Ford Drive One 'Press Conference' Commercial Rips Auto Bailouts

At Hot Air, "Wow: Ford ad blasts bailouts — and perhaps more."

The statement that America is about taking risks and enduring failure rather than expecting government to bail everyone out sounds more like a big thumb in the eye of the Obama administration, whose latest jobs bill keeps extending unemployment benefits, and which continues to propose spending billions on subsidies for businesses that can’t succeed on their own — like Solyndra.

No doubt. It also backhands Obama on his dismissal of American exceptionalism.

Myth and Reality After 9/11

From Victor Davis Hanson, at National Review:

Why did radical Islamic terrorists kill almost 3,000 Americans a decade ago?

Few still believe the old myth that U.S. foreign policy or support for Israel logically earned us Osama bin Laden’s wrath. After all, the U.S. throughout the 1990s had saved Islamic peoples from Bosnia and Kosovo to Somalia and Kuwait. Russia and China, in contrast, had oppressed or killed tens of thousands of their own Muslims without much fear of provoking al-Qaeda.

Moreover, thousands of Arabs have been killed recently, but by their own Libyan and Syrian governments, not Israeli Defense Forces. Al-Qaeda still issues death threats to Americans even though its original pretexts for going to war — such as U.S. troops stationed in Saudi Arabia — have long been irrelevant.

On this ten-year anniversary of 9/11, no one has yet refuted the general truth that bin Laden tried to hijack popular Arab discontent over endemic poverty and self-induced misery. In cynical Hitlerian fashion, al-Qaeda’s propagandists sought to blame the mess of the Arab Middle East on Jews and foreigners, rather than seeking to address homegrown corrupt kleptocracies, inefficient statism, indigenous tribalism, gender apartheid, and religious fundamentalism and intolerance ...

More at that link.

Beyond Cairo Embassy Attack, Israel Senses Wider Siege

See New York Times, "Beyond Cairo, Israel Sensing a Wider Siege":

JERUSALEM — With its Cairo embassy ransacked, its ambassador to Turkey expelled and the Palestinians seeking statehood recognition at the United Nations, Israel found itself on Saturday increasingly isolated and grappling with a radically transformed Middle East where it believes its options are limited and poor.

The diplomatic crisis, in which winds unleashed by the Arab Spring are now casting a chill over the region, was crystallized by the scene of Israeli military jets sweeping into Cairo at dawn on Saturday to evacuate diplomats after the Israeli Embassy had been besieged by thousands of protesters.

It was an image that reminded some Israelis of Iran in 1979, when Israel evacuated its embassy in Tehran after the revolution there replaced an ally with an implacable foe.

“Seven months after the downfall of Hosni Mubarak’s regime, Egyptian protesters tore to shreds the Israeli flag, a symbol of peace between Egypt and its eastern neighbor, after 31 years,” Aluf Benn, the editor in chief of the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz, wrote Saturday. “It seems that the flag will not return to the flagstaff anytime soon.”

More at that link, and see also, Barry Rubin, "Ten Years After September 11: Who’s Really Winning the War On Terrorism." Rubin looks at the range of extremist terrorist groupings outside of al Qaeda --- Hamas, Hezbollah, Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt --- and suggests that terrorism is on the march. Israel is right smack-dab in the middle of it all. As a challenge for U.S. foreign policy, the war on terrorism is hardly won.

Quantifying Economic Costs of the September 11 Attacks

From David Wessel, at Wall Street Journal, "Tallying the Toll on the Economy From 9/11":

Osama bin Laden vowed to bleed America "to the point of bankruptcy, Allah willing." He failed. The Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks were enormously costly to the U.S., though not in the ways expected initially.



Sept. 11 did not, as feared, trigger a wrenching recession; the bursting of the housing bubble was worse. And despite lines at airport security, Sept. 11 did not dent the efficiency of the U.S. economy; productivity kept growing.



But Sept. 11 did cost a lot in other ways. The attacks led to Afghanistan and Iraq, wars that already have cost nearly twice what Vietnam did, adjusted for inflation.



Putting a price tag on the human toll from 9/11 is impossible. Nearly 3,000 were killed in the attacks. More than 6,200 U.S. troops have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Measuring the impact of 9/11 on the American psyche and its sense of security and freedom is difficult.



