By Michael D. Capaldi
This summer, the future swerved around the corner and headed straight at us.
We’ve had a good run for the past 19 years,haven’t we?,since the Berlin Wall fell and the only other superpower checked out.
For that long, the U.S. has been lucky in its enemies. Radical Islam, though relentless, is not so menacing for what it can do today but for what it threatens to do someday. Even its success in 2001, exploiting a few suicidal men, box cutters and the element of surprise, pales next to the power of the Nazis to blitzkrieg a continent or the Soviets to vaporize every living being in the northern hemisphere.
Russia
But the days of unchallenged American power ended this summer. By unleashing his batteries on Georgia, Vladimir Putin,think of him as Tony Soprano with a standing army and flush with petrodollars,announced that Russia is back.
In the old days, the Soviets bullied Europe with missiles. This time, it’s all about oil. Russia now supplies a third of Western Europe’s energy, chiefly by pipeline.
But when the U.S. began developing alternatives to Russian oil and gas, specifically existing and planned pipelines through Georgia and Turkey drawing natural gas from Turkmenistan (with 3 trillion cubic meters of the stuff) and crude from the Caspian nations (which have reserves of 35 billion barrels), it threatened Russia’s leverage on Europe. Blood for oil? Ask Putin.
Then there’s China. Even as it was dismantling Tibet, tossing dissidents into jail and beating a foreign reporter or two, China sincerely wanted you wowed with the $44 billion it lavished on fabulous Olympic venues and opening ceremonies that looked like the Nuremberg rallies on hallucinogens. With these, China proclaimed that a great nation had arrived.
Westerners debate whether China will compete or cooperate, but it produces little oil and natural gas, while China’s industry craves both. To sustain its dizzying growth rates, China will have to let the elbows fly. The only question is whether the contest will turn violent.
So, add to a resurgent Russia an oil-hungry China radical Islam and the threat of nuclear-tipped spasms from North Korea and Iran, and the next 20 years look far more risky than the last.
American Model
But Americans are a lucky people, and, luckily, we have a model for dealing with the future. It just happens to be the same way we’ve dealt with the challenges of the past. We must guarantee American economic growth and ensure that our military capability is unmatched.
During the Reagan administration, America had a Navy of 600 ships. Today it’s 280, and we now spend only 4% of our gross domestic product on the military.
Increasing that to among the lower levels seen during the Cold War, say, 5%, would revive our conventional forces to a point where the price of challenging us would be almost unimaginable, even to our most powerful rivals.
Beyond that, the U.S. must, under all circumstances, maintain its technological edge even as others, China and India, for example, are honing theirs. If we surrender scientific leadership, as Europe did during the last century, we’ll lose not only our military advantage, but our prosperity.
Americans must again become the best-educated people on the planet. Today, however, we give a third of our kids a third world quality education. In bureaucracy-choked California, it’s worse: only 23% of high school students satisfy proficiency standards in English, while in mathematics it’s 26%. We’ll have to recognize that our persistent failure to educate children is social treason. It cripples young lives and threatens our nation’s security.
In one area, however, America’s past is no guide.
After 30 years of lip-service, we must finally do whatever it takes to move toward energy independence. Not only does the $700 billion we spend each year on oil imports sap our economy, but the world’s oil habit empowers dangerous regimes,Iran, for example,and invites war over resources, like Saddam Hussein’s grab at the Kuwaiti fields in the 1990s and Russia’s move on Georgia.
Strategic Growth
America can manage any adversary if it does what it always has done: grow. The Allies won World War II because America built more planes, bombs, boots, trucks and tires than the Axis powers did. Pittsburgh alone produced more steel than Germany and Japan combined.
Sure, economic growth pays for security. But, even short of war, our economic influence forces other nations to bend more to our will than we bend to theirs. In this, the U.S. starts with a huge advantage: Each year, we produce $14 trillion in goods and services. China generates $2.8 trillion, while in Russia it’s $1.7 trillion.
To make it over the next 20 years, we cannot tolerate any impediment to growth,whether tax hikes, regulation or anything else. The day we forget that growth is the source of our security is the day we fail.
Capaldi is a partner in the business law firm of Spach, Capaldi & Waggaman LLP in Newport Beach and chairman emeritus of The Lincoln Club of Orange County.
