We began these two chapters about the U.S. with an account of my country’s strengths. We then discussed what I see as our most serious problems now unfolding. Let’s conclude these chapters by viewing those problems within this book’s framework of crisis and change.
Of the dozen predictive variables listed in Table 1.2 of Chapter 1, which ones favor, and which ones impede, the prospects of the U.S. solving our problems by adopting selective changes? My motive in applying this framework to the U.S. is not just academic interest, but also the hope of offering Americans some guidance in our search for solutions. If we could clearly understand the factors obstructing our search, that awareness could help us focus our attention on finding ways to deal with those obstructions.
The factors favorable to a happy outcome include material or partly material advantages, and cultural advantages. One set of partly material advantages includes our demographic advantage of a large population; our geographic advantages of large area, temperate location, fertile soils, and extensive coastal and interior waterways; our political advantages of federal democracy, civilian control of the military, and relatively low corruption; and our historical advantages of individual opportunity, government investments, and incorporation of immigrants. Those are the main reasons why the U.S. is now, and has been for a long time, the world’s most powerful country and biggest economy. The other set of wholly material advantages is the set of geographic ones that has given us the greatest freedom of choice (factor #12 in Table 1.2) of any country in the world: the wide oceans that protect us on two sides, and the land borders with non-threatening and much less populous neighbors that protect us on the other two sides. As a result, the U.S. is at no risk of invasion in the foreseeable future, whereas two of the six other countries discussed in this book (Germany and Japan) have recently been conquered and occupied, and two others (Finland and Australia) have been attacked. But intercontinental ballistic missiles, economic globalization, and the ease of uncontrolled immigration permitted by modern transportation now reduce our former freedom from geopolitical constraints.
As for our cultural advantages, one is our strong sense of national identity (factor #6 on our list). Throughout our history, most Americans have held that the U.S. is unique, is admirable, and is a country of which we are proud. Non-Americans often comment on the optimism and “can-do” attitude of Americans: we view problems as existing in order to be solved.
Another American cultural advantage is American flexibility (factor #10 on our list), which expresses itself in many ways. Americans change their homes on the average of every five years, much more often than citizens of the other countries that I discuss. National transitions of power between our two major political parties have been frequent, with nine transitions at the level of the president in the last 70 years. Our long history of maintaining the same two major political parties—the Democrats since the 1820’s, and the Republicans since 1854—is actually a sign of flexibility rather than of rigidity. That’s because, whenever a third party started to become significant (such as Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party, Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party, and George Wallace’s American Independent Party), it soon faded because its program became partly co-opted by one of the two major parties. Flexibility as regards core values has also characterized the U.S. On the one hand, our claimed core values (factor #11) of liberty, equality, and democracy are not officially up for negotiation (although we do have blind spots in applying them). On the other hand, the U.S. in the last 70 years has jettisoned long-standing values that were acknowledged to have become outdated: our foreign political isolation was cast aside after World War Two, and our discrimination against women and our race-based discrimination have been in retreat since the 1950’s.
Now, our disadvantages. The first steps for any nation in addressing any national crisis are to achieve a national consensus that one’s country really is entering a crisis (factor #1); to accept responsibility for one’s problems (factor #2), rather than blaming them on “others” (other countries or other groups within one’s own country); and to undertake an honest self-appraisal of what is and what isn’t working well (factor #7). The U.S. is still far from uniting around those first steps. While Americans are increasingly concerned about our country’s condition, we still have no national consensus about what’s wrong. Honest self-appraisal is in short supply. There isn’t widespread agreement that our fundamental problems are our polarization, voter turnout and obstacles to voter registration, inequality and declining socio-economic mobility, and declining government investment in education and public goods. Large numbers of American politicians and voters are working hard to make those problems worse rather than to solve them. Too many Americans are seeking to blame our problems not on ourselves but on others: favorite targets of blame include China, Mexico, and illegal immigrants.