But one can, with the hindsight of a decade, begin to tally the quantifiable economic costs.

Continue reading at the top link.

Bill Whittle in Newport Beach!

I have College Day at LBCC in the morning, so a big write up will have to wait. Note for now that the Newport Beach event was intimate and informative. Bill Whittle is a captivating speaker, very scholarly and counterintuitive on a number of points. And host Mike Munzing was welcoming and the guests energized and engaged. Great food too. More later!

The U.S. Still Has a Promising Future?

Well, I certainly hope so.



But check Michael O'Hanlon, at Los Angeles Times, "Despite Problems, the U.S. Still Has a Promising Future":

Amid all the talk of gloom and doom in the United States, with the stock market's near-crash and the renewed threat of a double-dip recession, it is worth pausing to remember that the United States remains the greatest country on Earth. It is also the country with the most promising future. I make these assertions not as a matter of national pride, but as an analytical conclusion.

And he makes an excellent argument. The problem --- and I know it's a problem, because I'm just like O'Hanlon on this --- is that his analysis is almost completely structural. That is, O'Hanlon's looking at all this recent turmoil from a comparative power analysis interpretation, which almost systematically excludes internal political determinants. We can extrapolate from past patterns of America's remarkable exceptionalism and global preponderance and expect things to flow along fairly well simply because for all our troubles, no single other nation matches America's bounty or prospects. But the debt downgrade, as Danial Henniger points out today, is the ultimate signal that American hegemony is shrugging. To use Mark Steyn's analogy, we're like a prize fighter who's been hammered, and the opponent's sitting at the opposite stool, counting the seconds until the bell rings to come over for another round of pummeling. That's to say, for example, when Britain fell from preeminent status after WWI, and most definitely at the conclusion of WWII, the mantle of global political and eocnomic leadership passed to a benign power across the Atlantic, the United States. The U.S. had not only resisted the hegemonic role during the 1920s, but after WWII we did just about everything in our power to restore the defeated European nations and Japan to economic vitality and competitiveness. As America declines now --- and I'm using decline now for the first time really in agreement --- there's is no commensurate situation of the leading power passing the baton to a friendly rising power, as we experienced in 1945. China and Russia cooperate where possible but will seek advantage from America's weakening position, as power politics dictates, and that's while at the same time China is paradoxically hemmed in further from America's debt problems (mutual vulnerability forms a trace element of U.S. power internationally). And of course toss into the mix President Obama's hellbent agenda of making the United States the unexceptional nation, and well, let's just hope he's out in one term, November 6th, 2012. And the key factor for the electorate is the massive Democrat debt overhang. We're heading into a double-dip recession, some say. The Fed, for example, promised zero percent interest rates until 2013 because it expects no growth. The only thing good about this is that it almost guarantees that the Democrat ticket will lose next November. Even then, Republicans have been nearly as addicted to spending as the Democrats, with G.W. Bush's Medicare prescription drug expansion being Exhibit A. And the debt overhang will accelerate the collapse of U.S. world leadership unless two things happen: (1) we cut spending, and (2) the economy grows at a sustained pace of growth, say at three percent annual GDP for a decade or two, and then some. I can't see things turning around unless we have a combination of those two things, and without that we'll see a steady erosion of both U.S. global influence and a decline in the U.S. standard of living at home.



So, yes, Michael O'Hanlon makes a good case for continued optimism, but a more thorough analysis must consider the current failures of the American political system, and most importantly, the epic failures of the Democrat Party's expansionist, economic-killing social welfare policies.



More on this later ...

America as Less Than No. 1

I've been thinking about this. I find myself losing my normal optimism on America, which is extremely unlike me.



See Danial Henniger, at Wall Street Journal:

The U.S. is far from finished. The private economy—from the biggest corporations to innumerable dreamers launching start-ups—is fit and eager. But make no mistake: The U.S. has taken a hard hit to its 65-year status as the world's pre-eminent nation.

RTWT.



I'll have more on this topic in upcoming posts.

Kenneth Turan Movie Review: 'Captain America: The First Avenger'

At Los Angeles Times.

I'll probably take my youngest boy to see it today:

Atlantis Landing Ends Space Shuttle Era

At Los Angeles Times.

Also, "A cloudy vision of U.S. spaceflight."

