Oh Noes!

I really hate things like this:

http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/2010/08/striving-for-mediocrity.html

The U.S. as a second rate power? Second rate to whom? Sure everything listed is a problem, but I fail to see how the cumulative lack of an industrial policy, transportation policy, energy policy, and research and development policy automatically equals second rate power status.

This type of declinist jeremiad is boring, disgusting, and lazy.

The first question one needs to ask when faced with a statement about relative power status in the world is: Power to do what?

If the person making the statement cannot answer that question, if the purposes of power in the world cannot be defined, then there is no need for any further inquiry. Relative power becomes irrelevant at that point.

These types of jeremiads also need to be put within the proper context of post World War 2 international relations analysis.

At the end of World War 2 the United States was a gigantic colossus astride the international system in terms of industrial output and military power projection. Only the Soviet Army was a real counterbalance to U.S. power.

This is mostly because the Continental European and Japanese economies and industries were essentially non-functioning. Additionally, India was still a Crown Colony and China had not recovered from the instability of the early twentieth century. China was also suffering from an ongoing civil war. All of these factors changed in the next 30 to 40 years. Europe and Japan recovered, China's economy grew, India's economy grew, the Asian "tigers" (how racist is that?) emerged. These changes led to an apparent diminution of relative U.S. power. Political science and international relations scholars scrambled to explain what lay in store for a world without U.S. relative power dominance. Domestically, the theme of the decline of the U.S. vis a vis the world was used by conservatives to oppose everything from desegregation and women's rights to rock and roll.

Yet, by the 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, political scientists and international relations scholars were writing of unipolarity and the hegemony of the United States, willfully forgetting how wrong they had been about the importance of relative industrial output. The point here isn't that Political Scientists and international relations scholars are idiots, although a strong case could be made in support of that goal. The point is the overemphasis on relative power in the world without any solid definition of the point of that power is foolhardy.

I mentioned above how this type of analysis, relative power rises and declines, is lazy. It is lazy mostly because the author has a 50 percent chance of being right, and finds that probability high enough to justify the jeremiad. If the analyst is right, then book deals and I told you so tours begin. One gets lauded for one's prescience. However, no consequences result from being wrong. Very few people remember Louis Agassiz, and how spectacularly wrong he was in regards to the origin of humans.