Obama's America 2016 (Non-Fiction)(2012)

T
he American Era, 1945–2016. This could well be the title of a chapter in a history book a generation or two from now. A future historian, contemplating the American era, might express surprise that a nation so young and robust, a nation whose power and prosperity was without rival in the history of the world, lost its preeminence so quickly. Previous great powers did much better. The Roman era, for instance, lasted nearly a thousand years; the Ottoman era, several centuries; the British era, nearly two centuries. Who would have guessed that America, the last best hope of Western civilization, would succumb this easily, pathetically, ignominiously. For future historians, the most incredible fact might not be America’s decline and fall but the manner of it. Ultimately, history may show, this fall was achieved purposefully, single-handedly. It was all the work of one man, a man who in two presidential terms undid a dream that took more than two centuries to realize.

I believe in the American dream. Born in India in 1961, I remember sitting on the floor of our verandah as a boy, thumbing through the
Encyclopedia Britannica
, reading about the great empires from the dawn of history. In every case there was a rise and a fall, as the Romans, then the Ottomans, then the British, and finally and ironically the Soviets all ended up on the ash heap of history. “Lo, all our pomp of yesterday,” wrote Rudyard Kipling in his 1897 poem
Recessional
, “is one with Nineveh and Tyre.” But there was one exception to the rule, or so I thought, and that was America. America wasn’t so much an empire as it was an ideal, an ideal of freedom and prosperity and social decency, a dream that “all men are created equal” and entitled to a “pursuit of happiness,” a universal dream, one that even a boy in Mumbai, on the outskirts of world power, could aspire to. And thus I conceived my own dream, the dream of coming to America. I wanted to move from the margin to the center, to be close to, if not involved in, the great ideas and decisions, the decisive movements of history. When I served as a policy analyst in the White House, it was the fulfillment of a lifelong aspiration. Finally, I thought, the dream is becoming real in my life. And it has been.

The dream started, of course, with the founders. Two and a quarter centuries ago, the American founders gathered in Philadelphia to come up with a formula for a new kind of country. They called it the
Novus Ordo Seclorum—
a new order for the ages. The founders were convinced that if this formula were adopted, the new country would over time become the strongest, the most prosperous, the most successful nation on the planet. They were right. America today is the richest, the most powerful, and the most culturally dominant country in the world. Not only is America a superpower; it is the world’s sole superpower. Americans live better, and have more opportunity, than their counterparts in other countries because they have the good fortune to be born and living in the United States. Historically this was also true of the citizens of other great powers: the Romans, the Ottomans, and the British all lived better, at the height of their empires, than did people in other countries.

But those empires ultimately declined, lost their dominance, and became irrelevant in the global arena. If Americans today are aware of anything, they are aware of the precariousness of their position as an economic powerhouse and world leader. Let’s remember that America has only been a superpower for a couple of generations, since World War II, and America has only been the sole superpower for two decades, since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992. So far, America has been the shortest-lived superpower in world history. And history shows that once countries lose their top position, they never get it back.

So are we approaching the end of the American era? The International Monetary Fund thinks so; the IMF released a report saying that the Chinese economy will be larger than the American economy by 2016. Some have disputed the IMF’s date, as well as its methodology, which uses purchasing power estimates rather than straight income data to reach its conclusion. But no one can deny that China, a country with three times the population of the United States, whose economy is growing at four times the speed of America’s, will surpass the U.S. in the not-too-distant future. In a recent article, “The End of the American Era,” Stephen Walt writes that “China is likely to overtake America in total economic output no later than 2025.” Indeed, it seems reasonable to forecast that both China and India will have larger economies than America sometime in the twenty-first century. Consequently, we seem to be moving from the American Century to the Asian Century. Not only is America falling behind, but Western civilization is losing the dominant economic and political position it has enjoyed for the past five hundred years. A great historical reversal is under way.
²

