On the tenth anniversary weekend of the 9\/11 attacks, a remark to a global security conference held in Geneva underlined the urgency of the coming U.S. election.<\/p>\n
Speaking of the Arab Spring uprisings throughout the Middle East, an expert panelist from the region uttered a lament that would have been inconceivable anytime from 1945 to 2009: that, at this seminal moment in the world\u2019s most troubled region, the U.S. is not leading and through inaction is creating a vacuum that is proving very dangerous.<\/p>\n
The annual conference \u2013 a production of the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies \u2013 draws senior diplomats, military officers, and international security academics, as well as journalists and, this year, bloggers.\u00a0 The IISS is one of the leading non-government institutions of what was once called the Western Alliance, especially the U.S.-U.K. Special Relationship.\u00a0 Started during the Eisenhower years, it could now be called venerable.\u00a0 But over the weekend it showed a youthful hipness, at least to new forms of media.\u00a0 On the conference\u2019s first panel, the organizers included a free-lance journalist whose most notable outlet was his heavily trafficked Twitter feed.\u00a0 What can I say?\u00a0 Yes, he was insightful, and amazingly concise.<\/p>\n
Panel after panel took up topics that in prior years would have required extensive discussion of what the U.S. intended, where it wanted to lead, why it was doing what it was doing.\u00a0 For the first half of the weekend, the U.S. wasn\u2019t mentioned at all or only in passing.<\/p>\n
The dam broke on Sunday morning.\u00a0 On a panel about China and the Far East, a prominent American professor (he had served a stint in the Bush 43 White House) echoed Saturday\u2019s Middle Easterner, saying, \u201cIf the U.S. is not willing to maintain the balance of power in Asia, I am very worried.\u201d<\/p>\n
Over the remaining panels, one American after the other felt compelled to assert that the U.S. was not withdrawing from the world, just, one insisted, retrenching to pre 9\/11 levels.\u00a0 But then a prominent French scholar replied, the world today is not the world of pre-9\/11.\u00a0 Before 9\/11, the world was in a post-Cold War hiatus.\u00a0 Defense was cheap, and no global threats were thought to be accumulating.\u00a0 Now China is rising, he said.\u00a0 Others added Iran and North Korea.\u00a0 They could have included Venezuela and its allies in this hemisphere, as well as a potentially disintegrating Mexico.\u00a0 A noted British journalist summed up the America-playing-hooky theme: \u201cIn the last decade, Europe disliked America\u2019s strength.\u00a0 In the next decade, Europe will lament America\u2019s relative decline.\u201d<\/p>\n
The news since I returned from Switzerland has put big neon letters over the gates to our future: \u201cUnless you change your ways, abandon all hope, Americans who enter here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yesterday Italy was reported to be approaching China for bailout loans, even as China was initiating a major program of investment in the Caribbean.\u00a0 This is the kind of financial power America used to wield unchallenged in the world.\u00a0 It came from limiting government and maximizing freedom, even as we fought over where to draw the line between the two.\u00a0 Now we are living with the consequences of the first two years of this administration, when a unified Democratic White House and Congress raced without restraint to reverse that two-century-old order of priorities.<\/p>\n
Also yesterday, the administration trotted out details for financing the president\u2019s latest stimulus proposal.\u00a0 Though they didn\u2019t put it this way, it included taxes and other measures designed to weaken our oil and gas industry, our private airplane industry, and our private equity investment industry.<\/p>\n
And this morning, as the U.S. races to exit Afghanistan, in part because of strained resources, in part because of presidential preference, smoke was rising from the U.S. embassy in Kabul and a full day battle between Taliban and coalition forces had begun.<\/p>\n
My point here is that a feckless foreign policy and a feckless economic policy are inseparable.\u00a0 Sure the president and his advisors appear only dimly aware of the pivotal role of the U.S. in the global order.\u00a0 Sure they imagine they hold a \u201cget out of Afghanistan free\u201d card.\u00a0 You\u2019d think the Kabul attacks would give them second thoughts.\u00a0 But, then, you\u2019d think that one unproductive stimulus package after another would have given them second thoughts, and it hasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
To me this all says we must get the next GOP presidential nomination right.\u00a0 With rare urgency, the nation and the world are depending on it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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