Suicide of a Superpower_Will America Survive to 2025?

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  Consider: China occupies thousands of square miles of Indian land in Jammu and Kashmir seized in the 1962 war. Her claims to the Paracel and Spratly Islands in the South China Sea clash with the territorial claims of half a dozen nations. Her claim to the Senkakus in the East China Sea puts her at odds with Japan. China has also warned U.S. warships, especially carriers, to stay out of the Taiwan strait and the Yellow Sea.

  In the fall of 2010, Japan arrested the Chinese captain of a trawler that had rammed one of her patrol boats in the Senkaku chain. Threatening a cut-off of “rare-earth” materials only China produces in abundance, Beijing forced Tokyo to release the captain, then demanded an apology and compensation.

  South Korea is angered by China’s support of the regime in the North that in 2010 torpedoed and sank one of its warships, killing four dozen sailors, and shelled a South Korean island, killing four.

  Russia has to fear a China from whom the czars took a vast tract of land in the nineteenth century. Gazing north at the world’s last great storehouse of natural resources, Beijing is surely contemplating one day doing to Russia what czarist Russia did to her.

  China is also constrained by her discontented minorities—Uighurs in the west, Tibetans in the south, Mongols in the north—and also by her neighbors: the Vietnamese fought a war with China in 1979. The Burmese suspect the ties of their secessionist tribes to China. The Taiwanese have not been ruled from Beijing for a century and cherish their independence. The Chinese in Hong Kong are fearful of the embrace of the motherland.

  Perhaps the most powerful attraction of the United States to Asia is an awareness that America, executing a long retreat from that continent and from its commitments of the twentieth century, represents no threat, while the same cannot be said with the same assurance of Beijing.

  There is yet another crisis confronting China: a growing dependence on imported food as her water tables diminish and arable land disappears. Writes Lester Brown of Earth Policy Institute:

  Since 1950, some 24,000 villages in the northwestern part of the country have been totally or partially abandoned as sand dunes encroach on cropland. And with millions of Chinese farmers drilling wells to expand their harvests, water tables are falling under much of the North China Plain, which produces half of the nation’s wheat and a third of its corn.

  Chinese agriculture is also losing irrigation water to cities and factories. Cropland is being sacrificed for residential and industrial construction.…27

  As Britain and Japan can testify, nations that cannot feed themselves and rely on fleets of merchant ships for survival are vulnerable nations.

  SOUTH KOREA AND JAPAN

  Fifty-seven years after the armistice that ended the Korean war, a U.S. carrier task force steamed into the Yellow Sea in a show of force after North Korea fired artillery shells into a South Korean village.

  We will stand by our allies, said President Obama. And with our security treaty and 28,000 U.S. troops there, many on the DMZ, we could do nothing else. But why, sixty years after the first Korean War began, should Americans be among the first to die in a second Korean war?

  Why cannot South Korea defend herself?

  Unlike 1950, South Korea is no longer an impoverished ex-colony of Japan. She is the largest of the Asian tigers, a nation with twice the population of the North and an economy forty times as large. Seoul had just hosted the G-20 economic summit. There is no Maoist China with a million “volunteers” in North Korea. There is no Stalinist Soviet Union equipping Pyongyang’s armies. The U.S.-built planes, guns, and tanks of the South are far superior in quality.

  Why, then, are we still in Korea? Why is every quarrel with the North our quarrel? Why is a second Korean war, should it come, America’s war? Why do we retain tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers on the DMZ facing 11,000 artillery pieces and hundreds of thousands of North Korean troops? The U.S. force is too small to advance into North Korea, and South Korea could conscript the soldiers to take their place. Why, then, are the Americans still there?

  The answer: our soldiers are there to ensure that Americans die in the first hours of fighting. Thus bloodied, the United States will then send an army like the third of a million men we sent in the 1950s. The U.S. troop presence on the DMZ strips the United States of its freedom to decide whether we wish to fight a second war on the peninsula and leaves that decision to the North Korean dictator. Our troops in Korea are hostages.

