developed world.

[6] 60% of the American population rejects evolution as a valid explanation for the origin of species, another bizarre outlier trend found in no other developed country in the world.

As for America’s decline being complete, it’s scarcely begun. America has embarked on an unsustainability marathon in a wide variety of areas, from our collapsing military to our broken health care system to our disintegrating criminal “justice” system. When the crashes come, they’ll arise from multiple sources of unsustainable U.S. policies on a wide variety of fronts.

Just take a look at these 6 graphs and tell me that any one of them is sustainable. Tell me that every single one of these trends won’t crash and burn, and very soon:

AMERICA IN 6 GRAPHS:

Median weeks U.S. workers remain unemployed — a post WW II high

U.S. manufacturing trends in weapons vs consumer durable goods over the last 10 years

Tuition for American colleges from 1978 to 2010 compared to the consumer price index and home prices

U.S. national health spending as a percentage of GDP from 1970-2010

U.S. job creation from 1945 to 2000

American manufacturing capacity from 1945 to 2010.

I’d be surprised if it was common at all even in Europe except in cases of severe domestic deprivation

FWIW somewhere around a third of the population of London was born abroad.

This weird conversation about Americans not living elsewhere just recurs every so often here on CT, complete with lots of anecdotes from Americans living in the US who don’t know any of their compatriots who want to live abroad. But go to any medium-sized western European city and you’ll find a bunch of Americans living there either because of their job or because of their European spouse.

Yes, reading your post, the argument appears to be pretty strong in. So my gut response to the US would be “s&*t, or get off the pot.” In a few of key areas of discord in international relations the US has managed to maintain a role incomensurate with its weight, which you’ve outlined above. This is because rather than generating its own political influence, the US enjoys political influence that is affordedto it. I think you need to address the engine of influence that generates an identification with/accomodation of US interests. Is it merely residual? Is it the lack of paths of influence amongst countries and countries of similar weight to the US? Is the talk of US decline really a category error, and should we be speaking of the growth of linkage, (economic, cultural, military etc.) to countries like the BRIC countries?
In the case of the Middle East peace process the US has dominated mediation for years and from what can be ascertained in the Palestine papers leaked recently, has been acquiescing in the Israeli’s intransigence on their minimum position while the Palestinian maximum has extended and extended beyond what will break the Palestinians themselves. If the US influence doesn’t warrant its position their why has it been allowed to continue to oversee the slow death of the peace process?
I find it odd that you use the Middle East as the launch pad for revisiting the issue, saying you anticipate a further airing of the claims, and then claim you’ll “come back to the Middle East later, but that is sui generis.” Get to it! Inquiring minds want to know. I find coffee and revolutionary protests in a Middle Eastern capital make me impatient, if not rude, my apologies! Nontheless, is it sui generis because of an abiding interest in the world’s prime commodity being produced there? If so why not believe that some commodity may become as worthy of similar US interest and action. Or is it that the character of the Middle East, its regimes is distinct? That’s being disproved hour by hour. What I do know is that the current anti-regime protestors are not counting on US involvement or muscle, nor do actors in the current Lebanon crisis, nor even in the negotiations for government formation in Iraq where American disengagement was assumed in the parties negotiations and “Lebanonisation” anticipated.

to Otto @5, US Presidents have been on telly for decades bemoaning the rule of the Assads in Syria and Hussein in Iraq, so if you think Obama, appearing messiah like on telly would make Mubarak step down in a week under normal circumstances, think again. It’s the people on the street and beating down the gate of the Presidential palace who can get a president out in a week. Nobody believes the US will engage in Iraq II for a while to come.

But go to any medium-sized western European city and you’ll find a bunch of Americans living there either because of their job or because of their European spouse.

There’s perhaps a tendency to dismiss those cases because that person had some reason for leaving other than “I don’t like US politics/social institutions”.

But that’s almost always the case, regardless of the country. It takes a really extreme situation, egregious social breakdown or oppression, to turn large numbers of people into refugees; especially the middle- or upper-class people who have the easiest time getting out.

bianca steele is right about that (and I was trying to agree): hardly anyone really wants to go to the trouble of moving to another country unless they’ve already got a good situation set up at the other end. But if they’re feeling frustrated, they might think about it in somewhat abstract terms, which is an impulse that could be channeled toward changing things at home if the people who have it have enough power.

