That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [15]
Over and above all of this, there is America’s visible demonstration of the connections between freedom, economic growth, and human fulfillment. The power of example is a hugely potent social force, and the American example, with its remarkable record of economic success, has had a particularly strong global impact. Of course, other countries are democratic, prosperous, powerful, and influential. The political and economic principles on which the United States is based originated in the British Isles. After the collapse of communism, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe were inspired to follow the capitalist and democratic paths by the democratic, capitalist example of Western Europe. The increasingly prosperous countries of Asia adopted their versions of free-market economies from Japan.
Still, it was the United States that helped to establish and protect democracy and free-market economies in Western Europe and Japan after World War II, and it is the United States that has been, over the past hundred years, the most consistently democratic, prosperous, and powerful—and therefore the most influential—country in the world. It is the American example that deserves the most credit for the global spread of democratic politics and free-market economies. In this sense, too, the world of today is a world that we invented.
Alas, no country is prepared to step in to replace the United States as the world’s government, the way we stepped in when Great Britain went into decline. Nor will our economically pressed allies in Europe and Asia shoulder the costs of these global services. Therefore, a weaker America would leave the world a nastier, poorer, more dangerous place.
In sum, America’s future—and the future of the world beyond America—depends on how well we deal with all four of our challenges. Because they are so important to the United States, and because the United States is so important to the rest of the world, it is not an exaggeration to say that the course of the rest of the century depends on how we respond collectively to them.
There is every reason to think that the United States can rise to meet them. Our optimism rests on our country’s history of rising to great challenges. America is a nation that won its independence through a daring, violent break with the richest country and the greatest maritime power in the world. Americans then settled a vast and wild continent and waged a bloody civil war from which they recovered so rapidly that they built the largest economy on the planet within a few decades. Our armed forces tipped the balance in Europe in the first great war of the twentieth century; and our tanks, ships, and airplanes, as well as the efforts of our fighting men and women, were central to the defeat of Germany and Japan in the second one.
Winston Churchill once said to his British compatriots that “we have not journeyed across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.” The same could be said of Americans. Yet faced with era-defining challenges, the country has responded with all the vigor and determination of a lollipop. It has no concerted, serious, well-designed, and broadly supported policies to prepare Americans for the jobs of the future, or to put the nation’s fiscal affairs in order, or to hedge against dangerous changes in the planet’s climate. How to explain our failure of will? Our political system has gone awry, and so cannot produce the big, ambitious policies the country needs. And the American people have not demanded that our leaders tackle the challenges we face because they still have not fully understood the world we are living in.
What world are we living in? What do we need to do to thrive in this world? Do we have the requisite policies and are we carrying them out effectively?