Trillion Dollar Decisions

There are two trillion dollar decisions bouncing around our nation’s capital these days: healthcare and Afghanistan.  While each is significant in its own right, they are chapters in a larger story: the re-definition of American identity.

Ironically, one initiative intends to improve and save lives while the other wages death and destruction – achieving as yet unspecified objectives.  Both cost about the same within their projected ‘lives’ per the Congressional Budget Office and estimates leaking out of the Pentagon and the White House. While no one is suggesting it’s an either/or choice – the sublime notion of fiscal discipline notwithstanding – these choices illustrate what is likely a transformational time in American history.  Do we continue to assert our hegemony in the global system (with or without the cover of national security), or do we turn inward and take care of our own house?  

Even if we succeed at each – admittedly a foolish assumption – even if we actually take our healthcare system back from the stranglehold of the health insurance industry, pharmaceutical companies, state-based fiefdoms, malpractice attorneys, et al, and achieve affordable, accessible healthcare for all; or that we crush al-Qaeda, the Taliban, build a democracy in Afghanistan, or whomever/whatever it is we’re fighting for today … is it worth two trillion dollars and thousands of lives?  Are hegemony and/or healthcare the right priorities?  What about education, energy, climate change, economic development, scientific research, human rights, international law, or the dependability of the global financial system (to name a few other choices)? 

The larger issue is what makes a nation powerful and successful today –cherished by its people and envied by the world?  Which of the laundry list of initiatives collectively succeed in meeting this standard?  Which America will emerge in the next five years … ten years? What does it mean for our children and grandchildren? Will there be any trillions left for them to spend? Will they even be spending dollars?  Are we staring at the sunset of the American empire or its re-birth?  Do our leaders understand the enormity of the moment?  Is Obama the next Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, or Reagan; presidents who transformed our national identity and kept the American dream alive?  Or, are we destined to fumble our way recklessly forward toward a crisis where we are defined by powers, elements, and interests beyond our control?

The moment is Obama’s, notwithstanding the march of members of congress to the lectern to grab their seconds of fame, or the pundits who fan the flames of absurdity to claim the title of last loudmouth standing.  (They’ll still be there second-guessing everyone when this sequel is written.)  It’s time for Obama to sit alone and contemplate the larger issue: how to keep America on top … cherished by her own and envied my many more … keeping the American dream alive.  The answer may or may not include healthcare and Afghanistan.

America in Wonderland

Have we fallen down the rabbit hole?  Have we, like Alice in Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice in Wonderland, imbibed the concoction labeled “Drink me”?  Alice’s journey, read today, is hardly fantastic.  What was once considered a work of glorious creative madness seems now benign, even mundane.  Our collective sensibilities have been warped well beyond anything the Mad Hatter doles out at his tea party.  We have been slowly but surely Alice-ed.  But Alice woke up from her dream. Will we?

        America is Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty – teetering on a wall of debt and deceit, tempting a rogue gust of wind to send it careening beyond the help of all the King’s horses and all the King’s men.  Many, including economists who should know better, argue that deficit spending marks the path to stability and wealth, turning an ignorant eye on the savings and investment that built America.  Our leaders claim they are reforming healthcare while expanding it and re-binding us to a failed system.  We seriously consider doubling-down in Afghanistan to fight an enemy who is no longer there because we lack the political will to admit our mistakes and come home.  We sit around whining while smart folks took our money, saved their companies, and turned our tax dollars into their bonuses.  Our public education system is broken, and our power grid and transportation infrastructure is crumbling, while many of us honestly believe climate change is just another hoax and our future is assured if we’d just “Drill baby, DRILL!”  Our ‘reality shows’ are unreal, spawning nut-jobs who turn their families into hoax machines to feed an insatiable appetite for fame.  Our so-called news channels long ago chose opinion and invective over journalism leaving us all to decide between fiction ... and fiction ...  anchored at extremes of egotism.  The rest of the world sees us as vain and dangerous, but they have little to fear, the harm we do now is largely inflicted on ourselves.  We have become our own victim.

       Our unique drink – much stronger and more dangerous than Alice’s – is one part illusion, one part narcissism, and one part certitude.  We see things as they are and blithely re-interpret facts to bolster our myth of exceptionalism.  We look in the mirror and proclaim “I love me some ME!”  We allow faith to trump reason, trading intelligence for alchemy.  Yet, in spite of the volume, vanity, and vice, there is a solution in Carroll’s Wonderland.  In Wonderland resides the essence of greatness – that special mix of discipline and madness that just might save us from ourselves.

       We need a new drink. Keep the illusion, but trade narcissism for modesty and certitude for curiosity – and add a dash of sweat.  Let creative madness do its thing without allowing public parasites to bilk its treasure.  Set the White Rabbit’s clock back.  Return saving and investment to the altar of wealth.  Celebrate individualism without staring at our navels. Quit ‘tweeting’ and ‘YouTubing.’  And, turn off the damn cameras.  We’re not as clever or pretty as we think. Solve the problem, or shut up and get out of the way.