  While the United States has been a loyal ally for six decades, the U.S.–Republic of Korea security treaty should be renegotiated and all U.S. troops pulled off the peninsula. For a second Korean war, terrible as it would be, would not involve an interest of the United States sufficient to justify sending tens of thousands of Americans to fight. The decision as to whether we fight another Korean war should be left to leaders elected by this generation, not determined by a 1953 treaty agreed to by the Eisenhower administration and President Syngman Rhee.

  The same holds for Japan. Under the existing security pact, we are obligated to come to the defense of Japan, but Japan is not obligated to come to the defense of the United States. Why should this be so in 2011?

  Japan is not the destroyed nation of 1945, when she became a U.S. protectorate. We are almost as far away in time from the day General MacArthur took the Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri as the attack on Pearl Harbor was from Appomattox. Japan’s economy is nearly as large as and is more technologically advanced than China’s, and Japan has the capacity to build the air, missile, and naval forces needed to deter China or any other nation. Russia may still hold the southern Kuril Islands taken as spoils after World War II, but Russia represents no strategic threat. Indeed, Tokyo is helping to develop Russia’s resources in Siberia.

  The rebuttal: America alone possesses the weapons to threaten atomic retaliation on North Korea, or China, should Beijing threaten Japan with nuclear weapons. But that begs the question: why should America remain forever at risk of nuclear war when the free nations we defend are capable of developing their own nuclear deterrents?

  British and French development of nuclear weapons did not weaken America. It complicated the war planning of the Kremlin. South Korean nuclear weapons would cancel out any strategic advantage Pyongyang has gained from testing two crude bombs and would become North Korea’s worry, not ours. Japan’s possession of atomic weapons would be a threat only to those who threaten or attack Japan. That list does not include the United States.

  In the negotiations to convince Kim Jong-il to give up his nuclear weapons, Beijing—the indispensable party, as she alone has economic and political leverage over Pyongyang—has been singularly unhelpful. The prospect of Seoul and Tokyo acquiring nuclear weapons might focus the Chinese mind on solving the problem on the Korean peninsula.

  The Japanese and Korean security pacts should be renegotiated to restore America’s freedom to act in her own best interests. U.S. forces should be withdrawn from Korea, the home islands of Japan, and Okinawa, where their presence exacerbates tensions. Japan and South Korea could build or buy from the United States the weapons necessary for their own defense, which has to be more important to them than it is to us.

  From 1941 to 1989, America played a great role as the defender of freedom, sacrificing and serving mankind, a role of which we can be proud. But having won that epochal struggle, we found ourselves in a world for which we were unprepared. Like an aging athlete, we keep trying to relive the glory days when all the world looked upon us. Being the world’s champion of freedom became part of our national identity. We can’t let go, because we do not know what else to do. As our rivals look to tomorrow, we live in yesterday.

  AFGHANISTAN SOUTH

  On the last day of August in 2010, a front-page story in the Washington Times began thus:

  The federal government has posted signs along a major interstate highway in Arizona, more than 100 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, warning travelers the area is unsafe because of drug and alien smugglers, and a l
ocal sheriff says Mexican drug cartels now control some parts of the state.28

  This raises a question. Are vital U.S. interests more imperiled by what happens in Iraq where we have 50,000 troops, or Afghanistan where we have 100,000, or South Korea where we have 28,000—or by what is happening on our border with Mexico?

  In his 1994 memoir, Around the Cragged Hill, the legendary U.S. diplomat and Cold War geostrategist George Kennan wondered about his nation’s understanding of what was critical and what was not: “[T]he U.S. Government, while not loath to putting half a million armed troops in the Middle East to expel the armed Iraqis from Kuwait, confesses itself unable to defend its own southwestern border from illegal immigration.”29

  What does it profit America if we save Anbar and lose Arizona?