When the orbiter Atlantis lands at Kennedy Space Center on Thursday, ending the 30-year-old space shuttle program, NASA will have its sights set on the next big exploration mission: sending astronauts to an asteroid in about 15 years.

But the path to that goal remains poorly defined, jeopardized by a bleak budget outlook and a weak political consensus. It has left a deep angst that U.S. leadership in space flight is in rapid decline and the very ability to fly humans off the Earth is at risk.

"I'm very disappointed about where we are today," said Robert L. Crippen, who flew on the first space shuttle mission and went on to senior leadership jobs in both NASA and the aerospace industry. "NASA's future is very fuzzy right now."

NASA has a complicated plan that would include operating the International Space Station, tapping a private launch service to ferry astronauts to orbit, and building a new launch system to send humans on deep space missions, including an asteroid by the mid-2020s.

Engineers and technicians are busy at plants across the nation, building new crew capsules, testing hardware in vibration chambers and preparing to conduct demonstration flights, all part of supporting the future steps that NASA envisions.

Nonetheless, the overall plan has failed to gain widespread support, reflecting serious concerns about the costs, risks and the lack of detail about the most difficult aspects of the exploration mission.

But see, Nicholas de Monchaux, "Spirit of the Spacesuit."

Added: A killer piece at Daley Gator, "Home At Last: Atlantis Makes Historic Final Landing As Nasa’s 30-Year Shuttle Program Comes to An End."

Andrew Breitbart is New York Times' Blogger Provocateur

Well, he should be. He's declared war on the Democrat-Media-Complex.

See, "The Right’s Blogger Provocateur."

The Other McCain responds: "The Semi-Smear."

Below, as promised, is the video from the Breitbart talk in Newport Beach. And buy a copy of Righteous Indignation here.

Sarah Palin: 'America is the Exceptional Nation'

A new SarahPAC video, via Theo Spark:

Recall that when I was a CPAC in February, I made it a point to walk the National Mall to commemorate Abraham Lincoln's birthday. I love this country's history. And I love that Sarah Palin celebrates it with such passion.

Here Come Chinese 'Trophy Acquisitions' in the U.S.

In 1989, the editorial board of the New York Times asked, "Is the transfer of American assets to Japanese ownership something to worry about?"

The answer was no, "of course." But the Times board when on to suggest that this was "a sharp reminder of Japan's growing economic strength." So true, but within just a few years, by the mid-1990s, those fears of "Japan as Number One" quickly dissipated as that nation floundered in the fallout from its overheated bubble economy.

I'm reminded of this by the news this morning that China's Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Ltd. (ICBC) has made a bid for ownership entry into the U.S. financial market. See WSJ, "China's ICBC Bids for U.S. Entry":

CHICAGO—Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd. on Friday signed an agreement here to acquire a majority stake in Bank of East Asia Ltd.'s U.S. subsidiary, becoming the first state-owned Chinese bank to make an acquisition of a U.S. deposit-taking institution.

The deal, signed on the last day of Chinese President Hu Jintao's state visit to the U.S., represents what could be the start of big expansions by Chinese financial institutions in the world's largest economy.

The deal comes as both Beijing and Washington are calling for greater commercial ties between the two countries. China is prodding the U.S. to ease its export controls, especially those involving high-technology products, while the U.S. is asking for more Chinese purchases of made-in-America goods and services.

Still, the Bank of East Asia transaction promises to be carefully scrutinized by U.S. regulators, including the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, known as Cfius, because of the state-controlled nature of ICBC, China's largest lender. Bank of East Asia is a publicly traded bank based in Hong Kong.

RTWT.

And also at WSJ, "Why China’s ICBC Bank Deal is Important."

The Chinese are coming to America. And we'll soon see, no doubt, some "trophy acquisitions" that raise hollers far and wide. But as we've learned from previous experience, this hardly means the end of American world preeminence.

In any case, Daniel Drezner has a roundup on those "writers who vastly exaggerate China's rise!" See, "The most absurd edge of the 'China as behemoth' meme."

Related: Paul Krugman on China (via Memeorandum).

I'll have more later ...

