After America - Mark Steyn [8]
What do Americans have to show for the debt this time ’round? Cashfor-clunkers? Stimulus funding for a stimulus-funding application-coordinator in Idaho? Take Your Child Bride to Work Day in Afghanistan?
As to worshipping false gods, even avowed secularists have their moments of evangelical fervor. There have been two competing theories at play in the twenty-first century. The first and better known is “globalization”—which is less a theory and more a religion with universalist claims. To its worshippers, globalization is some kind of mysterious metaphysical force that’s out there remaking our assumptions about the planet. May the Force be with you—because, if it’s not, you’re just a squaresville daddy-o receding in the rear view mirror of history. The high priest of this cult is the New York Times’ in-house thinker and beloved comic figure Thomas L. Friedman. Hardly a week goes by without the Times’ most frequent flyer filing from a state-of-the-art departure lounge on the other side of the planet and marveling at its complimentary wi fi, light-rail link, and the way his luggage was brought in by cheery native bearers in traditional dress playing some raucous Abkhazi-Nauruan hybrid of Gamelan gangsta rap on an affordable new xPod-iBox you can wear under your sarong made at a state-of-the-art plant by a small Uighur start-up backed by a Herzogovine hedge fund. All of which makes a forlorn contrast with the scene that greets him when he lands back at Newark.
The United States has two roles in a “globalized” world: it funds the transnational bodies, it keeps the sea lanes open, it’s there when an earthquake or tsunami strikes—at least until the debt and politically untouchable social programs necessitate sweeping cuts in military capability. Which, for great powers in decline, they always do.
That’s America’s first role. Its second is just as important: the burgeoning middle classes of China, India, and elsewhere improve their lives by making stuff to sell to us. America’s government is the guarantor of global order; its people are the guarantors of global prosperity. That’s the United States the world needs: in security terms, the order maker; in economic terms, the order placer.
Unfortunately, neither role is sustainable. America is on course to be the first great power in history literally to shop till we drop. And the way to bet is one hell of a drop, and sooner than you think.
“Globalization” has the appeal of all inevitablist theories: it’s gonna happen. Why? It just is. Don’t sweat it. Likewise, Francis Fukuyama and The End of History: No nation can resist the pull of western liberal democracy, and so one day the entire planet will be Sweden and there will be no more wars. These days, even Sweden isn’t Sweden. Ask a Jew in Malmö, if you can find one.
Against this globaloney is the thesis put forward by the late Samuel Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations. Huntington’s view is less appealing because it’s less sedating. Globalization asks nothing of us, whereas the clash of civilizations puts a cold hard question mark over the future. Huntington posits that cultural identifiers count for more than economic ones. A man in a factory on the other side of the world may make parts for an electronic gizmo Thomas Friedman plays with while waiting for the VIP lounge to call his flight, but that does not mean they share anything like the same worldview. It seems sad to have to point out something so obvious. Which, after all, is more central to a man’s identity? The fact that he makes trinkets for Thomas Friedman? Or the fact that he’s an Indonesian Muslim? In 1996, Huntington identified ten world civilizations, including three major ones—western, Muslim, and Sinic.36 A decade and a half on, China—the Sinic power—is on the rise economically but is demographically weak,