NEW YORK TIMES: Last fall, television stations carried a 60-second ad for Audi’s A6 car. The opening images showed a pitted, potholed American road while the voice-over gloomily intoned, “Across the nation, over 100,000 miles of highways and bridges are in disrepair.” Fear not, said the voice; Audi’s smart gizmos would help. The spot’s message was clear: Roads in the United States are now so bad, you need a foreign car to negotiate them….
The authors are big hitters in the geopolitics genre. Robert Kagan coined what passes for a catchphrase in the international relations field when he declared a decade ago that “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.” At the time, Kagan, a veteran of Ronald Reagan’s State Department, was one of the leading advocates of military action against Iraq. Zbigniew Brzezinski, still best known for his service as national security adviser to Jimmy Carter, has filled the three intervening decades with a throng of books on the same terrain: what America should do in the world…
Above all, Brzezinski and Kagan unite in arguing against fatalism. American decline is not preordained, but neither is the status quo. If Americans want to remain on top, they will have to fight for that position, making some painful changes in the process (including, Brzezinski says, to a dysfunctional, paralyzed political system). But it’s worth it, chiefly because the current international order — more or less stable and free from world war for seven decades — will not maintain itself. Given what else is out there, the world still needs America. (more)
EDITOR: Any optimism reminds us of whistling in the dark while passing the cemetery. Our major problems: Squandering 7% of Gross National Product on a dysfunctional heath care system; wasting at least 3% of Gross National Product on foolish and cruel wars; the ‘Jim Crow’ war on drugs; the most regressive distribution of income of any advanced nation; unwillingness to fairly tax the rich; a nation subject to Big Oil, the Military Industrial Complex, entrenched health care interests, the criminal justice industry, limitless and anonymous contributions from special interests. We cannot even maintain our standards of living let alone move forward until and unless we enact necessary reforms in attitudes and laws.
