The United States has entered the third century of its existence as an independent nation full of doubts regarding its own future. And yet no other country is as vigorous, innovative, productive and well placed to influence the course of events in coming years and decades. Indeed, it will not be much of an exaggeration to say that peace and stability in our era and the well-being of the rest of mankind are to no small extent dependent on the strength and prosperity of the United States.
The second point is so obvious that it is hardly necessary to belabour it. Even so it may be useful to recall that governments of almost all leading industrialised countries have over the past one year been urging Washington to reinflate its economy and stimulate demand so that they can step up their exports to it and thereby revive their own growth. And this interest in the revival of the US economy has not been limited to its West European and Japanese allies. The Soviet Union, East European socialist states and several developing countries like India have been equally keen to increase their exports to America in order to be able to pay for the imports they need from it. In other words, they, too, have a stake in the continued strength of the US economy, whatever criticism they may otherwise make of it.
The United States, of course, no longer dominates the international economic scene as it did in the ’fifties and early ’sixties when it produced nearly one-half of the world’s wealth. Also the dollar is no longer the coveted currency it was till the mid-’sixties. But America’s is still the world’s largest and most dynamic economy and it cannot be ruled out at all that it will continue to enjoy and even increase its technological lead over its nearest rivals in critical areas for years and decades. Above all, America’s agricultural surpluses and the capacity to increase food output at will give it considerable leverage in dealing with friends and foes alike.
Disturber
The point about peace and stability is not equally self-evident. In fact, many countries have seen the United States as a disturber rather than as a promoter of stability and peace – a point of view which cannot be dismissed out of hand in view of the American performance in Viet Nam, its role in the overthrow of President Allende and its extraordinarily inept attitude towards China till the late ’sixties.
But peace in the larger sense of the absence of a world-wide conflagration has in our era been the product broadly of something like an overall power balance between the United States and the Soviet Union and of the willingness of Washington to act with a measure of restraint in the immediate post-war period when Moscow did not possess the nuclear bomb and, indeed, even much later when it could not match the US nuclear armoury.
More pertinently, a dramatic decline in America’s military power in the foreseeable future can destabilise the entire world scene to a dangerous extent with possible consequences which are too dreadful to contemplate. Not to speak of countries which are dependent on the United States for their security one way or another, even its principal rival, the Soviet Union, cannot wish its power to decline seriously. For, it, too, cannot view with equanimity the prospects of West Germany and Japan going in for nuclear weapons.
To return to America’s self-doubts, these are clearly the result largely of Viet Nam, the Watergate scandal aggravating distrust of the once widely respected office of the President, the disclosures regarding the activities of the CIA, the decline of the relative value of the dollar, the strange combination of inflation and stagnation, the sharp increase in dependence on the natural resources of other countries, specially oil, the growing awareness that the earth’s non-renewable resources are finite and cannot support an unlimited growth, the impact of the chemical revolution on the human habitat and the simultaneous and dramatic growth in the Soviet Union’s military prowess.
Destructive
In absolute terms the Soviet Union’s military power would have grown even if the other developments destructive of America’s self-confidence had not taken place. For, as Mr. Kissinger put it in his Boston address on March 11, 1976, “Nothing we could have done would have halted this evolution (of the Soviet Union as a superpower) after the impetus two generations of industrial and technological advance have given to Soviet military and economic growth.” But relative power is a different proposition. Indeed, it is difficult to believe that Washington would have failed to take note of the Soviet advance and to step up its own efforts in that field if for five long and critical years its political leadership was not almost wholly preoccupied with the war in Viet Nam.
Similarly, while it is obvious that the discovery of the limitation of the earth’s non-renewable resources and of the pollution of the atmosphere, lakes, rivers and the oceans by automobiles and the chemical industries had nothing to do with the Viet Nam war, the American people’s response to them would almost certainly have been very different if they were not already suffering from a loss of self-confidence as a result of that most divisive external involvement in their history. And there cannot be any question that the war fed inflation and aggravated, if it did not create, other economic difficulties. It certainly accounted for the devaluation of the dollar thrice in barely 18 months in 1971 and 1972. Also it created an atmosphere in which both the Watergate episode and the disclosures regarding it became possible.
Thus one cannot escape the conclusion that involvement in the Viet Nam war accounts to a large extent for most of America’s difficulties which have made the bicentenary celebrations a rather low key affair. It, of course, does not follow that the recovery of America’s self-confidence is assured as the country overcomes both the trauma of the failure in Viet Nam and other debilitating consequences of that foolish investment of human and material resources on a colossal scale. But the process of recovery is on, as is evident from the remarkable comeback the United States has staged in West Asia and, in a peculiar way, even from the recent investigations into the activities of the CIA.
These investigations are doubtless partly an expression of the puritanical spirit which promotes self-flagellation from time to time but these were also an expression, however faulted, of the American people’s confidence that even in these complicated days it is possible for them to live by the simple and noble principles which inspired the founding fathers. Which other country can think of turning the floodlight on the activities of its intelligence agency even in less troubled times and circumstances?
But it is ironical that just as the United States unthinkingly slipped into the fatal Viet Nam war at the height of power and influence in the wake of the Cuban crisis, the current recovery of the economy and self-confidence is accompanied by the feeling of what one may call spiritual isolation.
Mr. Daniel Patrick Moynihan is doubtless the most articulate exponent of this feeling. As he puts it: “Liberal democracy on the American model increasingly tends to the condition of monarchy in the 19th century: a holdover form of government, one which persists in isolated or peculiar places here and there, and may even serve well enough for special circumstances, but which has simply no relevance to the future. It is where the world was, not where it is going.” But Moynihan is not alone in taking this pessimistic view. The “danger of a philosophical isolation without precedent in American history” is, for example, the theme of an article by another distinguished American academician, Mr. Brzezinski, in the summer issue of Foreign Policy, New York. The title “America In A Hostile World” is by itself revealing of the theme.
Doubtless
There are doubtless American intellectuals like Mr William Bundy, editor of the Foreign Affairs quarterly, who believe that “there are bound to be ebbs and flows (to the tide of democracy), as there surely were in the years from 1715 to 1867 – from Magna Carta to the Second Reform Bill – in the Anglo-Saxon history” and that if the situation regarding the future of democracy appears discouraging “it is surely not so much so as in the 1930s.” There are also other Americans who are alive to the fact that the urge for greater equality has not been able to extinguish the demand for individual freedom either in the communist or the third world.
But right now the voice of the pessimists is dominant in the United States perhaps because it accords better with the popular mood. This will doubtless change if the process of recovery, economic and psychological, continues. America’s may not be institutions towards which, to quote Lord Bryce in The American Commonwealth, “as if by law of fate, the rest of civilized mankind are forced to move.” But they will continue to inspire and influence man in his endless journey towards freedom.
The Times of India 6 July 1976