The long-ago decade of the 1950s may have a lesson for our new decade, the 2020s. Start with Ike. During a presidency the stature of which has grown steadily in the estimate of historians, Dwight Eisenhower’s success flowed from two critically important insights.
The first was that American military power and diplomatic influence was absolutely dependent on the might of the U.S. economy. The second was embodied in his justly famous Farewell Address warning that an unconstrained “military-industrial complex” could threaten both our economic strength and our democratic liberties.
A generation later Eisenhower’s wisdom was validated in a widely acclaimed book by the British historian Paul Kennedy: The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict 1500-2000.
In this far-ranging study of five centuries of Western history, Kennedy demonstrated that economic disorder has been the invariable prelude to military and political calamity. In examining the Soviet Union and the United States he warned that both superpowers were showing symptoms of “imperial overstretch.”
Three years after the book’s appearance, the Soviet Union collapsed—largely owing to the massive failure of its economy. Thirty years later it is the United States that is manifesting acute symptoms of “imperial overstretch” via a deeply troubled economy laboring under the incompatible burdens of mountainous debt and runaway spending, compounded by a failure to recognize the limits of its power or focus on a coherent set of foreign policy objectives.
The glaring deficiencies of U.S. foreign policy and growing fragility of America’s role as leader of the West were harshly spotlighted at the recently completed G-7 Summit in England, as well as the subsequent NATO meeting in Brussels and President Biden’s first personal encounter with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva.
It was the hope of the Biden Administration that the President’s first trip abroad would be a celebration of their cherished theme of “America is Back” and an opportunity to rally the world’s leading democracies in a unified stand against a “threatening rise in authoritarianism” (i.e., Russia and China).
Instead, the trip became a showcase for the weakness and divisions among America’s allies and their collective unwillingness to stand up to China in a meaningful way. As described by Stuart Lau in Politico (6/10/21) – “China is the Elephant in the Room at the G-7”- the power of the Asian giant would cast a long shadow over all the discussions among Western leaders in this seminal week in world politics.
Awkward photo-ops and highly deceptive final communiques could not conceal the signs of division and lack of focus in and around the Summit. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and France’s President Emmanuel Macron continued sniping at each other over the relatively parochial issue of a “hard border” in Northern Ireland. When Biden urged the two to negotiate on their differences, Macron pointedly refused and further exacerbated the situation by continuing to advocate for the E.U. to pursue “strategic autonomy” from the U.S.
While President Biden was asserting his belief that G-7 economies “have potential to bounce back very strongly,” he was daily receiving ominous reports of growing labor shortages and surging inflation in the problematic U.S. economy.
Meanwhile a wandering bipartisan band of U.S. senators visited Georgia and Ukraine—formerly parts of the Soviet Union—offering vague but unwarranted encouragement regarding their military conflict with Russia.
One of them -Rob Portman(R-Ohio)- published an op-ed in the Wall St. Journal urging President Biden to tell Putin that he had changed his mind and was reversing his tacit endorsement of the Nordstream 2 pipeline. This came at the very same time that German Chancellor Angela Merkel had bluntly told her allies that her country regarded the pipeline issue as closed and not a subject of further discussion.
After their one-on-one meeting mainly dealing with bogged down bilateral trade talks President Biden and Prime Minister Johnson preferred to speak of the more elevated topic of “shared values” and invite comparisons with their illustrious predecessors Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, who had come together in the darkest days of World War II to issue the historic Atlantic Charter.
Any comparison between then and now is historically impermissible and denies a stark reality. At its founding in 1975, the G-7 nations constituted 70% of the global economy – today just 40%. It is very clear that the tectonic plates undergirding the world’s economic, military, and political balance of power are shifting and the consequences--however painful for America and the West--are plain to see for all who are willing to honestly look at them.
William Moloney is a Fellow in Conservative Thought at Colorado Christian University’s Centennial Institute who studied at Oxford and the University of London and received his doctorate from Harvard University. He is a former Colorado Commissioner of Education.