Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Americans have choices ahead. Charles Krauthammer explains the direction that liberalism is leading our nation, through its foreign policy of apologies and appeasement, and through its domestic policy of increasing governmental control, restraining our economy and threatening security. He ends with how we can change directions. Brace yourselves, Charles went long today in this adaptation of a speech he made last week.

…my thesis is simple: The question of whether America is in decline cannot be answered yes or no. There is no yes or no. Both answers are wrong, because the assumption that somehow there exists some predetermined inevitable trajectory, the result of uncontrollable external forces, is wrong. Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is written. For America today, decline is not a condition. Decline is a choice. Two decades into the unipolar world that came about with the fall of the Soviet Union, America is in the position of deciding whether to abdicate or retain its dominance. Decline–or continued ascendancy–is in our hands. …

…Which leads to my second proposition: Facing the choice of whether to maintain our dominance or to gradually, deliberately, willingly, and indeed relievedly give it up, we are currently on a course towards the latter. The current liberal ascendancy in the United States–controlling the executive and both houses of Congress, dominating the media and elite culture–has set us on a course for decline. And this is true for both foreign and domestic policies. Indeed, they work synergistically to ensure that outcome. …

…The New Liberalism will protest that despite its rhetoric, it is not engaging in moral reparations, but seeking real strategic advantage for the United States on the assumption that the reason we have not gotten cooperation from, say, the Russians, Iranians, North Koreans, or even our European allies on various urgent agendas is American arrogance, unilateralism, and dismissiveness. And therefore, if we constrict and rebrand and diminish ourselves deliberately–try to make ourselves equal partners with obviously unequal powers abroad–we will gain the moral high ground and rally the world to our causes. …

…This deliberate choice of strategic retreats to engender good feeling is based on the naïve hope of exchanges of reciprocal goodwill with rogue states. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the theory–as policy–has demonstrably produced no strategic advances. …

…Domestic policy, of course, is not designed to curb our power abroad. But what it lacks in intent, it makes up in effect. Decline will be an unintended, but powerful, side effect of the New Liberalism’s ambition of moving America from its traditional dynamic individualism to the more equitable but static model of European social democracy.

This is not the place to debate the intrinsic merits of the social democratic versus the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism. There’s much to be said for the decency and relative equity of social democracy. But it comes at a cost: diminished social mobility, higher unemployment, less innovation, less dynamism and creative destruction, less overall economic growth. …

…This shift in resources is not hypothetical. It has already begun. At a time when hundreds of billions of dollars are being lavished on stimulus and other appropriations in an endless array of domestic programs, the defense budget is practically frozen. Almost every other department is expanding, and the Defense Department is singled out for making “hard choices”–forced to look everywhere for cuts, to abandon highly advanced weapons systems, to choose between readiness and research, between today’s urgencies and tomorrow’s looming threats.

Take, for example, missile defense, in which the United States has a great technological edge and one perfectly designed to maintain American preeminence in a century that will be dominated by the ballistic missile. Missile defense is actually being cut. The number of interceptors in Alaska to defend against a North Korean attack has been reduced, and the airborne laser program (the most promising technology for a boost-phase antiballistic missile) has been cut back–at the same time that the federal education budget has been increased 100 percent in one year. …

…Decline is a choice. More than a choice, a temptation. How to resist it?

First, accept our role as hegemon. And reject those who deny its essential benignity. There is a reason that we are the only hegemon in modern history to have not immediately catalyzed the creation of a massive counter-hegemonic alliance–as occurred, for example, against Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany. There is a reason so many countries of the Pacific Rim and the Middle East and Eastern Europe and Latin America welcome our presence as balancer of power and guarantor of their freedom.

