Tag Archives: superpower

Big Mac…

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As it turns out, Doug MacArthur was right. We should have gone right ahead and pummeled North Korea into submission in the early 1950s and skipped over the last 60 years of them becoming increasingly batshit crazy. In the 50s it would have been socially acceptable to lob a few nukes at them, throw the Chinese back across the Yalu, and unify the Korean peninsula under the democratically elected government of the south. Today we have to send them grain and beg them for a chance to “talk it out.” Hindsight is a real pain in the ass, like that.

Big Mac, Curtis LeMay, George Patton, and even Colin Powell knew how to handle the kind of situation that results from your enemy declaring that they are no longer bound by the terms of a ceasefire… you destroy them with massive and overwhelming force. But we live in a civilized world now, where it’s impolite to even make that kind of suggestion for fear of being labeled a war monger or worse.

North Korea is a mess… and not the kind that’s going to be fixed by a shipload of food and asking them to sit down for tea in Panmunjom. But since our leaders don’t seem capable of even making sensible domestic decisions, my expectation of them being able to make the hard calls on the international stage is almost nonexistent. So instead of making the world just a little safer for democracy we’ll go for round 487 of the DPRK behaving badly and getting rewarded for its trouble.

Sometimes I just don’t see the point in being a superpower anymore.

Superpower America (or How’s that for Mixed Metaphors)…

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The actual future is going to look different than the future we thought we were going to have. That’s true if only because we’re notoriously bad at predicting the future – We’re all still waiting on our flying cars, right? I don’t think it’s going to be radically different to the point that Canada starts being cool or Hollywood starts making good movies (that would be some kind bizzaro universe). I actually have a sneaking suspicion that the future is going to be painful. Painful in that we’ve spent the last 30 years binging on cheep booze and grease ball cheeseburgers and now we’re about to wake up with a national hangover the likes of which none of us has ever seen. The fight to raise the debt ceiling ain’t nothing compared to the battle that will be joined when we realize we’ve got to actually start paying down the debt itself.

The future is going to seem painful because there’s every possibility that we’re about to experience a world where Superpower America isn’t. Those of us who grew up beyond the shadow of the cold war are going to have the hardest time adjusting because we’ve never had to moderate our expectations about anything really. You guys know I’m not exactly an alarmist, but my read of the situation is that bottom line: Superpower America is too expensive. How we go about fixing that with the least pain possible (the no pain option is well off the table), remains to be seen. So too does whether we have the national will to collectively make hard decisions about what is in the long term national interest and what isn’t; what we can pay for and what we can’t. These decisions matter. Economic realities matters.

Don’t believe me? Ask Superpower USSR how it works out when you pretend economics is an imaginary science. Spending ourselves into oblivion isn’t an option, but I wonder who’s going to be the first to offer up their sacred cows so we can try to avoid slaughtering the whole herd.