Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (125 page)
Authors: Conrad Black
BOOK: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership
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The high-water mark of the European idea was the launch of the euro in 1999, the common currency in which ultimately 17 of the 27 European countries (at its fullest expanse, at time of writing) participated. But the endless regulations of the minutiae of everyday life, in the name of community, grated on many. The natural rivalries between the major European powers, though all in the context of friendly peoples, eroded any sense of unity. The social democratic emphasis on the public sector and a safety net for all created a continental lethargy and sluggish job creation, and curtailed economic growth. When the Eastern European states were admitted, they all sought the U.S. military guarantee implicit in NATO membership more fervently than any participation in what was now called the European Union. The southern Eurozone states, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, all signed false prospectuses to secure their admission at higher values to their soft national currencies than proved to be justified, causing immense financial strain near the end of the first decade of the new millennium. And Europe, suffering an insufficient birthrate, to avoid declining population, replaced the unborn with largely Muslim immigration, importing a serious problem that led to a great deal of urban violence in the early years after 2000. A Europe of convivial neighboring states won the adherence and commendation of all, but as a coherent power in the world, it gained no traction.
The cycle had evolved, in descending order of scale of threat to the United States. The first European challenge, Nazi Germany, was mortally dangerous, as Roosevelt saw as early as 1936, when he warned against French toleration of the remilitarization of the Rhineland. Hitler’s Greater Germany had as great a population (though 40 percent of it did not speak German) as the United States and an inferior but not uncompetitive industrial capacity. And Italy, unoccupied France, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Slovakia, Spain, and Portugal were fascist satellites. The mortal conflict with Hitler, the physical brunt of which was borne by Stalin’s Russia, was followed by the serious but uneven rivalry of Soviet Communism, until it collapsed from the unbearable weight of the self-imposed competition with the United States. Japan seemed to have a formula for remaining a military protégé of America and taking advantage of its low military obligations while striking a mortal threat at the industrial and financial core of American strength, but apart from the quality of its engineered products, the threat was made of straw and was quickly blown away. And the idea of the rivalry of a united Europe was a wild surmise unsupported by any practical foundation.
This left only China, of the potential centers of rival economic and military strength Nixon had identified in 1972. China was large and historic, and was starting from very far back. Chou En-lai died in January 1976, followed seven months later by Mao Tse-tung. The customary rending struggle for power followed, in which there emerged the twice-purged veteran of the Long March, Deng Xiao-ping, who gained effective control of the government in 1977 and held it for 15 years, and remained the most influential figure in the country to his death in 1997, aged 92. He invented what was called socialist capitalism, and other hybrid names that essentially promoted an economy that was about half free and half command and state-planned, in a political structure that was less authoritarian than Mao’s but a party dictatorship. There were not the wild lurches into mad and destructive derailments like the Great Leap Forward of the fifties, when Mao had everyone trying to produce steel in their backyards, or the Great Cultural Revolution of the seventies, when millions of people were displaced, humiliated, beaten, and killed. (Deng was under house arrest and his son was defenestrated, becoming a paraplegic.) The then second figure in the Party, standing briefly between Mao and Chou, Lin Piao, was such a helpless cocaine addict he had to breathe motorcycle fumes to clear his head. He supposedly attempted a coup in 1971, was inadvertently betrayed by his daughter, fled by plane, and died when the airplane crashed in Mongolia, whether by running out of fuel (the unlikely official version), by pilot error (the unlikely Mongolian version), or from attack by pursuing Chinese warplanes.
It was from this teeming firmament that Deng emerged to reinvent communism and lead China toward its potential status as a world power, which it had enjoyed at several stages in its incomparable history, though in a smaller, in the sense of less-explored, world. By encouraging entrepreneurship, plowing the resources of the state into economic investment, welcoming foreign investment, and radically modernizing key industries, Deng had the pleasure of seeing China achieve astonishing economic and social progress. The brutal suppression of the freedom demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989, though it is not clear that Deng ordered it, temporarily compromised his authority, but as throughout his career, he persevered. He had inaugurated, as Khrushchev did in Russia, the removal of senior officials without inflicting physical harm on them, and the maneuvering that continued in the highest Chinese circles to the end of Deng’s life did not lead to bloodshed (with the likely exception of Mao’s widow, who died in prison and may have been informally executed) or vast public campaigns of denunciation.