And that reason is simple: We are as benign a hegemon as the world has ever seen. …

…There are, of course, major threats to the American economy. But there is nothing inevitable and inexorable about them. Take, for example, the threat to the dollar (as the world’s reserve currency) that comes from our massive trade deficits. Here again, the China threat is vastly exaggerated. In fact, fully two-thirds of our trade imbalance comes from imported oil. This is not a fixed fact of life. We have a choice. We have it in our power, for example, to reverse the absurd de facto 30-year ban on new nuclear power plants. We have it in our power to release huge domestic petroleum reserves by dropping the ban on offshore and Arctic drilling. …

…Nothing is written. Nothing is predetermined. We can reverse the slide, we can undo dependence if we will it.

The other looming threat to our economy–and to the dollar–comes from our fiscal deficits. They are not out of our control. There is no reason we should be structurally perpetuating the massive deficits incurred as temporary crisis measures during the financial panic of 2008. A crisis is a terrible thing to exploit when it is taken by the New Liberalism as a mandate for massive expansion of the state and of national debt–threatening the dollar, the entire economy, and consequently our superpower status abroad. …

Jennifer Rubin starts with an amazing call to Obama from Bob Kerry to act more like Bush. She then makes an important point, that Obama feels himself to be above any obligations of national or historical context. He feels he is above the presidency, above the nation. Whether he believes he must keep his own word remains to be seen.

…What is at stake, Kerrey argues, is whether Obama can cut through the cant about another Vietnam (the war hero explains: “This war is not Vietnam. The Taliban are not popular and have very little support other than what they secure through terror”) and keep his word. He argues: “When it comes to foreign policy, almost nothing matters more than your friends and your enemies knowing you will keep your word and follow through on your commitments. This is the real test of presidential leadership.” …

…Now maybe Obama doesn’t consider the promises of his predecessors to be binding on him. After all, he remarked after sitting through a Daniel Ortega rant that he didn’t want to be held responsible for the Bay of Pigs, which occurred when he was 3 years old. In other words, he may not see himself as the successor to previous presidents’ obligations. He stands above and apart from mere parochial Americanism. He is in essence a free agent, without the burden of deals, understandings, and obligations undertaken by those who came before him, and most particularly George W. Bush.

But Afghanistan is different. He was the one who defined it as a critical war. He was the one who set the strategy to defeat the Taliban. He was the one who hired Gen. Stanley McChrystal to come up with an alternative to the losing counterterrorism strategy. So it’s not merely a case here of stepping apart from his predecessors’ promises, but from his own. If he can’t manage to do even that, friends and allies soon will see America as unreliable and untrustworthy. It will be the dawning not of an age of multilateral nirvana, but of every-country-for-itselfism. The result will be a more dangerous and less predictable world. And it won’t be at all what the Nobel Committee had in mind.

More bad news from that Universal Health Care Wonderland, Massachusetts. Wendy Williams writes that they are being fined because the state changed the rules on health care.

My husband retired from IBM about a decade ago, and as we aren’t old enough for Medicare we still buy our health insurance through the company. But IBM, with its typical courtesy, informed us recently that we will be fined by the state.

Why? Because Massachusetts requires every resident to have health insurance, and this year, without informing us directly, the state had changed the rules in a way that made our bare-bones policy no longer acceptable. Unless we ponied up for a pricier policy we neither need nor want—or enrolled in a government-sponsored insurance plan—we would have to pay $1,000 each year to the state. …

…IBM seems like a rock of stability compared to the state of Massachusetts. It’s apparent that state health-care policies can change at the whim of politicians in Boston, and we might not be able to adjust to the new rules. The way we figure it, if we sign up for a state-subsidized plan we will be at the mercy of the state.

So we are sticking with our plan and paying the tax. But what bothers me most is that a similar health-care mandate is being proposed in Washington, and some of the same promises that were made here are being made again—such as that the mandate will never hit middle-class folks with a new tax. …

…The mandate in Massachusetts was sold as something that wouldn’t penalize people like my husband and me. But those political promises were only good for as long as it took to get the mandate enacted into law.

Paul Hudson, on the BBC News, asks what happened to global warming. He looks at the current theories.

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?  …