A trend for wealthy and influential Americans with disproportionate power is to recognize that something is wrong, but, rather than devoting their wealth and power to finding solutions, they instead seek ways for just themselves and their families to escape American society’s problems. Currently favored strategies of escape include buying property in New Zealand (the most isolated First World nation), or converting American abandoned underground missile silos at great expense into luxurious defended bunkers (Plate 10.2). But there’s only so long that a luxurious micro-civilization in bunkers, or even an isolated First World society in New Zealand, can survive if the U.S. outside is crumbling: A few days? A few weeks? Even a few months? This attitude is captured in the following bitter exchange:
QUESTION: When will the U.S. take its problems seriously?
ANSWER: When powerful rich Americans begin to feel physically unsafe.
To that answer, I’d add: when powerful rich Americans realize that nothing they do will enable them to remain physically safe, if most other Americans remain angry, frustrated, and realistically without hope.
Our other big disadvantage: among my dozen predictors of successful coping (Table 1.2), the one that most flagrantly does not characterize the U.S. is willingness to learn from models of alternative coping methods practiced by other countries (factor #5). Our refusal to learn is related to our belief in American “exceptionalism”: i.e., our belief that the U.S. is so unique that nothing that any other country does could be applicable to us. Of course that’s nonsense: while the U.S. is indeed distinctive in many respects, all human beings and societies and governments and democracies have shared features, permitting all of us to learn something from others.
In particular, our neighbor Canada is, like the U.S., a rich democracy with a large area, low population density, English as the dominant language, freedom of choice resulting from protective geographic barriers, rich mineral resources, and a population made up largely of immigrants who arrived since AD 1600. While Canada’s world role is different from the U.S.’s, Canada and the U.S. share universal human problems. Many of Canada’s social and political practices are drastically different from those of the U.S., such as with regards to national health plans, immigration, education, prisons, and balance between community and individual interests. Some problems that Americans regard as frustratingly insoluble are solved by Canadians in ways that earn widespread public support. For instance, Canada’s criteria for admitting immigrants are more detailed and rational than the U.S.’s. As a result, 80% of Canadians consider immigrants good for the Canadian economy—a far cry from the lacerating divisions in American society over immigration. But American ignorance of neighboring Canada is astounding. Because most Canadians speak English, live literally next door to the U.S., and share with the U.S. the same telephone system of area codes, many Americans don’t even think of Canada as something separate. They don’t realize how different Canada is, and how much we Americans could learn from Canadian models for solving problems that are frustrating us.
Americans’ view of Western Europe is at first sight unlike our view of Canada. It’s obvious to us that Wester
n Europe is different from the U.S., in a way that it’s not obvious to us for Canada. Unlike Canadians, Western Europeans are far from the U.S., require at least five hours of airplane travel to reach rather than a short car trip, mostly speak languages other than English as their first language, and have a long history not based on recent immigration. Nevertheless, Western European countries are rich democracies facing the familiar American problems of health care, education, prisons, and others, but solving those problems in different ways. In particular, European governments support health care, public transport, education, senior citizens, the arts, and other aspects of life by means of government investments in policies that Americans tend to dismiss as “socialist.” Although per-capita income is somewhat higher in the U.S. than in most European countries, life expectancy and measures of personal satisfaction are consistently higher in Western Europe.
That suggests that Western European models may have much to teach us. But recent U.S. history offers few examples of American government missions sent to learn from Western European and Canadian models, as did Japan’s government missions of the Meiji Era. That’s because we are convinced that American ways are already better than Western European and Canadian ways, and that the U.S. is such a special case that Western European and Canadian solutions could have nothing relevant to suggest to us. That negative attitude deprives us of the option that so many individuals and countries have found useful in resolving crises: learning from models of how others have already resolved similar crises.
