Post-Pax Americana?

Most of us in the course of our lives are struck with moments of stunning insight and clarity.

 

Sometime at around age 15 or 16, I remember watching some low-budget Cold War-era flick about a communist takeover of the United States. Reflecting on it a few days later, I was struck by the rather stark realization that if the United States suffered some major calamity — an invasion or internal collapse of some sort resulting in the utter destruction of our ideals — there would be little left that was definably American.

 

Of course, way back then I had no idea that far less prosaic minds than mine had been ruminating on and debating this idea for years. We are, after all, a credal nation defined far more by our ideals than by the ancient ethnic or religious bonds that distinguish other nations from one another.

 

More recently, though, and at the risk of sounding like a neocon, it’s occurred to me that national greatness figures into this too.  From the beginning, we’ve either been a great nation in the making or a great nation in fact. And that raises an equally intriguing, if not unsettling, question: What would an America be like that ceased to be great or, at the very least, that lost much of its luster, one that was viewed less as a model and beacon to other nations and more as a spent historical force?  For that matter how would we Americans deal with it?  Would we follow our post-war British cousins, tying our fortunes to an ascending nation and striving to become its mentor?  Or would we nurse our frustrations in comparative isolation, much like post-Soviet Russia?

 

If New York Times columnist Paul Samuelson is right, we may be asking these sorts of questions sooner than many of us realize.  What Samuelson foresees is an America more akin to a post-World War I Britain — perhaps not so much a spent force like the Britain that emerged after Second World War but one that is aware of its limitations and less willing to impose its will across the planet.  As Samuelson writes,

 

America won’t retire from the world stage, but how active it will be is unclear.  Iraq has reduced national confidence and credibility. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid spending are already twice defense spending. Generational attitudes are shifting. A poll of 18- to 24-year-olds finds that 72 percent don’t think the United States should take the lead in solving global crises, reports Paul Starobin in National Journal.