"America can be a superpower or a welfare state, but not both."

The Gates Farewell Warning

ok. i'm back from vacation, and i've now read this article. First, wow, ridiculous agenda pimping by the wsj. As for the specific arguments, i'll just ask how many $200+ million-dollar F22s does the author think it would take to withstand the army that 1.5 billion Chinese could send our way?

Seems to me, nothing short of our nuclear arsenal (which we've already paid for) would give us any margin for "victory," especially considering how long our economy could hold out after our biggest source for capital and most of our manufacturing base, strangely, decided to attack their meal ticket here on the other side of the world. So, if we are talking about military conflict with China, then, strategically, we'll just need to stick with our weapons of mass destruction and the mutually assured destruction that has kept modern nation-states from engaging in direct war with on another since Hiroshima.

And in any event, "superpower" is so passe. The cold war power relation paradigm is defunct. The superpower construct only works within a system of nation-states conflict. Within that system, a nation-state was the smallest denominator with the resource access to wage war against another nation-state--with superpowers dominating that system because they had the necessary resources to take on more than one.

But in a global system where 9 people can kill 3,000 in a day, superpower is just another word for target. Like the old gunslinger who spends his days taking challenges from young guns looking to make a name for themselves by taking out the legend, we are just waiting around to lose.

With regard to welfare? Whatever value we decide to place on the life of each american citizen, and how much effort we are willing to make to help each of them succeed through our collective agency, we can't afford to support the superpower illusion any longer. Not only is it financially crippling, but the costs to the american psyche to maintain this pissy dominance and petty, self-aggrandizing snobbery is making us the global asshole hypocrites that nobody wants to play with and which, ironically, is used to justify those who want to attack us...a truly vicious circle.