  “Mexican drug cartels literally control parts of Arizona,” said Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu.

  They literally have scouts on the high points in the mountains and in the hills and they literally control movement. They have radios, they have optics, they have night-vision goggles as good as anything law enforcement has. This is going on here in Arizona. This is 60 miles from the border—30 miles from the fifth-largest city in the United States.30

  Sheriff Babeu asked President Obama for three thousand National Guard troops. He got fifteen road signs. Prediction: After all U.S. troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Korea are home, a U.S. army will be on the Mexican border. For this is where the fate of the republic will be decided, as the fate of Europe will be decided by the millions streaming in from the Maghreb, the Middle East, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa.

  Six thousand Mexicans died in drug-related killings in 2008 in a war where cartel tactics include massacre, kidnapping, and beheadings. Sixteen hundred died in Juárez alone, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso. Thousands of federal troops are now in Juárez, where gun battles occur daily. Fifty thousand troops are now committed to this war that Mexico is not winning, as the Pentagon estimates the cartels field 100,000 foot soldiers, a force almost equal to the Mexican army.31

  After a cartel threatened to kill a police officer every forty-eight hours if he did not resign, the chief of police of Juárez quit. To show its seriousness, the cartel had murdered four cops, including the chief’s deputy. In 2008, fifty Juárez police officers were murdered. “The decision I am taking … is one of life over death,” said Chief Roberto Orduna Cruz.32 He would seem to have a point. A colleague’s head was found in an ice cooler outside a police station. The mayor of Juárez kept his family in El Paso. They, too, had been threatened with decapitation.

  “Corruption throughout Mexico’s public institutions remains a key impediment to curtailing the power of the drug cartels,” said the U.S. State Department.33 President Felipe Calderón retorted that while the murders may be committed in Mexico, the cash and the guns come from the United States.

  The drug war is killing our neighbor. While remittances from Mexican workers in the United States are down, U.S. tourism in Mexico has also begun to suffer. Beheadings around Acapulco have not helped. Warnings have been issued to U.S. college students to avoid Mexico, as kidnappings for ransom are common. Restaurants and bars in Juárez that catered to soldiers from Fort Bliss and folks from El Paso are shutting down. In Cancún, a retired army general sent to create an elite anticrime unit was kidnapped, tortured, and executed. Mexican troops swiftly raided the Cancún police headquarters and arrested the chief and dozens of officers in connection with the murder.

  So menacing have the cartels become that Freedom House, in its 2010 annual rankings, dropped Mexico from the list of free nations to only “partly free” as the state is failing in its duty to “protect ordinary citizens, journalists, and elected officials from organized crime.”34

  Mexico is at risk of becoming a failed state, a narco-state of 110 million with a border with the United States stretching two thousand miles from San Diego to the Gulf of Mexico. In the January 2009 threat assessment given to President Obama, the U.S. Joint Forces Command wrote, “In terms of worst-case scenarios for the Joint Force and indeed the world, two large and important states bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and Mexico.”35

  How can Mexico win a drug war when millions of Americans who use recreational drugs are clients of the Mexican cartels that are bribing, murdering, and beheading to keep our self-indulgent young supplied?

  There are two ways to end this war swiftly—Mao’s way or Milton’s way: victory, whatever the cost in blood, or surrender. Mao’s Communists killed users and suppliers alike as social parasites. Milton Friedman’s way is to decriminalize all drugs and call off the war. When Nixon declared the War on Drugs in 1972, Friedman spoke out in Newsweek:

  On ethical grounds, do we have the right to use the machinery of government to prevent an individual from becoming an alcoholic or a drug addict? For children, almost everyone would answer at least a qualified yes. But for responsible adults, I, for one, would answer no. Reason with the potential addict, yes. Tell him the consequences, yes. Pray for and with him, yes. But I believe that we have no right to use force, directly or indirectly, to prevent a fellow man from committing suicide, let alone from drinking alcohol or taking drugs.36

  Americans are never going to adopt Mao’s solution. For the drug users are often classmates, colleagues, friends, even family. Our three most recent presidents did not deny using drugs. Nor are we going to raise the white flag of surrender, as Milton Friedman urged us to do.