China passed Japan as the second largest economy in the world in 2010, and had about 40 percent of U.S. GDP, and in terms of purchasing power parity within the country, almost 70 percent, though only about 15 percent per capita. The Chinese navy was starting to build aircraft carriers, as the Soviet Union had (and as Hitler started to do but did not complete any). The pattern of geopolitical challengers setting out for naval rivalry with the incumbent holder of the scepter of the seas is a familiar one, from the Persians and the Turks to the Spanish, the Dutch, Napoleon, Wilhelm II, and Khrushchev. As a policy, it has been no more successful, and much more costly, than Britain’s historic addiction, from Pitt to Churchill, to undermanned amphibious landings around the perimeter of Europe.
China cannot be underestimated, and has the historic mentality and experience of a Great Power that has not faded in that immense and ancient people, as it has in Spain, where world power depended on distant colonial possessions. But, as with previous challengers to the U.S., there has been a tremendous gush of unthinking and premature acclaim; China has a completely corrupt political system with no worthwhile institutions, and a governing philosophy and national goals and political ethos that are made up ad hoc and very difficult to enforce over such a vast, sullen, skeptical population. Not one published financial or economic figure can be believed, it is still mainly a command economy, and although China has performed admirably as a developing country pulling hundreds of millions of people out of a primitive and desperately poor life into a burgeoning contemporary economy, there are still many hundreds of millions of people living as they did 3,000 years ago. The radical and often stylish evolution of Shanghai and Beijing in particular have impressed the world, as did China’s emergence from nowhere to win the 2010 Olympic Games (in Beijing and in monumental stadia designed by the world’s most illustrious architects).
But there are almost no general social services, and terrible internal stresses. The reduction of its problem of overpopulation can only be accomplished by such restrictive birth control that there will be a prolonged problem of aging. China will face the same problem as Europe, Russia, and Japan—an aging, declining, more welfare-dependent population—though at least it is by choice and a smaller population is objectively desirable. Opposite a determined America, China will have a very long and difficult time achieving real geopolitical parity.
As Europe wrestles with its financial woes, Germany is emerging as a semi-giant, at the head of a core of strong-currency nations, including Austria, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Poland, the small Baltic countries, and Scandinavia, about 190 million people and about half of American GDP Such a bloc, astutely led, could establish some level of preeminence over most of Europe, including France (which has become very erratic) and Russia.
2. GEORGE BUSH AND BILL CLINTONPresident Bush’s post—Gulf War popularity quickly eroded, as much of it was relief that there had not been heavy casualties or prolonged combat in the Gulf War; Iraq had everything that Vietnam had not—an unquestionable cause, a precise and achievable goal, overwhelming force, a complete constitutional and international mandate, a huge coalition, volunteer armed forces, and a simple exit strategy. But a moderate recession settled in and Republicans remembered Bush’s preelection pledge of “no new taxes” after he acquiesced in tax increases to reduce the deficit. He had called Reagan’s economic proposals “voodoo economics” in the 1980 primaries, and Republicans were now Reaganite. The president’s support in his own party was soft, and Ross Perot, an opinionated Texan billionaire, ran a largely self-financed populist campaign against Bush’s free-trade policies, including the Free Trade Agreement with Canada in 1989 and the much more controversial North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, including Mexico, which was only adopted just after the 1992 election. Bush recalled his able secretary of state, James A. Baker, to take charge of his reelection campaign and replaced him for the last few months of the term with career foreign policy specialist and former Kissinger protégé Lawrence Eagleburger.
