David Ignatius seems to be my whipping boy de jour or de month, or de whatever. Dave’s latest offense comes in a column nominally devoted to the disquiet with which Australians view Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, “Australians are mortified by Trump’s rise”. Well, seeing as I am American, my mortification far exceeds any Australian’s, but I also diagree vehemently with the moral that Dave seeks to extract/inflict in his last paragraph:
“Great powers sometimes crack under strain. Australia watched as the seemingly unshakable power of the British Empire became brittle and weary and turned inward. Global leadership isn’t a perpetual motion machine. It requires effort and occasional sacrifice. This year is a character test for the United States, and you need only travel abroad to understand how intently the world is watching.”
Sorry, Dave. The “seemingly unshakable” British Empire’s problem wasn’t that it was a “weary titan,” as the cliche has it. Rather, the BE stopped being a titan. Both the U.S. and Germany massively outstripped Britain, both in economic growth and population, by the 1890s. After World War II, the non-white members of the Empire, who had been mercilessly exploited for decades (in the case of India, for centuries) were finally able to escape the yoke. In the 1960s, even the white members of the BE, notably Canada and Australia, realized that their supposedly benevolent masters in London had been ripping them off for centuries and finally ripped up the economic agreements that had been siphoning off colonial wealth for the benefit of the “gentlemen” back home. The British didn’t become “brittle and weary”. Rather their economic base, limited as it was to a tiny island, was eclipsed by powers of vastly greater size, and the empire collapsed beneath the weight of its own inequities.
Sometime in this century the center of world civilization will shift irretrievably to the East, through the sheer weight of population. It is absurd to think that “character” will allow a nation of 300 million to tell a nation of one billion what to do. The future of the United States will depend on a willingness to understand that its power relative to the rest of the world will diminish over time. That will be the real test of “character”.
Afterwords
Shockingly, I agree with almost everything Dave has to say about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is the main burden of his piece. But recognizing, intelligently, that we are irretrievably (and desirably) part of a global economy and saying we have to tell the rest of the world what to do (as the British Empire supposedly once did) are two different things.
