It is too common for people to conclude we must be losing a war because we can see many of our problems while assuming that the failure to see enemy problems just as routinely means the enemy has no problems rather than that we just can't see them. This is an age-old problem (and note that I wrote that at perhaps the peak of our despair over Iraq). Kipling put it well:
Man cannot tell but Allah knows
How much the other side is hurt.
But there is another perception problem, too, that Robert Kagan addresses. Most basically, economically we have not lost ground. Kagan points out something I've repeatedly addressed: that our immediate post-World War II economic dominance was an anomaly based on being the only major economic power not ravaged by years of brutal war and destruction. Of course that dominance could not last as the rest of the world rebuilt. By the 1970s, we could see the results of the rest of the world rebuilding while we coasted on our artificial lead. But we reacted and rebounded. Our share of global GDP has remained remarkably constant at about 25% for many decades now. Europe is surely declining relative to the rest of the world (and masking that decline by adding new nations to the EU so that the decline of the original core is not evident) while Asia gains ground. But we haven't collapsed.
Time also obscures the problems we faced in the past and makes us feel that we no longer control events the way we used to:
Every day seems to bring more proof, as things happen in the world that seem both contrary to American interests and beyond American control.
And of course it is true that the United States is not able to get what it wants much of the time. But then it never could. Much of today’s impressions about declining American influence are based on a nostalgic fallacy: that there was once a time when the United States could shape the whole world to suit its desires, and could get other nations to do what it wanted them to do[.]
Clearly, our President has this perception problem.
The fact that we did succeed (well enough, anyway) to arrive at where we are obscures the failures and even the difficulties of getting the success we did have. Obviously, had we failed enough to screw things up, we wouldn't have the opportunity to discuss why our Golden Age is gone.
Just because we don't remember how tough we had it doesn't mean we didn't have it tough.
We're not off the hook for facing our problems and solving them. Failing to see the enemy's problems allows us to take the easy way out and assume we must be doomed--so why try to succeed? And failing to see the problems of the past is just as numbing, allowing us to assume that somehow we had more capacity to solve problems--and indeed faced fewer problems than today. So why try to solve problems when they are so much greater now and when our capacity to solve them is so much weaker?
Neither perception is true. We are a great power with many assets. Our problems are not beyond our ability to solve--or at least address well enough to give future generations the luxury of believing that this is a Golden Age when the world did what we wanted and no problem was beyond our genius to fix.
Work the problems, people. We may want the apparent security of curling up in a fetal position and giving up, but that isn't the way forward. It never has been.
UPDATE: President Reagan's 1984 SOTU address, quoted here, sums this up nicely:
I've never felt more strongly that America's best days and democracy's best days lie ahead. We're a powerful force for good. With faith and courage, we can perform great deeds and take freedom's next step… Let us be sure that those who come after will say of us in our time, that in our time we did everything that could be done. We finished the race; we kept them free; we kept the faith.
We will have better days. Keep the faith. We just need leaders who will do everything they can to justify my faith in America.
