America’s Razor’s Edge Victor Davis Hanson
https://victorhanson.com/americas-razors-edge/
We are the most powerful country in civilization’s history but not invulnerable. Even America will finally bleed out if we continue to open our own veins.
Was it $40, $50, or $60 billion in equipment, weapons, supplies, and infrastructure that the U.S. simply abandoned in Afghanistan? That was that—no problem?
We had too much military junk anyway? We can just print the money to buy more replacement stuff?
Our enemies took no notice and instead thought, “Wow, what a powerful adversary just to scram out of Kabul and leave priceless weaponry behind—my God, we don’t wish to tangle with such a formidable power!”
Was that the idea in leaving as we did?
Was that “Flight of the Americans” the fitting epitaph to 20 years of blood-and-treasure nation-building to ensure another Bin Laden did not partner with the Taliban to attack the U.S.? Are we safer in 2020 from Talibanian terrorism than in 2001, given the two decades of costly occupation?
Are we so wealthy in treasure and blood, that Americans can fly pride flags, paint George Floyd murals, and birth gender studies programs in Islamic Kabul, while losing 2,400 lives, and seeing 24,000 wounded—before abandoning a $1 billion new embassy and a $300 million refitted secure airbase to the Taliban?
Is it no big thing that it will take years to resupply our 155mm artillery shell stocks, our Javelin missiles, our short-range missiles, after giving Ukraine $100, $120, or is it $130 billion in weapons, economic aid, training, and supplies?
Is America so internally secure that it can normalize shoplifting in its major cities?
Exempt smash-and-grab destruction of parked cars in San Francisco?
Hector the middle class on their incorrect use of gas water heaters while allowing flumes of feces to stream in the bays of Los Angeles and San Francisco, on the theory that such organic pollution is not pollution if the excrement emanates from the homeless?
Is the logic that since we have no idea how to treat raw sewage flowing offshore from our major coastal cities, from the daily hosing down of open sewage on our streets, we can still square that circle of impotence by proclaiming that the gas stoves, pizza ovens, and the water heaters of America are the true ecological villains? Is the rationale the very human principle that when we are impotent in the face of the existential challenges, we find solace in obsessing over the trivial—or bullying the innocent, when the guilty are sacrosanct?
What does it matter that we neglect the Saturday night massacres in our inner cities, keep their dysfunctional schools out of sight and out of mind, avoid at all costs walking in Chicago at night, or driving in the PM hours in large parts of Baltimore, Los Angeles, Memphis, or Washington, DC, but then puff up that we have hired thousands of elite Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion minority officers in our universities and corporations to tell us that we are racist?
Is the DEI apparat the real solution to the dilemmas of the inner city?
Was Modern Monetary Theory a brilliant new design that postulated aggregate debt and annual deficit were of no concern, being little more than an accounting gimmick since government alone prints money and can supposedly arbitrarily decide its worth apart from markets?
So does it matter that the U.S. owes $31 trillion to its bond holders (who won’t buy more if interest is not paid on what they hold) or each president since Bill Clinton has almost managed to double the debt in two terms, or would have at the rate of borrowing in his first term?
Is all federal spending so essential that not a cent can be cut, or contrarily, is the middle class so wealthy that it can endlessly give 55 percent of its income to state and federal governments in income, sales, Social Security, Medicare, gas, and property taxes?
In sum, the U.S. is on the razor’s edge, at least in sustaining it current affluent, leisured, and secure lifestyle of millions. But what cannot go on, does not go on. And in Hemingwayesque terms, decline is gradual—and then surprisingly sudden.
A visitor from 1958 San Francisco would now see his 2023 city in precivilizational terms, a century-and-a-half of progress arrested, as it reverts to Barbary Coast/Great Fire/Earthquake/Wild, Wild West origins—or worse.
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