While the seeds of American decline can be traced back to previous administrations and previous decades, the pace of decline has dramatically accelerated in the past four years. Ordinary Americans can feel this decline in their income, their net worth, and their standard of living. Here are some indices. In America, between 2007 and 2010, median net worth fell nearly 40 percent—wiping out more than a decade of savings and home appreciation. This is the biggest reduction in American wealth since the Great Depression. As America declines, the rest of the world gains; to take a single example, the number of American millionaires dropped by 129,000 in 2011, while the rest of the world gained 175,000 millionaires. Economic growth over the past four years has averaged less than 1 percent, the most anemic growth rates since the 1970s. More than 13 million Americans are out of work. The unemployment rate in America rose from 6.8 percent in January 2009 to around 8.2 percent currently; the percentage of working Americans is at its lowest in three decades. Unemployment has risen despite the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars in stimulus and bailouts and other evidently unsuccessful attempts to restore economic vitality. Even the 8.2 percent government figure for unemployment is misleading; the actual rate is closer to 12 percent, since millions of Americans have given up looking for a job and dropped out of the workforce, and thus they are not counted in the official data. The poverty rate has climbed from 13.2 percent in early 2009 to 15 percent, which means that 45 million Americans are living below the poverty line. Food and gas prices are markedly higher; for example, the average retail price of gas rose from under $2.40 per gallon in November 2008 to $3.60 currently, a 50 percent increase. The federal deficit climbed from $500 billion in 2008 to over $1 trillion annually, and the country is now $15 trillion in debt, much of that owed to other countries, including some that are hostile to America. This figure refers only to debts accumulated by the federal government; it doesn’t count credit card debt, consumer debt, or home mortgage debt. In sum, by virtually all objective measures, Americans are worse off than they were four years ago.
³

Moreover, America has seen a dramatic erosion of its power in the world. America is out of Iraq and getting out of Afghanistan, though both countries seem unstable and not necessarily future allies. While it seems the world’s sole superpower can win short wars against weak opponents, it cannot maintain the peace, even in small, impoverished Third World nations. America’s huge nuclear stockpile, which provided deterrence during the Cold War, has been largely jettisoned. The current administration is reducing America’s arsenal to a few hundred missiles and seeks to do away with nuclear weapons entirely. Finally, America has seen its influence diminish in South America, Asia, and especially the Middle East, where anti-American forces are on the rise and America’s allies are increasingly isolated and endangered. Not since Jimmy Carter has America suffered such a stark decline of power and prosperity.

Who is responsible for this? At the center of the debate is one man, Barack Obama. There are those who think that he has nothing to do with any of it; that he inherited all the problems from previous administrations; that he has been gallantly restoring America’s economy and America’s position in the world; that he has faced unfortunate obstacles, mainly in the form of obstinate Republicans, but that success is just ahead; that if we only give him a second term, Obama will vindicate the hope and confidence that were placed in him in 2008. This is the liberal position, which I will show is dangerously delusional, utterly incongruent with the facts, although we still have to explain why intelligent people are so susceptible to such delusions. Then there is the mainstream Republican view, which is that Obama is a typical American liberal, a progressive bungler of the Jimmy Carter type. He wants to restore America’s economy, but he simply adopts one misguided policy after another. He wants to bring down unemployment and gas prices, but doesn’t know how markets work. He wants to repair America’s standing in the world, but his efforts to do so thwart American interests, undermine our allies, and bring our enemies to power.

So the Republicans shake their heads and say: well, he has no experience of working in the private sector, he is unskilled in foreign policy, he just doesn’t understand. We have witnessed four years of right-leaning pundits explaining to Obama that Iran and Syria are not our friends; that slashing our nuclear arsenal is not a way to make America stronger; that if we get rid of nuclear weapons Iran’s mullahs aren’t going to lose interest in acquiring their own bombs; that higher taxes don’t foster economic growth; that if we drill for oil in America we will become less dependent on foreign oil; that debt is reaching a point at which the economy risks ruinous collapse; and so on.

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