Bush’s answer to a worsening economy was a rather vacuous plea to a joint session of Congress and to the country to spend more. He paid a price for not ever having been an electoral politician. He had had a fairly tough race for his congressional district when he first ran, but after that, despite the important positions he held appointively and by clutching Reagan’s coattails, he never really clicked with the public.
Perot was a populist who flowered suddenly after the main party nominations had been locked up by the president against populist dissident Pat Buchanan, and by five-time Arkansas governor Bill Clinton for the Democrats over a diverse field including a rather offbeat campaign by former California governor Jerry Brown. Perot’s campaign was launched with a tremendous television blitz as soon as the primaries were over, and he was fishing especially after the popularly disaffected of both parties with an eclectic platform of a balanced budget, free choice of abortion, tightened gun control, a stricter war on drugs, protectionism, greater emphasis of environmental protection, and electronic referenda to promote direct democracy. He had led some important task forces on education and drugs in Texas; had, unlike Clinton, opposed the Gulf War; and ran a campaign pitched to a disconnected group of constituencies of right and left.
The country was uninspired by its president and unconvinced by his chief challenger, and Perot made greater inroads than any third-party candidate since the scarcely comparable Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. Perot was running for a time ahead of both parties’ likely candidates but abruptly withdrew in July after Bill Clinton was nominated by the Democrats at their convention in New York. Clinton selected Senator Al Gore of Tennessee as his vice presidential candidate, and enjoyed a tremendous bounce from his convention, where he presented himself as a “New Democrat,” who had supported the Gulf War and criticized the budget deficit. He claimed that too many people had been disadvantaged by Reagan-Bush policies favorable to the prosperous but indifferent to those less well-off. Perot claimed that he did not wish to push the race into the House of Representatives. However, he was back two months later, claiming he had been forced out by Republicans who had threatened to disrupt his daughter’s wedding.
The Republicans met in Houston and got only a modest lift from their convention. It was not clear when Perot reentered the race which of his opponents was the principal victim of his depredations. It was illustrative of the clumsiness of the Republican campaign (after the death in 1991, aged only 40, of hardball Bush strategist Lee Atwater) that it accepted a three-way debate, failed to take measures to arrest the economic slide, and largely focused on Clinton’s peccadilloes and draft avoidance. Bush (somewhat understandably) never knew what to make of Perot, whom Clinton sideswiped with his pitch to the people of modest incomes and insecure employment, “I feel your pain.” It was an appalling blunder for Bush to get so detached from the Reaganite foundations of the modern Republicans that he lost chunks of it not only to Clinton but even to an unstable political charlatan like Perot, who never provided a word of specificity for all the facile promises he made. On election day, Clinton won, 44.9 million votes (43.1 percent) and 370 electoral votes from 32 states and the District of Columbia to 39.1 million votes (37.5 percent) and 168 electoral votes from 18 states, and 19.7 million votes (18.9 percent) and no states for Perot.
George Bush had been a competent and, in foreign policy terms, a good president, but a generally unexciting one. Though he did not know the people well, he was a respected and well-liked ex-president, who was soon seen clearly as a gentleman and patriot who had served the nation valorously in war and intermittently and with distinction through many important positions all the way to its highest office, for nearly 50 years.
Bill Clinton was a very astute politician, and one of the new group of presidential politicians who had never had any real career except politics, nor any real ambition except to be president. Such men as Taft, Wilson, Hoover, Eisenhower, and Reagan were very famous because of completely separate careers they had had before seeking any public office. Truman, Carter, and Bush had had other careers, and Franklin Roosevelt had been sidelined for seven years mitigating a terrible affliction (polio). Harding, Coolidge, Johnson, and Ford went early into politics (after war service, in Ford’s case), but none of them was aiming for the White House; and Kennedy and Nixon, who were, at least won some battle stars, got round the world a bit, came from prominent centers (Boston and Los Angeles), and had been a long time in Washington. Bill Clinton ran unsuccessfully for congressman at age 28, was elected attorney general of Arkansas at 30, and governor at 32.
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