Dept. of Half-Empty Glasses
Well, that was quick. It took Paul Kennedy 15 years to back off from the thesis of his 1987 book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, that the United States was in decline and ran the risk of "imperial overstretch." By 2002, the Yale historian was writing a long article for the Financial Times in which he recounted standing on the deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier and marveling at this country's "disproportionate military and economic heft." "Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power" between the United States and other nations, he wrote then. "Nothing."
Now, just seven years later, Kennedy has changed his mind again. Recently he wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the "world's number one power will take heavier hits than most other big nations" in the coming year, and that the "global tectonic power shifts, towards Asia and away from the West, seem hard to reverse." So America is back on the path of decline and there isn't much we can do about it.
Kennedy's latest not only recycles the arguments in his 20-year-old book. It's also not particularly provocative. Indeed, it's just the latest drop in a torrent of books, articles, and op-ed columns proclaiming that America's best days are behind it. The central challenge facing President Obama, the declinists argue, is to manage America's decline in a way that will "help to make those historical transformations less bumpy, less violent, and much less unpleasant" (Kennedy). We weep for the trees that have been felled in order to print this stuff.
Yes, even an old and conventional argument can be correct. And there's no question that America faces great economic and national security challenges. We have yet to fully reckon, for example, with the enormous burden of global responsibility that has been entrusted to us. Nonetheless: THE SCRAPBOOK tends to think that Kennedy had it right in 2002. The central fact in world politics remains the overwhelming military, economic, and cultural power of the United States of America. That power may be diminished slightly during the global downturn. But America has been in recession before, and has recovered. It's called the business cycle for a reason.
And it's not as though our potential challengers and adversaries aren't also reeling. Just ask the Chinese factory worker who has been laid off because of a lack of demand for his products. Or talk to Hugo Chávez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose economies have plummeted along with the price of oil. In fact, America's autocratic rivals are likely to fare worse during the recession, because their heavily politicized economies, undemocratic governments, and relatively weak civil societies suppress the innovation and dynamism that spur recovery. Somehow the declinists miss this.
Kennedy acknowledges that America "possesses tremendous advantages compared to other great powers in its demographics, its land-to-people ratio, its raw materials, its research universities and laboratories, its flexible work force, etc." He's right! We'd add that the U.S. economy still dwarfs the others; the United States accounts for slightly more than a fifth of global economic output--down only three percentage points from its share in 1960.
Meanwhile, U.S. defense spending, at 4.2 percent of GDP, is still at least six times greater than the amount our closest rival, China, spends. America protects global stability and promotes global public goods--such as stable sea lanes--through a network of diplomatic and military alliances that spans the globe. The result is a more peaceful world where terror networks like al Qaeda are slowly being destroyed.
Declinism is a recurring fad among American intellectuals and, like all fads, it's a passing phenomenon. One day--probably right around the time Barack Obama begins his reelection campaign--Paul Kennedy will probably change his mind once more and marvel at American might and all the good that liberal democracy has done for the world. We're waiting.
Senator Trail Blazer
The late columnist Carl T. Rowan once divided the world into "dream makers" and "dream breakers," and THE SCRAPBOOK states unequivocally that it is not a dream breaker. So naturally, we are delighted by the appointment of Roland Burris to the Senate seat recently vacated by Barack Obama.
We concede, of course, that the appointment comes with something of a taint, since Burris was the choice of Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois, who has been accused of seeking to sell the seat to the highest bidder. But there is no evidence that the elevation of Burris was a fee-for-service transaction, or that the former one-term attorney general of Illinois (1991-95) is personally corrupt.
No, THE SCRAPBOOK's pleasure may be explained two ways. First, the whole Blagojevich episode has not only come to symbolize the Illinois/Chicago political environment that nurtured Barack Obama, but has revealed certain chinks in the president's armor as well. For whatever reason, he chose not to involve himself in the business of filling his vacant Senate seat, and as a consequence, emerged from this episode looking weak--compared to Blagojevich!--unprepared, even politically naïve.
When the governor first announced the Burris appointment, both Obama and the Senate Democrats announced that the appointment would not stand, and Burris was initially turned away when he sought to take the oath on the Senate floor. But then Representative Bobby Rush (D-Illinois), our favorite ex-Black Panther, made noises about lynch mobs and George Wallace, at which point the Democrats' reservations about Blagojevich's choice melted away.
That's the first explanation. The second is depicted in the photograph on the opposite page. This impressive neoclassical structure is Senator Burris's pre-mortem mausoleum in Chicago's Oak Lawn Cemetery. It may be difficult to read the inscribed text, but the future occupant has listed all manner of accomplishments as a "Trail Blazer," some of them impressive in their way--first black attorney general of Illinois, first African-American bank examiner for the U.S. Treasury--and some preposterous. For example, it is noted for posterity that Burris was the first non-CPA to serve on the board of directors of the Illinois Society of Certified Public Accountants, and that he was the first black exchange student at the University of Hamburg from his alma mater, Southern Illinois University.
Now, after innumerable failed attempts at statewide and federal office, Burris the Trail Blazer will keep the stonecutters busy for the next two years at least. He is, after all, the third African American (after Obama and Carol Moseley-Braun) to serve as senator from Illinois, and the first non-CPA SIU graduate to be appointed to the Senate by the first Illinois governor to be impeached in the 21st century.
Czech, Please
To mark the Czech Republic's turn at the rotating European Union presidency, artist David Cerny told officials in Prague he and other artists from the EU would create a sculpture of Europe, in which individual countries would be represented by national symbols of pride. Or something like that. In reality, Cerny and a few of his friends made "Entropa," which is currently on display in Brussels. And it may result in the dissolution of Europe.
While Italy is rendered lovingly as a nation of soccer fanatics, Belgium as a box of chocolates, and Sweden as an IKEA box, Bulgaria is, well, a Turkish toilet (see photo below). One Bulgarian diplomat was flush with anger, describing it (to euobserver.com) as "preposterous, a disgrace," and "a humiliation for the Bulgarian nation and an offence to national dignity." But as Cerny explained to Spiegel Online, "No other [European] country has those kinds of toilets." Germany is represented by a mass of cars on highway strips--that look suspiciously like a misshapen swastika. (Cerny denies this vehemently.) All of Holland, meanwhile, is submerged in water, save the minarets of mosques. France is dominated by a giant sign yelling "Strike!" And Luxembourg is so tiny it simply dangles a pricetag.
THE SCRAPBOOK hopes these countries will develop a sense of humor. After all, it could be worse. Imagine being depicted as a Dracula-themed amusement park. That would be Romania.