The two remaining factors constitute one minor disadvantage and one mixed message. The minor disadvantage is that Americans have not been steeled to tolerance of national uncertainty and failure (factor #9 in Chapter 1), which clashes with our “can-do” attitude and our expectation of success. Compared with the British, who coped with the humiliation of the 1956 Suez Crisis, and with the Japanese and Germans, who recovered from crushing defeat in World War Two (plus in World War One for Germans), Americans found failure in the Vietnam War divisive and hard to tolerate. The U.S. gets a mixed grade for previous experience of surviving crises (factor #8). We have not been defeated in war and occupied as have Japan and Germany, nor have we been invaded as has Finland, nor have we been threatened with invasion as have Britain and Australia. We have not undergone as massive a transformation as did Japan in 1868–1912, nor as did Britain in 1945–1946 and subsequent decades. But the U.S. did survive a long civil war that threatened our national unity, did climb out of the Great Depression of the 1930’s, and did successfully switch from peaceful isolation to an all-out war effort in World War Two.
In the preceding paragraphs I’ve taken stock of my dozen predictor factors as applied to the U.S. The geographic features giving us freedom of choice, our strong sense of national identity, and our history of flexibility are factors suggesting a good prognosis. Factors that stand in the way of a good outcome are our current lack of consensus about whether we are indeed entering a crisis, our frequent blaming of our problems on others rather than recognizing our own responsibilities, the efforts of too many powerful Americans to protect themselves rather than working to fix their country, and our unwillingness to learn from the models of other countries. But these factors don’t predict whether we will choose to solve our problems; they merely predict how likely we seem to choose to solve them.
What is going to happen to the U.S.? That will depend upon the choices that we make. The enormous fundamental advantages that we enjoy mean that our future can remain as bright as has been our past, if we deal with the obstacles that we are putting in our own way. But we are presently squandering our advantages. Other countries have previously enjoyed advantages that they, too, squandered. Other countries have previously faced acute or else slowly unfolding national crises at least as serious as our current one. Some of those countries, such as Meiji-Era Japan and post-war Finland and Germany, succeeded in painfully adopting big changes that went a long way towards eventually resolving their crises. It remains to be seen whether we Americans shall choose to build a fence (factor #3), not along the Mexican border but between those features of American society that are functioning well and those that aren’t; and whether we shall change those features inside the fence that constitute our growing crisis.
CHAPTER 11
WHAT LIES AHEAD FOR THE WORLD?
The world today—Nuclear weapons—Climate change—Fossil fuels—Alternative energy sources—Other natural resources—Inequality—Crisis framework
The previous chapters discussed crises within the bounds of single countries. Readers from elsewhere will be able to think of possible crises in store for their own country. Now, let’s consider the impending world crisis: What factors threaten human populations and standards of living around the world? In the worst case, what threatens the continued existence of civilization globally?
I identify four sets of problems with potential for worldwide harm. In descending order of dramatic visibility but not of importance, they are: explosions of nuclear weapons (Plate 11.1), global climate change, global resource depletion, and global inequalities of living standards. Other people might expand this list to include other problems, among which Islamic fundamentalism, emerging infectious diseases, an asteroid collision, and mass biological extinctions are candidates.
The Hiroshima atomic bomb of August 6, 1945 killed about 100,000 people instantly, plus thousands more who died subsequently from injuries, burns, and radiation poisoning. A war in which India and Pakistan, or the U.S. and Russia or China, launched most of their nuclear arsenals at each other would instantly kill hundreds of millions. But the delayed worldwide consequences would be greater. Even if bomb explosions themselves were confined to India and Pakistan, the atmospheric effects of detonating hundreds of nuclear devices would be felt worldwide, because smoke, soot, and dust from fireballs would block most sunlight for several weeks, creating winter-like conditions of steeply falling temperatures globally, interruption of plant photosynthesis, destruction of much plant and animal life, global crop failures, and widespread starvation. A worst-case scenario is termed “nuclear winter”: i.e., the deaths of most humans due not only to starvation but also to cold, disease, and radiation.
The only two uses of nuclear weapons to date were the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. Ever since then, fear of large-scale nuclear war has formed the backdrop of my life. While the end of the Cold War after 1990 initially reduced grounds for that fear, subsequent developments have increased the risk again. What scenarios might lead to the use of nuclear weapons?