American Power in 2011

I almost forgot to post my annual New Year's Day report. Last year's is here. Not too much to add except that I'm actually going through the process of mortgage modification, and I don't know the outcome yet. There's a chance my family might have to move out of this house and start over. But at this point I'm fine with whatever happens. If you follow the link above that'll take you to my 2009 New Year's Day report, where I discussed my family's financial situation at that time. I had a lot of anxiety back then. Now not so much. Let it ride, I guess.

In other news: I've started writing a book. I'll update as I make more progress, but it'll be a semi-autobiographical analysis of ideological change in American politics, with special attention to trends in resurgent anarcho- and neo-communism on the progressive left. And blogging will continue, as always. I wrote 3,384 entries in 2010. I don't know if I'll keep up that pace, but there'll be lots of hot commentary and analysis in the months ahead.

Americans No Longer Think U.S. Economy No. 1

From Ronald Brownstein, at National Journal, "Down From The Pedestal" (via Memeorandum):

In the global race for jobs and economic prosperity, the United States is No. 2. And it is likely to remain there for some time. That’s the glum conclusion of most Americans surveyed in the latest Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll. Henry Luce famously labeled the 20th century the “American Century.” This survey suggests that most Americans now doubt that this new century will bear that name.

In the poll, only one in five Americans said that the U.S. economy is the world’s strongest—nearly half picked China instead. Looking forward, Americans are somewhat more optimistic about regaining primacy, but still only about one in three expect the U.S. economy to be the world’s strongest in 20 years. Nearly three-fifths of those surveyed said that increasing competition from lower-paid workers around the world will keep living standards for average Americans from growing as fast as they did in the past. Ruben Owen, a retired Boeing engineer in Seattle who responded to the survey, spoke for many when he said, “We’re still in a reasonably good place … but it’s going to get harder because other places are growing stronger.”

Across a wide range of issues, the poll found the traditional American instinct toward optimism straining against fears that the nation’s economic struggles may extend far beyond the current slowdown. On many fronts, particularly the quality of higher education and scientific research, large majorities of Americans still believe that we lead the world. And most say that the U.S. can remain a manufacturing leader.

RTWT.

We discussed exactly this topic in the conclusion to my World Politics course on Wednesday. China still has quite a ways to catch the United States on a number of measures. China's GDP in 2009 was roughly $5 trillion. The U.S. economy was nearly three times as large, at rougly $14.2 trillion. And while breathtaking, I doubt China can maintain its growth trajectory indefinitely (see, "China Is Not Another Ascendant Superpower"), and the nation's quality of life is still mired by its Third World standard of living for much of the population (see, "Cost of Living Increasingly a Struggle for China's Poor").

Especially problematic is Chinese authortarianism. I noticed today this piece yesterday at NYT: "China Moves to Block Foreign News on Nobel Prize." And earlier at WaPo, "On eve of Nobel ceremony, China cracks down and lashes out." The research on democracy and economic productivity suggests that non-democracies perform as well as democratic states, but given the information-driven nature of coming first-mover industries, I doubt China will compete effectively against the United States as long as it remains a closed, repressive regime.

That said, there's always the potential for increased conflict in U.S.-Chinese relations. The Economist reported on that this week: "The dangers of a rising China," and "Friends, or else: A special report on China's place in the world."

More on all of this later.

RELATED: "The Road to Ruin? American Profligacy and American Power."

Happy Thanksgiving From Blackfive

Via Theo Spark:

I almost skipped posting this, but Uncle Jimbo pulls off some Reaganite optimism toward the end of the clip. It's good to hear, considering everything of late.

Chalmers Johnson Obituaries

Following up my post, "Chalmers Johnson, 1931-2010."

WaPo published an obituary yesterday, "Renowned Asia Scholar Chalmers Johnson Dies at 79."

Dr. Johnson's interest in Asia began in 1953, after he graduated with an economics degree from the University of California at Berkeley and became an officer in the Navy aboard a landing ship tank, a shallow-bottomed cargo vessel.

During his wartime service, Dr. Johnson's ship ferried North Korean prisoners back across the demarcation line but often experienced mechanical trouble and was sent to Yokohama, Japan, for repairs.

While waiting for the vessel to be fixed, Dr. Johnson bided his time by learning Japanese and examining the country's culture, economy and longtime turbulent relationship with China.

