Since gold had been entirely demonetized (by Nixon in 1971, Chapter 15), the major currencies had no value except against each other, and all the more-circulated currencies, led downward by the U.S. dollar, the euro, and the Japanese yen, were crumbling together. Imports of foreign-sourced oil grew from the 20 percent Richard Nixon viewed with alarm in 1973 (not to mention the 10 percent that worried Eisenhower in 1956) to 60 percent of a much larger level of consumption at five times the price less than 40 years later, but did decline to about 45 percent under Obama because of advanced drilling techniques, tighter fuel efficiency standards, and some conservative measures. Predictions for petroleum imports were optimistic, which indicated declining income for the world’s most mischievous countries. But world markets soon showed a lack of confidence in the ability of the Obama administration to cope with these problems even as the financial stability of the Eurozone wobbled badly, and France stepped backward by electing a nondescript Socialist (François Hollande), on a platform of raising taxes and lowering the retirement age.
Obama seemed to think that by signaling that the United States was no longer under white Christian senior management, all countries that were not white and/or Christian could set aside their differences with it, as if international affairs were ever resolved on any basis except national interests. After the “shellacking,” as he called the 2010 elections, voters were now turning the rascals out every two or four years.
5. SEEING AMERICA PLAIN
Barring a miraculous renascence of Obama’s administration, which was fairly narrowly reelected in 2012 over another diffident republican challenger, W. Mitt Romney,
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the United States seems to have lost its vocation for greatness in the absence of any rivals to it. After 1991, there wasn’t much American strategic policy, because there wasn’t much need for one. From 1756 to the end of the War of 1812, American leaders were establishing their country as a stable fixture in the world. Then, until the end of the Civil War, they were deferring or winning internal conflicts, preserving the Union. For the next 60 years, with the brief diversion of Woodrow Wilson’s foray to turn the German emperor’s provocations into the attempted evangelization of the world for democracy and world government, America was just growing, rapidly and by all measurements—the natural, thrusting, irrepressible growth of what the whole world now knew to be a predestined nation. And from the depths of the Great Depression to the end of the Cold War was what its greatest modern leader called America’s rendezvous with that evidently approaching (though not exactly manifest) destiny. One adversary after another was laid low: economic and psychological depression, the threats of Nazism and Japanese imperialism, and then international communism. The country had run out of adversaries, except within, and a ragtag of terrorists abroad.
Almost two years before Richard Nixon enumerated his geopolitical reasoning for the outreach to China, he told Americans (in his Silent Majority speech of November 3, 1969) that North Vietnam “cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.” This was the real challenge to American supremacy, the ability of the United States to sustain a will to greatness when it had nothing left to prove, no foreign power to surpass, and no serious direct or even remote threat from any other nation or coalition of nations. And this has proved a doughty challenge in the 20 years since the end of the Soviet Union.
The United States in 2012 was in full decline by all normal measurements. Its economy was sluggish, misoriented to discarded criteria of mindless consumption, low investment, and no savings; its justice system was corrupt and oppressive and produced 6 to 12 times the per capita number of incarcerated people as other prosperous democracies, on behalf of a war on drugs that is an exercise in hypocrisy and futility in which America has been more decisively defeated than in any war it actually waged. A rogue prosecutocracy terrorizes the country; it wins 99.5 per cent of its cases, 97 percent without a trial, so stacked is the judicial deck and withered the guarantees of individual liberties in the Bill of Rights. Forty-eight million Americans have a criminal record and there is minimal general recognition of the evils of the system.
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It is less, but still significantly, dependent on oil-exporting countries that do not wish it well and use their price-gouging to promote worldwide anti-Western and particularly anti-American activity. Public education standards have eroded drastically, and most recent immigration has been illegal and of unskilled labor, as the springs of American ascent in the world, the more easily assimilable and comparably cultured Central and Eastern Europeans, have dried up, and in any case had the gate slammed in their face tragically, starting in 1925. American democracy is corroded, is based on the agitation of self-serving interests, and is in permanent election campaign, and presidential campaigns now require $1 billion or more for each side. The quality of national candidates and congressional leaders has declined precipitously.
In sum, American exceptionalism, which was always to a degree a fraud (because of the mistreatment of African Americans and the comparable democratic rights of the British, Dutch, Swiss, and Scandinavians), is now only a matter of the country’s immense scale, and of the continuing credulity and dedication of the American masses. Dissident conservatives still celebrate the Tea Party, unaware of the questionable purposes of the original; most Americans still work hard and believe in the revolutionary purity of their origins and the unique democratic values of their country. They are generally aware that America made democracy the dominant world political system, but not that the United States is not now a very well-functioning democracy itself.
But the United States has taken a good time for a setback. It has no rivals, and China will hit the wall of false financial reporting and unsustainable official corruption long before the difficulties of the United States induce any irretrievable decline in that country’s status. America missed the opportunity to be more tightly connected to the rest of the Americas and thus have a more comparable demographic bloc for its economic progress than China or India. It could have had effective federal union with large parts of the hemisphere had it wished it, at different times and in different ways, including Canada and Mexico, by which acts it would have added 50 percent to its population and 150 percent to its treasure house of natural resources. But most of Latin America and certainly Canada are steadily gathering strength and are fairly well-disposed, or at least unthreatening, neighbors, but have no interest in being too intimately associated with the United States.