(I was trying to respond to the people who argue that Americans never even have idle thoughts about the superior features of other countries, outside of a few deep-blue, college-town enclaves. I don’t think that it’s quite that concentrated, partly because people do move around. Take me, again, as an example: though I have friends in Somerville and I’ve lived in Cambridge and Arlington, right now I actually live out near the New Hampshire border in an area that is full of Scott Brown voters. And I started being a crazy liberal at the west end of Fairfax County, Virginia, back in the Eighties when that neighborhood was much more white suburban Republican than it is now. This is all coastal but it’s not all Berkeley.)

Excellent post, McLaren.

Six millions immigrants in Canada? As in, the equivalent of Houston is in Canada. That means there are less than 30 million Canadians? The order of magnitude difference in population is staggering to me. Just the increase in complexity for the logistics of farming and transport south of the 49th parallel…

“We’re too young a country for that.”

Isn’t Quiggin’s Australia an even younger country?

“In geopolitical terms, the US spends a lot more on its military than anyone else (in fact, more than everyone else put together) and (contrary to the beliefs of most Americans) hardly anything on development aid or other efforts at promoting global public goods. ” The first is only true if you use absolute figures, the second only if you use relative (% of GDP). Neither is true if you use the other metric, respectively.

NW guy and Piglet,

Agreed, Australia is too newly revolted from the British Empire to even be a “real” country let alone give up on the destiny of that country.

Ah, but Piglet, it is a requirement of a democratic empire which is the only empire the USA can aspire to without contradiction. For democracies, demography is destiny.

For democracies, demography is destiny.

It just doesn’t seem that the word “democracy” is meaningful enough to generalize.

China has one party, espousing economic nationalism, with its leaders rising from the bottom up for decades and via dozens of elected offices.

The US has two parties, both espousing economic liberalism, the winner takes all system, and its leaders often jump from corporate boardrooms directly into the senate.

France has a whole bunch of parties, various ideologies, from fascism to trotskyism, mostly career politicians, and the system of proportional representation.

These are three different models; it seems arbitrary to pick the US and France, call them both ‘democracies’ and start generalizing.

Chris,

Good point. I am giving to much weight to the historical in terms of the national character in order to highlight a contrast to other developed countries.

Although, I would claim that from a “nation is a people with a place” point of view, the new immigrants (and the slaves that stayed) have legitimated by their remaining in the USA the idea that there is no inherent connection of nation, people and geography. The former slaves that moved to Texas and California legitimated the claim of the USA to that territory by their emigration and their adopting and retaining US citizenship.

The point I’m trying to make is that it is very difficult to get one’s head around what it means for a US citizen to consistently adopt a “colonialism and imperialism were a mistake” ideology when it seems inherent to what the USA is, in a way that its not as inherent to what it means to be Swiss or German or Russian or even English. Yes, one could try to reconstruct the USA as a “return to nativity, kinder and gentler country” but its just not clear to me how one makes any sense of the identity of the USA in that case.

I guess that is why some people view parts of the US citizenship as knuckle-draggers and those people often return the favor by calling the others freeloading hypocrites.

Chris,

Thanks, got it.

However, if I was conceived by a rape I would not know how to think about my relationship to my father. To me, the question of “what does it mean to be conceived by a criminal performing a criminal act?”, is a real and tough question. I couldn’t really regret my creation (or my father) even though the act was otherwise odious.

I guess I have an overly historical (and patriarchal) (im)/morality.

chris, your point seems to underestimate the millions of people immigrating north often repeatedly when caught and deported. This is a continual voting with one’s feet by many, many people, throughout the US.

OK, but people who are immigrating now are endorsing (in that sense) the nation as it exists now, not all past versions of it. The US isn’t still committing acts of conquest and/or genocide against its native population (at least, not so far as I know, and it would clearly be illegal to do so).

Michael,

So are you watching the decline in US Wealth, power and influence as they show up in other countries or as they show up in the USA on television?

Who are you seeing growing in wealth, power and influence?

The Finns, Brazilians, South Africans, Somalis, Russians, Kurds, Basques, Lapps, Navajo, greens, teenagers, Google owners, warlords, Mexican drug dealers, Cubans, Turks, reunited Germans, Brahmins, Gypsies, I-phone users, Esperanto speakers, dolphins, whales, honey bees, neutrinos, I mean the imagination does run wild…