When he returned to Berkeley in 1955, Dr. Johnson began studying political science and immersed himself in texts related to Asia. For his doctoral thesis, Dr. Johnson explored the rise of the Communist party in China, which he claimed was rooted in a contagious zeitgeist of nationalism shared among much of the country's poor.

To illustrate his point, he compared the rise of Communism in China to that of Yugoslavia shortly after the Germans invaded that eastern European country in World War II, where many peasants became fervently nationalistic and mobilized under the Yugoslav Communist party leadership.

He received a doctorate in 1961 and embarked on a year-long Ford Foundation fellowship in Tokyo. During that time, he revised his thesis and in 1962 it was released as a book - "Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937-1945," - the same year he joined the Berkeley political science faculty.

In 1982, Dr. Johnson released "MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975," where he reported on the Japanese government's control over the country's capitalistic market.

It was in the research to that book that Dr. Johnson said he initially became disillusioned with what he would later term "American imperialism" abroad and would lead him "to see clearly for the first time the shape of the empire that I had so long uncritically supported."

The full obituary at the link.

UC San Diego has a feature as well, "Leading Scholar on Japan - Chalmers Johnson (1931-2010) - Left Lasting Legacy at UC San Diego."

The Road to Ruin? American Profligacy and American Power

I've mentioned this piece a number of times now, from Roger Altman and Richard Haass, "The Consequences of Fiscal Irresponsibility." The introduction provides the background to America's massive fiscal overhang, and then this:

It is important to understand the impact of all this debt. As it grows, interest rates inevitably rise. As they do, the U.S. government's annual interest expense -- the cost of borrowing money -- will rise from one percent of GDP to four percent or more. At that point, interest expense would rival defense expenditures. And it would exceed all domestic discretionary spending, a category that includes spending on infrastructure, education, energy, and agriculture -- in effect, anything other than entitlements and national security. The U.S. Treasury would need to borrow a staggering $5 trillion every single year, both to finance deficits and to refinance maturing debt.

Yet the real outlook for deficits and debt is much worse than these forecasts. For one thing, the debt that the United States effectively guarantees but that is not included in official totals is almost equal to the Treasury Department's stated $9 trillion total. In particular, the debt of government-sponsored enterprises is another $8 trillion. The biggest of these are the essentially bankrupt housing finance agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They have been placed into federal conservatorship, and for all practical purposes, their debt is equivalent to U.S. Treasury debt. The American taxpayer stands fully behind it.

State and local governments also owe huge amounts, on the order of $3 trillion. And again, Washington indirectly stands behind much or all of it. This sector is deeply distressed, with the largest state, California, recently issuing IOUs. Moreover, many state and municipal pension systems use an antiquated pay-as-you-go funding approach, which has left them underfunded by another $1 trillion.

The post-2020 fiscal outlook is downright apocalyptic, for two reasons. First, the aging of the U.S. population will drive sharp increases in health care costs (and at the same time, more Americans will be retired). Second, federal interest expense will rise exponentially, as the Treasury's borrowing costs grow with the debt. The Congressional Budget Office projects that official federal debt (excluding government-sponsored enterprises) could hit 110 percent of GDP by 2025 and 180 percent by 2035. Adjusting these forecasts for the inevitably slower growth that would accompany such quickly rising debt levels means hitting those stratospheric ratios sooner.

Why is this scenario so dangerous? One reason is that a large amount of federal borrowing would eat up the stock of private capital that is available to finance investment. A higher and higher percentage of personal savings would be diverted to purchasing government debt and away from productivity-enhancing investments in equipment and technology. This would shrink the base of productive capital and flatten GDP and family incomes. As more and more debt piled up, growth would slow and Americans' standard of living would fall.

In addition, interest expense would become so large as to crowd out whole categories of federal spending. Budgets for research, education, and infrastructure, to name but three examples, would inevitably decline in inflation-adjusted terms. Washington's capacity to respond to domestic crises, such as the recent recession, would also fade. All of this would further undermine families' incomes.

More at the link.

My problem with this piece is that it's way too pessimistic, even for a problem of this magnitude. There's no discussion of how tax receipts rise dramatically during periods of robust economic growth. So should the administration agree to the extention of the Bush tax cuts from 2003, it's possible that a surge in GDP --- with a boom in individual and corporate profits --- could send a significant windfall of revenue to the treasury. This was indeed happening by the last couple of years of the Bush administration, and it's likely to happen over the next few years, now that the GOP has retaken the House. See the commentary at Wall Street Journal, "Liberal Tax Revolt."