  It has been argued that we once outlawed homosexuality, abortion, alcohol, loan-sharking, and gambling as criminal vice. Homosexuality and abortion are now constitutional rights. Gambling and booze are sources of government revenue. Loan-sharking is done by American Express, VISA, and bank-owned credit card companies, not just Don Corleone and his family.

  While the libertarianism of Milton Friedman is making converts, as long as we remain a predominantly Christian country, legalizing narcotics is off the table. But the consequence of our decision to soldier on in the drug war may be a failed state of 110 million dominated by drug cartels on America’s border.

  THE RETURN OF THE NATIONALIST

  Which way is history marching?

  At the end of the Cold War, globalism seemed the inevitable future of mankind. Everywhere countries were coming together in common purpose. West Germany reached out to embrace East Germany. The EU, the model for a world government, began to lead the liberated nations of Eastern Europe into the tent, doubling its membership. A single currency, the euro, was created. NATO expanded to take in all of Eastern Europe and the Baltic republics.

  The North American Free Trade Agreement brought the United States, Canada, and Mexico together in a common market George W. Bush predicted would encompass the hemisphere from Prudhoe Bay to Patagonia.

  Globalization was the word, the wave, and the way of the future. A World Trade Organization was formed in 1994 to police the rules of global trade. Vice President Gore brought home the Kyoto Protocol establishing a global regime to control the greenhouse gases that produce global warming. An International Criminal Court, modeled on the Nuremberg tribunals that dealt with Nazi war crimes, was established to deal with genocide and crimes against humanity not prosecuted by nation-states. International acceptance of the doctrine of limited sovereignty had made a great leap forward.

  Supporting the drive toward the One World envisioned by Kant and Woodrow Wilson were thousands of nongovernmental organizations, scores of thousands of international civil servants, and the transnational corporations that represent half of all the world’s largest economic entities.

  Where Fukuyama had written of the end of history and the triumph of liberal democracy as the final form of government, Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat saw a planet brought together by American ideas and ideals, principles, products, and power. Interdependence had replaced independence as the ideal of the statesman.

  Yet, the seemingly inexorable move toward global unity and global govern
ance did not go unresisted. The American establishment was united behind NAFTA, GATT, and the WTO. The American people never were. French and Dutch voted down a European constitution that would have moved the continent toward an EU superstate. The Irish rejected a revised constitution, the Lisbon Treaty. They were made to vote a second time. The British would have killed both constitutions. They were not permitted to vote. The eastward expansion of NATO halted. Ukraine and Georgia will not now be admitted. Nor will Turkey be admitted to the EU anytime soon.

  The follow-up summits to Kyoto, Copenhagen in 2009 and Cancún in 2010, were failures. Global warming is on a back burner now. China, India, and Brazil refuse to accept Western-dictated limits on carbon emissions.

  Globalism has lost its luster. Few American children today go “trick or treating for UNICEF.” The Doha Round of world trade negotiations long ago passed its deadline uncompleted. Czech president Václav Klaus openly calls the EU a prison house of nations. When the Lisbon Treaty was ratified, Klaus declared, “The Czech Republic will cease to be a sovereign state.”37

  When world leaders gathered at Turtle Bay in 2010, Swiss President Joseph Deiss called on the United Nations to “comprehensively fulfill its global governance role.” Klaus took the podium to reject global governance and say the time had come for the UN and all international organizations to “reduce their expenditures, make their administrations thinner, and leave the solutions to the governments of member states.”38

  When the financial crisis broke, the Irish, British, and Germans bailed out their own banks, as did the Americans, who inserted a “Buy American” provision in the $787 stimulus bill. The Economist was close to hysterical.