Debt ceiling detritus

Like most of the western world's educated class, I've been having an interesting few weeks following the debt crisis kerfuffle in DC. Now that a deal appears to be on the table, I'm interested in relating the process and the outcome to what I think of as the real world of geopolitics -- the very different world I live in, which admittedly is shared by only a small minority of scientists and policy thinkers.

In my world, the American debt-and-deficit crisis needs to be seen in the context of larger things, if you can think about anything larger.

What larger things?

On the top of my list, the items I tend to track daily, are the processes and pace of climate change, changes in relative energy cost-and-availability, or energy economics, innovations in energy technology, changes in food security, changes in geopolitical military power, including asymmetric capabilities, and finally, the desperately slow march of democracy and human rights worldwide.

Set alongside this laundry list, the debt ceiling negotiations seem in very minor proportion, just a light bump in the long slow downhill stretch of road that is the decline of western hegemony.

For others, it seems, the debt ceiling fiasco allowed or enabled the realization that we're on a downhill trajectory. Duh. How does this come as a surprise? Growth in Chinese population and economy has long been on a pathway guaranteed to outpace the west. Sure, Western technological preeminence, including military preeminence, remains the key factor in determining the outcome of conflict all around the world, but how long can this be expected to remain the case?

And what will happen when climate change and relative energy scarcity adds to that potential for conflict?

So the various geoeconomic jeremiads being issued today by and through the world's press (examples here and here) are surprising to me only for their lack of overall perspective.

Of course the west is in decline. And of course America is now leading the charge. How much longer did you expect it to last?

The real question is what this, and the much larger problems in climate, energy, food and security that barely make the front pages, will do to the great western project of political, intellectual and religious freedom?

We're going to have a climate and energy and food and security crisis, and the west will decline relative to the east, particularly China and India. Those things will most likely happen whatever we do.

The real question is, will we be living in a world of climate change, energy and food scarcity, and increasing conflict where democratic freedom is in the ascendance, or will we be living in a world of climate change, energy and food scarcity, and increasing conflict where democratic freedom is in decline, along with the great western nations that permitted it to all-so-briefly flourish?

One interesting personal nuance to my vantage point over this complex and shifting geopolitical arena is that I'm British.

Therefore it comes as no surprise that the west is found to be in decline.

Born in 1961, I grew up in the last gleam of the twilight of empire. In the decade when America was putting Neil Armstrong on the moon, Britain was in the last stages of bringing her people home. As I became of conscious age, British possessions all around the world were decolonized one after the other. Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, Singapore and Hong Kong, British Honduras/Belize, none of these mattered very much to me, but it was interesting to hear tales from various elders of the different world that had existed forty or fifty years later, before Britain effectively bankrupted herself fighting the Nazis.

That was a war that most of those elders fought in or suffered through. And it was a war that ended in a debt crisis. At least, it did for Britain.

What can we learn from this?

I have no personal nostalgia for all those little bits of "pink on the map," but if we're to preside over the decline of the American empire, what might we learn from the decline of the British one?

The final end of empire was averted for a short while, a generation, by a foreign bale-out, the famous "American Loan" negotiated by none other than Lord Keynes himself. But hidden in the sub-text and context of the American Loan was the final clause of the grand bargain that FDR had effectively put to Churchill prior to Pearl Harbor: America will help you, but the Empire has to go. Churchill of course thought he could out-live and out-smart FDR on this. He managed one of those two.

The Suez crisis of 1955 and '56 was in essence Churchill's final attempt to outsmart the American position, and marks the end of any final dreams of empire for Britain.

There were ten years between the post-war debt crisis and the bale-out that was the American Loan, and the military conclusion that was Suez. Ten years during which Britain had a chance, and failed, to work out a sustainable geopolitical stance. After which she went into almost terminal decline. Luckily, the island nation lost only her empire and not her soul, largely, again, through American backing.

There is life after decline, once you've learned how to be a second-rate nation. But you can't expect the world to do as you wish anymore. And you have to work out what it is you value the most, because you can't hold on to everything. The Britain I grew up in was working out those kinds of things. Ultimately it settled on a very plural and inclusive democracy that has not yet been fatally wrecked by terrorism. Indeed, terrorism may have made it stronger and more inclusive in some ways. There are still satanic mills churning out product, still pastures green, stillness still lives in the cathedral close, and it doesn't seem to matter very much to the sanctuary of the cathedral that there's the sanctuary of a mosque just down the road. Britain is still Britain, and the British are still the phlegmatic and absurdly mongrel race we've always been, only more so now that many of us are brown.

So while the current crisis marks a turning point of kinds in American power and hegemony, it doesn't yet mark the kind of geopolitical and military failure that was Suez. American economic power is wounded, possibly fatally, but American military power is not. And America is still a place where people of all colors and religions can somehow live together in imperfect and creative harmony.

There will be half a generation or more, or less, between the nadir of American economic power that is represented by the recession-to-debt-crisis period of 2008-2011, and the point in the future when some burgeoning Nassar chooses to challenge America militarily and wins some kind of American Suez. But that time will necessarily come. It is inevitable that as American economic power declines, American military power will follow.

And so now the process begins, and Americans have to therefore begin to work out what it is they value the most, because they can't hold on to everything.

As a Briton that knows and loves America well, well enough to be part American, what would I advise holding onto?

Britain has her green and pleasant land and her mongrel people, including generations of new British races currently being assimilated, all of whom are now deeply accustomed to freedoms of speech, politics, and religion that date back to 1215.

America has a landscape that stretches from sea to shining sea, a geography of plenty shared with Canada that can perhaps be saved from the worst of climate change. It would be good to hold onto this, the world's breadbasket. That means preventing it from fatal climate damage. The Chinese will have to come to terms for food, if nothing else. A healthy environment is a source of power and freedom.

And America has, like Britain, a mongrel population that has become used to being able to say anything it wants to say to anyone it wants to say it to. A healthy disrespect for authority is also a source of freedom. One possibility we should hold out for is that as western power declines, democracy and freedom rises in China. We should do everything we can technologically and intellectually to foment democracy in China. We should deliberately export disrespect for authority to China. It's what they need the most.

And if all else fails, it would be good to hold onto that freedom for ourselves, so at the very least, we can talk truth to Chinese power.

And tell them where to get off.