And refer to my bullish comments from Saturday on the international aspects of coming growth domestically: "The World in China's Orbit?"

Chalmers Johnson, 1931-2010

Professor Chalmers Johnson has died.

Steve Clemons has reflections (via Memeorandum), and see also the links at Google so far. Leftists lionize Johnson --- not to mention paleocon America-bashers --- for his research on the purported American empire. Much more important is Johnson's work in comparatitve political science.

Below I've re-posted an essay on Johnson from January 31, 2007, "Chalmers Johnson and America's Imperial Decline."

*****

Chalmers Johnson's one of the nation's foremost experts on Japanese politics and international economic competitiveness. A professor emeritus at UC San Diego, Johnson's book, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975, remains one of the most important selections on Japanese politics graduate syllabi. In recent years Johnson's been writing on trends in American foreign policy, particularly the consequences of America's clandestine intelligence operations and the "blowback" from U.S. strategic reach and ambition.

Johnson's got a new book out, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Empire, which looks at what Johnson sees are threats to the republic from the country's massive military industial complex, which emerged from our post-World War II foreign policy of containing threats to U.S. national security.

Nemesis received an outstanding review by Tim Rutten in today's Calendar at the Los Angeles Times:

The thesis proffered here is that, since the end of World War II, the United States has been undergoing a kind of creeping coup in which the growth of an imperial presidency, the development of the CIA as a secret presidential army, the bloating of an outsized military establishment, and a venal and derelict Congress have conspired to undermine the American republic — perhaps irremediably.

Much of what Johnson denounces is the Bush administration's advocacy of executive branch supremacy in the realm of national security, manifest, for example, in the adminstration's early policies on the detention and torture of enemy combatants. But Johnson goes too far in making his case, essentially equating the Bush administration's excesses with the totalitarianism of Hitler's Nazi regime. Here's what Rutten says about that analytical overstretch:

Many of the conclusions Johnson teases from his shrewdly assembled and analyzed material are not so convincing. For example, appropriating Hannah Arendt's description of Adolf Eichmann — "desk murderer" — and applying it to Cheney, George W. Bush and Donald H. Rumsfeld isn't just histrionic, it's wrong on the merits, wrong in ways so fundamental that it renders moral judgment itself a uselessly blunt instrument. However horrific events in Iraq have been, they have nothing in common with Hitlerian Germany's "final solution," and it does violence to both reason and history to carelessly suggest otherwise for mere effect.

On the other hand, when Johnson argues that America "will never again know peace, nor in all probability survive very long as a nation, unless we abolish the CIA, restore intelligence collecting to the State Department, and remove all but purely military functions from the Pentagon," he presents a case that demands consideration.

That sounds pretty fair. Rutten goes on to give additional examples of the difficulties of Johnson's analysis. For example, even if the Bush administration succeeded in elevating White House power into an "imperial presidency," the election of a Democratic majority in the November midterms has already started the process of restoring the balance of power among the branches in the federal system. The democracy's not in jeopardy of succumbing to a military dictatorship any time soon, as Rutten ably points out.

(An interesting aside here is that Johnson's book shares its title, Nemesis, with the second edition of Ian Kershaw's authoritative biography of Adolph Hitler, Hitler: 1936-1945, Nemesis. I agree with Rutten, though, that comparing Bush to Hitler -- or U.S. foreign policy to Nazi foreign policy -- defies reason. The antiwar left, nonetheless, loves to denounce the Bush administration as fascist. Whether the shared title was deliberate or coincidental is an intriguing footnote to Johnson's scholarship.)

I've been reluctant to read Johnson's latest books. Upon skimming The Sorrows of Empire at Barnes and Noble, for example, I got the feeling the work was just a dressed-up, high-brow anitwar attack on the Bush administration war policies. Rutten's cool-handed review has convinced to give Johnson's writing a second look, however. There's a growing debate on America's continued leadership of the global system -- which I have discussed here and here, for example -- and Johnson's work certainly adds an important dimension to the discussion.

The World in China's Orbit?

