American Exceptionalism
Who Is America’s Biggest Enemy?
It’s not who you think
When I was a kid, the Soviet Union was our biggest enemy. Then the USSR broke up and our concern shifted to the Middle East. There was some recognition that China was probably going to be a problem eventually, but that seemed to be down the road. None of these entities turned out to be our biggest enemy, however.
I laughed when Sarah Palin warned us about keeping an eye on Russia, but it was probably the only correct thing that woman has ever said in her life.
All eyes are on Russia now, but Putin is not our only problem. It is not as if all our other enemies (and frenemies) can be set on the back burner while we address the invasion of Ukraine.
Our money and might have always allowed us to bend the rest of the world to our will. But our grip on power may be slipping.
Biden just cut off all Russian oil imports to the U.S. — just when gasoline prices are already very high. We hoped to get more oil from the Middle East, but they are snubbing us. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates reportedly refused to take President Biden’s call.
What happens if China and Russia join forces? According to the Wall Street Journal, Saudi Arabia may let China buy oil using not the dollar but the yuan. That’s a new and sobering clue that we are losing our grip on world power. The supremacy of the U.S. dollar has not been seriously challenged before.
We will see how long we care about bombed babies in Ukraine as the prices at the pump keeps rising. We were perfectly willing to wage war in the Middle East for oil. Our track record of caring more about humanity than oil isn’t that great.
Politically, Biden is already blamed for high gas prices, even though it’s hard to see what anyone could possibly do to lower them. You can put economic pressure on Russia or you can buy oil from Russia. Pick one.
In the long term, we need to shift to greener energy, but in the short term the world needs oil from somewhere, because for decades, we’ve decided to do fuck-all about developing other energy sources.
Which brings us to the enemy I mentioned … the one that is weakening us. The enemy about half the country doesn’t realize we have.
It’s us. We are our own worst enemy.
Do you remember (or perhaps you learned in your American History class) President Jimmy Carter’s famous “Crisis of Confidence” speech in 1979? He had tough talk for America. We needed to reduce our foreign energy imports. We needed to tighten our belts and conserve fuel. We needed to develop our solar industry. (Carter actually had solar panels installed on the White House). We needed to make sacrifices as a nation. Click that link and read that speech and think about how much better off we’d be if we’d listened to him.
Carter lost because he made us feel bad. Reagan won because he made us feel good. Off came the solar panels from the White House. People on the left like green energy and electric cars but people on the right like oil and coal. What if we had been working on renewable energy since 1979?
We might well be in the position of telling the Middle East to fuck off by now.
If we’d spent the last several decades funding research on better wind and solar technology, maybe Europe would be purchasing this technology from us rather than having a tragic dependence on Russia energy to run their countries.
But no. We didn’t want to make any sacrifices then, and now — long after those who made these bad decisions are gone — the whole world is suffering for it.
All our external enemies are still around, and we depend on all of them. It’s not a good thing when you need your enemies but they, perhaps, no longer need you.