This appeared earlier today.
Why the fates of Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan hang in the balance
Americans and Europeans truly have blindfolds on if they think they can raise their glasses to a happy new year while missiles rain down on Kyiv.
Niall Ferguson
Updated Jan 4, 2024 – 10.07am, first published at 5.00am
Twenty years ago, I published Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire. I had wanted to call it Blind Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire. In the still jingoistic atmosphere that had followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, my publisher dissuaded me. By the time the paperback came out, I could at least insist on my preferred subtitle.
Despite the passage of two decades, the book’s core arguments still stand up. Indeed, the tragic spectacle unfolding in Ukraine reminds me why I wrote the book in the first place. Americans – and Europeans, whose wealthy yet geopolitically inconsequential Union I also criticised – truly have the blindfolds on if they think they can raise their glasses to a happy new year while missiles rain down on Kyiv. Writing in 2003, I was not in principle against a pax americana in succession to the pax britannica of the 19th and early 20th centuries. I took (and still hold) the now heretical position that most history is the history of empires; that no empire is without its injustices and cruelties; but that the English-speaking empires were, in net terms, preferable for the world than the plausible alternatives, then and now.
However, I was sceptical about the neoconservative project to reorder the “greater Middle East” under the cover of a “global war on terror” in retaliation for September 11. I particularly doubted that the United States would be able to achieve its goals of transforming the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq into its allies – or at least satellites. Had Britain’s imperialists succeeded in taming the wild lands north of the Khyber Pass, much less ancient Mesopotamia?
The reasons for my scepticism were what I called the “three deficits” of America’s strange empire that dared not speak its own name. The first was the economic deficit – the federal government’s fiscally unsustainable path, which would make long-lasting military and administrative commitments abroad difficult to afford. More broadly, the United States was a net importer of capital and hence a massive global debtor, in marked contrast to Victorian Britain, which accumulated a vast stock of overseas investments. If you want to run the world, it helps to own much of it, rather than to owe it.
The second was the manpower deficit – unlike 19th-century Britons, most Americans have no great enthusiasm for spending large parts of their lives in far-flung hot, poor and dangerous countries. Consider the short tours of duty served by most military personnel who were deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the way many US bases tended to be cut off from the local populations.
Likewise bunkered in bomb-proof embassies, deficient in local-language proficiency, and wedded to first-world comforts, few American Foreign Service Officers have “gone native” in the past 20 years. They didn’t get the chance.
Finally, and most importantly, there was the attention deficit – the tendency of the American electorate (and therefore its elected representatives) to lose interest in any foreign enterprise that takes longer than a few years to complete. The prediction that the American appetite for reordering the Middle East would not outlast George W. Bush’s first presidential term proved correct. Barack Obama based his meteoric rise on not having supported the war and went on to tell the world that America was no longer “the world’s policeman”. (Syrians soon learnt what that meant in practice.)
All that has happened since 2003 has confirmed that the three deficits remain a powerful constraint on the exercise of American power abroad. The fiscal deficit now far outstrips what it was 20 years ago. The total federal debt was 59 per cent of GDP in 2003; last year it was double that (120 per cent). The manpower deficit today manifests itself as the armed services’ growing difficulty in finding willing, able-bodied recruits: At 452,000 active-duty soldiers, the US Army is the smallest it has been since 1940. Finally, the attention deficit disorder is now so severe that the public expresses impatience with wars it is merely being asked to support with money and material. No American has been obliged to fight to defend Ukraine against Russia’s criminal invasion. And yet, according to recent polling, nearly four in 10 Republicans think that “in terms of military support, America is already doing too much”.
Vastly more here and really excellent reading:
https://www.afr.com/world/europe/the-fate-of-ukraine-hangs-in-the-balance-20240101-p5eujb
It really seems that 2024 has started pretty badly and it is hard to be very optimistic right now!
On the Digital Health front I plan to wait a few weeks to see what interesting initiatives are announced for 2024 and what progress is reported for last year. Time will tell I guess…..
David.
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