From Niall Ferguson, at Wall Street Journal, "In China's Orbit":

Today per capita GDP in China is 19% that of the U.S., compared with 4% when economic reform began just over 30 years ago. Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore were already there as early as 1950; Taiwan got there in 1970, and South Korea got there in 1975. According to the Conference Board, Singapore's per capita GDP is now 21% higher than that of the U.S., Hong Kong's is about the same, Japan's and Taiwan's are about 25% lower, and South Korea's 36% lower. Only a foolhardy man would bet against China's following the same trajectory in the decades ahead.



China's has been the biggest and fastest of all the industrialization revolutions. In the space of 26 years, China's GDP grew by a factor of 10. It took the U.K. 70 years after 1830 to grow by a factor of four. According to the International Monetary Fund, China's share of global GDP (measured in current prices) will pass the 10% mark in 2013. Goldman Sachs continues to forecast that China will overtake the U.S. in terms of GDP in 2027, just as it recently overtook Japan.



But in some ways the Asian century has already arrived. China is on the brink of surpassing the American share of global manufacturing, having overtaken Germany and Japan in the past 10 years. China's biggest city, Shanghai, already sits atop the ranks of the world's megacities, with Mumbai right behind; no American city comes close.



Nothing is more certain to accelerate the shift of global economic power from West to East than the looming U.S. fiscal crisis. With a debt-to-revenue ratio of 312%, Greece is in dire straits already. But the debt-to-revenue ratio of the U.S. is 358%, according to Morgan Stanley. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that interest payments on the federal debt will rise from 9% of federal tax revenues to 20% in 2020, 36% in 2030 and 58% in 2040. Only America's "exorbitant privilege" of being able to print the world's premier reserve currency gives it breathing space. Yet this very privilege is under mounting attack from the Chinese government.



For many commentators, the resumption of quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve has appeared to spark a currency war between the U.S. and China. If the "Chinese don't take actions" to end the manipulation of their currency, President Obama declared in New York in September, "we have other means of protecting U.S. interests." The Chinese premier Wen Jiabao was quick to respond: "Do not work to pressure us on the renminbi rate…. Many of our exporting companies would have to close down, migrant workers would have to return to their villages. If China saw social and economic turbulence, then it would be a disaster for the world."

Read the whole thing at the link.



Ferguson's a phenomenal scholar. I really enjoyed his piece on U.S. decline earlier this year, at Foreign Affairs, "Complexity and Collapse: Empires on the Edge of Chaos." And up until recently I'd been mostly bullish on the duration of American preponderance, but with the long recession in the U.S., and the political intransigence that makes the tough decisions (massive reducdtions in federal spending) nearly impossible, I'm growing more skeptical on sustaining U.S. hegemony for much more than a generation. It's not like we can't turn things around at home, especially on fiscal policy (see, "How to Cut $343 Billion from the Federal Budget"), but that we've got a massive collective action problem, particularly on entitlement reform, which hinders progress.



One point not discussed is cyclical economic trends, domestically and internationally. I've consistently maintained that the U.S. will not only come roaring back, but that we're soon likely to experience another decade like the 1990s (which stifled talk of American decline after our last period of self-doubt). And who's to say that China will ineluctably continue its path to the tops of international power? Perhaps the secular trend toward parity is largely inevitable, but the U.S. has assets that other former hegemonic powers lacked (continued population dynamism at home, for one thing, set to increase the U.S. population to about 400 million by 2050, something even Joseph Nye neglected to mention in his recent piece, "The Future of American Power: Dominance and Decline in Perspective").



More on all of this going forward.

American Exceptionalism

From the letters at Los Angeles Times:

People who believe they're part of a great nation represent a problem for those who'd like to tear the house down and start over. Thus the left works tirelessly to persuade other Americans that they're nothing special — that in fact they're so bigoted, backward and selfish, only a fundamental restructuring of society can redeem them.

As a vote-getter, this proposition has obvious limitations. Obama skillfully shrouded it in gauzy platitudes during the 2008 campaign, but issues like Guantanamo, civilian trials for accused terrorists and Arizona's immigration law have since made his government's ideological distance from the mainstream unmistakable.

Most of us see a good country with flaws. The left sees a flawed country with potential — and the last two years as progress.

Michael Smith

And here's the original Jonah Goldberg essay: "The Bashing of American Exceptionalism."