Fix Ourselves Instead of Fixing the World

 

Why exactly are we competing with China for global hegemony?  Why exactly are we engaged across the entire globe in wars and insurrections?  How much does this cost?  The traditional rationale of such things was to keep the world safe for trade, keep the oil flowing, and maintain the world order.  And that if the US did not do these things, then either Russia or China would.  We work very hard to keep nations dependent on us so that we can be the nation that essentially runs things.

This has sort of worked.  We spend blood and treasure running around the world trying to get everyone to buy into this system through either pay-offs, threats of force or just straight bombs.  And in return, US corporations flourish as money flows easily to their coffers.  It is good for US consumers in that we get cheap flat screen TVs and we get to offshore our greenhouse gas emissions to the third world.  After all, the pollution and detritus of a vast consumer driven civilization is gross, expensive, and dangerous.  It is ironic that everyone who buys a Prius or installs solar panels to virtuously minimize climate change seem perfectly ok with child slaves in the third world digging in the dirt to get the raw materials needed to make such things.  Not to mention the Chinese slave laborers who make your smart phone.  Yes, it is better to allow the third world to deal with that mess.  We don’t talk about such things in polite society.

But this arrangement is costly for us too.  Half of our decent paying jobs have been off shored with countless communities destroyed through crime, drug addiction and despair.  Families ruined, endless dollars spent, and barrels of blood spilled.  The cost is becoming too much to bear.  

And as if we didn’t have enough problems, there is the great migration to contend with.  I have always said that one day the third world will figure out that living in corrupt and failing states kind of sucks and think to themselves, “Why not just go to where the money is?”  And that is exactly what they are beginning to do.  And who could blame them?  Vast caravans of migrants are traveling to the first world to partake of the luxuries that even the poorest among us enjoy.  Europe and US struggle with bankruptcy and the destruction of their civilizations on the one hand and a perceived moral duty to figure out how to take care of such people on the other.  That will end badly no matter what they do. And of course the Chinese don't care about such things.  They are perfectly content to put Uighers in concentration camps.

In the midst of all of this, the Davos crowd will keep trying to figure out how to keep this game going.  After all, there are trillions of their dollars at stake.  But our current trajectory has us bankrupting ourselves and losing this game in the end.  None of this is sustainable. 

In light of all this, perhaps it is better for us to now look after ourselves.  Look to our own hemisphere and let the Chinese figure out what to do with the rest of the world.  We have everything we need in our own hemisphere to prosper.  We are blessed with abundant resources and a large, innovative population.  We actually don’t need the rest of the world to flourish.  Instead of spending all our money around the world trying to be global hegemon, perhaps we should send our money south.  Instead of investing in south east Asia, maybe we should invest in El Salvador.  Instead of off shoring our jobs to China, maybe we should help build up our neighbors to the south so that they can enjoy prosperity in Guatemala and not feel the need to come here.  Instead of spending countless dollars on foreign wars, we might spend a chunk of those dollars working to build a prosperous western hemisphere.

The benefits of such a shift could be enormous for us and for our neighbors to the south.  I am quite sure that El Salvadorians would rather be prosperous in their own country than partake in the dangerous journey to the US.  Instead of spending countless dollars trying to govern an entire globe, would it not be better and cheaper to stay in our lane and focus on our own hemisphere?  Let the world figure out their house and let’s think about just figuring out our house.

I am trying to understand the downside of such a shift.  I am sure the billionaire class would fight tooth and nail to prevent such a thing.  Ending the endless foreign wars would be bad for defense contractors, and corporations whose profits come from exploiting cheap labor overseas would be very unhappy.  It would upend the entire global system.

But I am not sure that would be such a bad thing.  The current global system is not sustainable.  We might think about crafting this new western hemisphere in a way that is sustainable.  But we would have to ensure that rather than replicate an unsustainable model in our hemisphere, we create systems that are sustainable.  The great risk is that instead of exploiting Vietnamese labor, we simply exploit Mexican labor.  That instead of bombing Afghanistan, we bomb Venezuela.  If that happened, no one would be any better off.  Indeed, our neighbors to the south might be terrified for us to take such an interest in the Western Hemisphere.  We have ignored them for so long, and maybe they prefer it that way. 

But there is a chance that we could do it better.  Fixing the world is not going to happen.  But we might be able to fix here.