The United States is a country that takes less account of corruption and hypocrisy and is more susceptible, in Napoleon’s phrase, to “lies agreed upon,” than many other prominent nations (the Europeans and Japanese, after their appalling barbarism in the twentieth century, seem to have faced and accepted their guilt and shame). The United States remains incomparably the greatest and most successful country there has ever been. And though it is vulgar, banal, slovenly, and complacent, and most of its leadership cadres have failed it, it is neither lazy nor driven by a death wish. Historically, when the United States has needed strong leadership, it has found it. It does need leadership now, and it is not easily visible in the present sea of mediocre strivers. But America is threatened only by itself, and Americans, collectively, like themselves, and the country will come round. Someone will lead it on with a new purpose more galvanizing than just borrowing for the bovine satiety of fickle appetites, in politics as in consumer goods.
Richard Nixon was correct that only Americans can defeat and humiliate the United States, and eventually, when they see it plain and have some serious leadership again, they will recognize the impulse to self-destruction as un-American, and turn it into one of national renovation. God, Providence, fate, or the Muse have not withdrawn His or its blessing, and the Americans will return to the manifest destiny of being a sensibly motivated and even exemplary country again, long before they have forfeited to any other long-surpassed nation the preeminence in the world for which America long strove, which it richly earned, and which it has more or less majestically retained.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to Barbara for putting up with this distraction in our lives; to Robert Jennings for his early encouragement, and to Doug Pepper of Random House Canada, Roger Kimball of Encounter Books and The New Criterion, and Morton Janklow, for their encouragement at various stages, to Henry Kissinger for his generous Introductory Note and his sage advice as the work was in progress, to Stan Freedman, Ron Genini, George Jonas, John Lukacs, Andrew Roberts, Brian Stewart, the incomparable Bill Whitworth and Ezra Zilkha for their comments on the manuscript, to Joan Maida for greatly helping to organize the material, and to Heather Ohle, Lesley Rock, Lauren Miklos, and Jenny Bradshaw for their invaluable work in getting it ready for publication. They all deserve credit (if any is to be had), and no blame, for the resulting book, and I profusely thank them all.
—Conrad Black, Toronto, March 2013
INDEX
Abbess of Crewe, The
(Spark)
Abercromby, James
Abrams, Creighton W.
Acheson, Dean G.; on China; and Cuban missile crisis; insubordination; and Korean War; and MacArthur; and Nixon; on Roosevelt; wit of
Adams, Charles Francis
Adams, Charles Francis, Jr.
Adams, Charles Francis
Adams, John; administrative skill; Alien & Sedition Acts; and Declaration of Independence; death of; and Federalist dispute; in France; Fries pardon; vs. Hamilton; integrity of; and maritime impressments; on militia; monarchist slant; Naturalization Act; at Paris peace talks; presidency of; as vice president; and Washington
Adams, John Quincy; as abolitionist; gag-rule repeal; intellect of; and Monroe Doctrine; presidency of; as secretary of state; and Texas; and War of 1812; and Whig Party
Adams, Samuel; as anti-federalist
Adams, Thomas
Adams, William
Adenauer, Konrad
Afghanistan: and Reagan; Soviet invasion; Soviet withdrawal; U.S. war in
African Americans: civil rights for; and desegregation; and G.I. Bill; Martin Luther King; and New Deal workfare; northern migration; and Obama campaign; poll taxes; and segregation; voting rights
Aga Khan
Age of Reason, The
(Paine)
Agnew, Spiro
Aguinaldo, Emilio
Aidit.N.
AIG
Aiken, George
Alabama
, CSS
Alaska: and Canada border; purchase of
Albany Congress
Albany Regency
Albert, Prince Consort
Albright, Madeleine K.
Aldrich, Nelson W.
Aldrich, Winthrop
Aldrich-Vreeland Act
Alexander, Harold
Alexander I, Czar
Alexander the Great
Algeria
Alien and Sedition Acts
Allende, Salvador
Alliance for Progress in Latin America
Alsop, Joseph
Alsop, Stewart
Alverstone, Richard Webster, Lord
Ambrister, Robert
Ambrose, Stephen
American Party (Know-Nothings)
American Revolution; antecedents; Arnold’s betrayal; Boston siege; Brandywine; Bunker Hill; Camden; Charleston; Germantown; guerrilla warfare in; Guilford Court House; King’s Mountain; Lexington and Concord; Long Island; and loyalists; Monmouth; New York retreat; Philadelphia defense; Princeton & Trenton; Saratoga; Treaty of Paris; Yorktown
American Tobacco Company
Amherst, Jeffery, Lord
Amistad
Amnesty International
Ampudia, Pedro de
Anderson, John
Anderson, Robert
Andrássy, Julius, Count
Andropov, Yuri
Anglo-French Entente