My account that follows relies on information provided by William Perry in conversation and in his book My Journey at the Nuclear Brink (2015). Perry’s career underlying his expertise about nuclear issues includes his analyses of Soviet nuclear capabilities in Cuba for President Kennedy each day during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis; serving as U.S. secretary of defense from 1994 to 1997; negotiating nuclear and other issues with North Korea, the Soviet Union / Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Iran, and Iraq; negotiating the dismantling of the former Soviet nuclear facilities in Ukraine and Kazakhstan after the dissolution of the Soviet Union; and much else.
One can identify four sets of scenarios culminating in the detonation of nuclear bombs by governments (first three scenarios) or by non-governmental terrorist groups (fourth scenario). The scenario most often discussed has been a planned surprise attack by one nation with a nuclear arsenal on another nation with a nuclear arsenal. The purpose of this surprise attack would be to destroy the rival nation’s arsenal completely and instantly, leaving the rival without an arsenal with which to retaliate. This scenario was the one most feared throughout the decades of the Cold War. Because the U.S. and the Soviet Union both possessed the nuclear capacity to destroy each other, the only “rationally planned” attack would be a surprise attack expected to be able to destroy the rival’s retaliatory capacity. Hence both the U.S. and the Soviet Union responded to that fact by developing multiple systems to deliver nuclea
r weapons, in order to eliminate the risk that all of their own retaliatory capacity could be eliminated instantly. For example, the U.S. has three delivery systems: hardened underground missile silos, submarines, and a fleet of bomb-carrying aircraft. Hence even if a Soviet surprise attack destroyed every single one of the silos—unlikely, because the U.S. had so many silos including deceptive dummy ones, hardened against attack, small, and requiring implausibly high accuracy for Soviet missiles to destroy every one of them—the U.S. could still respond with its bombers and its submarines to destroy the Soviet Union.
As a result, the nuclear arsenals of both the U.S. and the Soviet Union provided “mutual assured destruction,” and a surprise attack was never carried out. That is, no matter how tempting was the goal of destroying the rival’s nuclear capacity, both American and Soviet planners realized that a surprise attack would be irrational, because it was impossible to destroy all of the rival’s delivery systems in order to prevent the rival from subsequently destroying the attacker. But these rational considerations offer limited comfort for the future, because there have been irrational modern leaders: perhaps Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un, plus some leaders of Germany, Japan, the U.S., and Russia. In addition, India and Pakistan today each possesses only a ground-based delivery system: no missile-carrying submarines. Hence a leader of India or Pakistan might consider a surprise attack to be a rational strategy offering a good chance of destroying the rival’s retaliatory capacity.
A second scenario involves an escalating series of miscalculations of a rival government’s response, and pressure by each country’s generals on their president to respond, culminating in mutual non-surprise nuclear attacks that neither side initially wanted. The prime example is the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the low opinion that the Soviet premier Khrushchev formed of U.S. President Kennedy at their 1961 Vienna meeting led Khrushchev to miscalculate that he could get away with installing Soviet missiles in Cuba. When the U.S. did detect the missiles, U.S. generals urged Kennedy to destroy them immediately (posing the risk of Soviet retaliation), and warned Kennedy that he risked being impeached if he did not do so. Fortunately, Kennedy chose less drastic means of responding, Khrushchev also responded less drastically, and Armageddon was averted. But it was a very close call, as became clear only later, when both sides released documents about their activities then. For example, on the first day of the week-long Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy announced publicly that any launch of a Soviet missile from Cuba would require “a full retaliatory response [of the U.S.] upon the Soviet Union.” But Soviet submarine captains had the authority to launch a nuclear torpedo without first having to confer with Soviet leadership in Moscow. One such Soviet submarine captain did consider firing a nuclear torpedo at an American destroyer threatening the submarine; only the intervention of other officers on his ship dissuaded him from doing so. Had the Soviet captain carried out his intent, Kennedy might have faced irresistible pressure to retaliate, leading to irresistible pressure on Khrushchev to retaliate further…
Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis Page 37