        As Alice’s Golden Afternoon ended, Carroll wrote,

Thus grew the tale of Wonderland:

Thus slowly, one by one,

Its quaint events were hammered out –

And now the tale is done,

And home we steer, a merry crew,

Beneath the setting sun.

May Lewis Carroll’s creative madness be ours.

Afghanistan: Let’s Get Real

History suggests, and our own experience confirms, that waging war in Afghanistan is a fool’s bet.  Two great powers have come before us and failed – the British in the 19^th century and the Soviet Union in the 20^th.  We went there eight years ago with a defined mission: destroy Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda base of operations responsible for terrorist attacks on the United States. We failed, perhaps because we decided Saddam Hussein and Iraq were the larger threat (or satisfied other ambitions), yet we failed nonetheless.

          We now have 69,000 troops in Afghanistan. By all accounts, including most recently that of Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, we’re failing still.  The government we supported to replace the Taliban, which we displaced prior to taking on Iraq, is corrupt and unable to maintain security. Afghans view the Karzai government as illegitimate. The Taliban has taken control of the border areas with Pakistan and virtually all areas outside the capital of Kabul. And, al-Qaeda operations now flourish in Pakistan – a state with 50 nuclear warheads. As a Taliban commander recently claimed in an interview with Richard Engel of NBC News, there’s little difference between us [Taliban] and al-Qaeda: “We both want to kill Americans.” Yet, the only Americans they have killed since 9/11 are the ones we’ve placed there, in harms way.

          Many argue the reason to commit more troops (40,000 more is the latest estimate by General McChrystal) is to, as Senator McCain argues, “protect the 69,000 who are there.” Others predict that not finishing the job means more 9/11s. But wouldn’t coming home better protect those troops? Is prevention of terrorist attacks less expensive than expanding efforts at counterinsurgency 7,000 miles away? And, what is “the job”? 

          The mission today has not been articulated beyond a stubborn resolve to “never give up.”  No compelling argument has been made that defeating the Taliban and/or al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and the border areas of Pakistan will stop, or even curb the activities of terrorists – of those who hate us (for whatever reason).  Even once those definitions and arguments are successfully made, another critical decision must be made: is it worth more troop fatalities and billions of dollars?  Are there better opportunities to invest the talents of our troops and financial resources?  Does it serve the best/highest interests of the United States of America?

          Absent a fully articulated plan and cost/benefit analysis that proves more compelling than addressing other objectives like healthcare, education, alternative fuels, etc., perhaps we should set our stubbornness aside and come home.

From ‘Super’ to ‘Default’ (and Back?)

Scholars and pundits love to spar over the nature and magnitude of American power in the global system.  In the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs, Josef Joffe, co-editor of Die Zeit and senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies takes up the side of American prowess against those he suggests subscribe to “declinism.”  He argues “every ten years, it is decline time in the United States.”  He makes his case for continued American unipolar dominance by pounding the keys of his calculator against traditional metrics of military spending, gross domestic product, and demographics – although he leaves the pesky issue of debt out of his analysis.  (Apparently his calculator doesn’t have a minus key.)  He dismisses “false idols” like China suggesting it is no more a threat than Japan was in the 1980s.  He wades somewhat clumsily into elements of soft power claiming America’s “unmatched research and higher education establishment” … “warrior culture” … and “convening power” (the capacity to call a meeting and have people show up) provide additional evidence of power.  In the end, just in case these arguments don’t stick, he anchors his case with the ‘default’ concept: whom else would any of us want “to take over as housekeeper of the world”?  His case reads like an evangelical running out of prophecies: from boisterous to breathless.  What he succeeds in, if anything, is surely unintended.  He paints a picture of a nation that is still winning a game that many aren’t playing anymore, and those that are play by different metrics. Maybe the world doesn’t want or need a housekeeper.

          The question Joffe ignores, or doesn’t see, is what does it mean when the player who is still ‘winning’ is doing so from a position of both relative and absolute decline?  Isn’t it possible that both the game (the model) and the way score is kept (the metrics) are what are really changing?  Is the United States the “last man standing,” as Joffe argues, because others don’t want to stand there anyway?  Is the state-centric model where power is measured by guns, money, land, and headcount, passé?  Is there anything about the Cold War bipolar vernacular that still applies in an asymmetric networked world where many of the key actors are neither elected nor bejeweled?  Joffe may be locked in an argument he may win and still lose, simply because it’s the wrong argument – on both sides.  He and the ‘declinists’ may be wrestling over the last claim on a mountain without gold – the right to win nothing.

          I’ll wager that what’s ahead for the global system and the way power is acquired, expressed, and distributed has little to do with historical models or calculations. Guns, money, land, and headcount may not matter as much. The rules of attraction and persuasion are changing.  America is well positioned to play this game.  But it needs to decide to play, and in so doing shift its priorities and resources away from old-school metrics.  It needs to set its sights on innovation and inspiration where intelligence gains primacy and empowerment at home and throughout the global system brings America back – from ‘default’ to ‘super’ again.