(This is Part 5 of a series. Go back to Part 4.)
A fourth kind of hurricane waiting in the wings is the fact that the U.S.—upon which the world still depends at this point—is seriously overstretched in a number of areas and has little or no margin of safety left.
We've touched upon the financial situation above, and discussed the consequences of the vast and historic debt bubbles that have formed. The bottom line of these bubbles is that they make the financial system more and more fragile.
For instance, the U.S. Federal Reserve is now caught in a conundrum. If it keeps on raising interest rates it will drive the U.S. into a recession as it becomes more and more difficult for borrowers to service their debts.
On the other hand, if the Fed doesn't continue raising rates the dollar is likely to crash because foreign lenders are becoming increasingly leary of buying the bonds of such a profligate government as the U.S. But a crash in the dollar would itself set off a recession. That's fragility.
But it's not just in the financial arena that this is occuring. Another example is the American military. The U.S. is maintaining over 700 military bases around the world, spending hundreds of billions on high-tech weaponry and tied down in an unrelenting mess in Iraq. In the process it has stretched its military almost to the breaking point.
This was shown most dramatically during the recent and ongoing crisis in New Orleans and beyond, when the U.S. National Guard was urgently needed in the afflicted areas but had difficulty responding because so many of its men and equipment were in Iraq.
Because of its overstretch military, if the U.S. were to encounter a true military crisis now it would face the greatest military challenge since Washington's desperate situation during the Revolutionary War 200 years ago.
If the Chinese were to invade Taiwan, if the Iraq conflict were to become a wider war, if the struggle for fossile fuel resources were to erupt into open warfare—to take just three examples—the United States would be severely compromised.
Those things and others may or may not happen, but that
something of that nature will happen sooner or later is a virtual certainty. In other words, as in the financial area, we are more and more dependent on the persistence of a comforting stability—a stability which is becoming more and more precarious with the passage of time.
This same phenomenon of overstretched resources is evident in the nation's infrastructure. As reported recently in the New York Times, the American Society of Civil Engineers recently surveyed 15 infrastructure categories
—including bridges, sewer systems, public schools and drinking water—"and issued an overall grade of D".
Warnings abound. The 2003 electricity blackout in the Northeast. The 2004 vaccine shortage. The California energy shortage of a few years back. American public school students ranked near the bottom among developed nations. And, not least, the flooding in New Orleans.
Infrastructure of all kinds is being starved for funds as the country directs more and more resources into militarism, unaffordable tax cuts, corporate welfare and pork-barrel politics. Meanwhile, we see government appointments based on cronyism rather than competence, producing a dwindling infrastructure of government services, as we've seen most recently in emergency management.
Abroad, a different kind of infrastructure is crumbling—the goodwill accumulated by the U.S. over many decades for everything from helping to defeat Nazism to our assistance in rebuilding Europe to providing a (mostly) salutary example of democracy and the rule of law.
Now, as polls have shown, the U.S. is increasingly seen abroad as arrogant, insensitive and pugnacious. This has resulted from such things as the Abu Graib scandal, the discarding of treaties including the Geneva Conventions and the Kyoto Accords, the rush to war in Iraq and so on. This has alienated much of the world.
It can be argued that all of this doesn't make a whole lot of difference. After all, we possess the world's largest economy and the world's largest military and we can do pretty much what we want. And that argument can seem true—right up until the minute that our fragility is tested by a pressing need for allies, infrastructure or resources. Then we may suddenly find that the well is dry.
(This is the end of Part 5. Go to Part 6.)
—jim sloman, 9.11.05
|
