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US election
Over-Obamad expectations
By Kevin Potvin
Not one Democratic supporter uttered words of caution about expectations piling too high on a man and an office that cannot do that much
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The British Empire, upon which the sun famously never set, is the one that comes to most people’s minds. But quick: name one single British Prime Minister who served during any phase of the British Empire.
Let’s make it easier: Was it predominately Whig or Tory governments that perpetuated that empire? Don’t know, do you.
The Holy Roman Empire ran Western Europe for a whole millennium. Name one Pope by his given or taken name, your choice. The Astro-Hungarian Empire is famous. Name one leader. The Turkish Empire stretched across the vastness of the centre of the world. Name one prominent figure associated with it in any way. The French, Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish ran colonial empires all over the world. Forget naming any president or prime minister, just say whether any of those governments were relatively to the left or to the right of any other of those governments.
Can’t do it, can you. That’s because the leaders of those empires were never that important to imperial history. Empires follow their own trajectories regardless of who pretends to lead them. That’s why we know all about the great empires of the past, but nothing about the leaders who perpetuated them.
So why does everyone in the world think the election of Barrack Obama to replace George W Bush as President of the United States is going to bring any fundamental change to the arc the American Empire etches across the 21st Century sky? The world is comprised of nations and nations follow paths largely undetermined by their putative leaders. We don’t know if administrations were relatively left or right or whether leaders were more or less effective in the history’s other big empires because the nature of administrations and the qualities of their leaders doesn’t matter much to empires. What matters is the trajectory of empires, to which their leaders and political parties are as enslaved as Jona in the belly of the whale.
History, the final arbiter of the important and the essential, will no more remember Bush’s need to win his poppy’s approval than it will record Bush at all when laying down the narrative of the American Empire’s demise in ruinous wars in Asia.
History forgets who was leader of Britain but remembers that Britain desperately needed to resolve a wildly imbalanced trade relationship with China (on account of London society’s affected penchant for tea and silk). This is the key fact required to understand Britain’s investment in industrialized poppy production in Afghanistan, wholesale heroin refineries in India, and cannon-equipped cargo ships to deliver the stuff to Chinese cities up and down their rivers, to the point where one in ten men were eventually addicted, an accomplishment that finally reduced Britain’s balance of payments deficit with China.
The US move on Iraqi oil, Afghan opium, and other resources buried under other parts of the world map, are certainly important facts crucial to understanding how the American Empire met its fate. But it’s the chronic and sustained US balance of payments deficits that will come to frame the short sweet tale of the American Empire once it recedes into history.
It’s fitting that they should. It’s the one thing everyone has been aware of, yet its also the one thing everyone has largely overlooked. The whole American Empire in all its myriad manifestations might just have worked, were it not for this one fatal and unseen flaw lurking beneath the ground, rotting and weakening the roots till the whole tree, however healthy looking in its branches, crashes down.
Nation’s balance of payments are not widely paid attention to in this age of personality politics (isn’t Obama as much about personality as Bush ever was?), but if the general direction and tenor of the world is the object of our inquiry, balance of payments figures tell the tale plainly in the big story about the relationships among the family of nations.
Simply put, balance of payments figures tell how much a whole nation exports compared to how much a whole nation imports. It is the key figure to understanding the relationship of nations to nations because it allows all nations to be understood analogously as single individuals. To appreciate the seminal role balance of payments figures play in the major movements of history, reflect a moment on the degree to which your own choices and behaviors are determined and framed by the figure arrived at by subtracting all your personal spending from all your personal earning. Compare the levels of confidence, ambition, stress and happiness, between those with a negative balance and those with a positive balance. To really get the complete geopolitical picture in utter clarity, reflect a moment on how long one is for this world if they are, year after year after year, spending more than they earn, and then imagine that person having no reasonable prospect for ever getting into balance. That person is under stress. That’s the kind of guy who eventually blows up his Taco restaurant and jumps off the bridge.
The United States has been quietly running deficits in its balance of payments for nigh on decades. They have worsened almost every year. They were shocking eight years ago when, after two democratic administrations in the White House, they reached $400 billion annually. The latest year, they hit $900 billion annually. Just like the small business owner in trouble who finds he can keep going by using one credit card to make payments on all the others already maxed out, all can be made to feel sustainable, to feel as though it could all be kept going forever, for nations too.
It can’t, and not for very complicated reasons. It comes down to the willingness of a supplier to keep running up a tab for a customer who looks more and more like he won’t ever be able to pay it down, or even stop it from increasing. Why would the supplier continue to let the customer keep taking deliveries? He won’t—he will one day cut the customer off.
The US government has financed a huge military for this very reason. To stop its suppliers from shutting their doors to it for unpaid bills, the US is stuffing guns down its waistband and inside its socks in plans to continue taking supplies by threatening to blow the supplier away if he cuts them off. About the most accurate way to describe America’s role in the world is not so much the “policeman” to the world, as Americans like to tell themselves, but the “armed robber” to the world. It doesn’t matter who is sitting in the oval office next January just as it doesn’t matter who is driving the getaway car once the armed robbing spree is under way.
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