Dem
51
GOP
49
Donald Trump is a very unusual candidate in so many ways. One of them is his incredibly negative view of America as an unmitigated hell-hole. Contrast this with Ronald Reagan's view of America as a shining city on a hill. The difference is that Trump is focused entirely on grievance voters, mostly those in rural areas who hear stories about crime-ridden cities where people think men are women. When they think of America, they think of Trump's depiction of San Francisco, not the actual San Francisco or even their own little town. They don't have a clue how things really are.
Gen. Wesley Clark (ret.) has written an op-ed for the Washington Monthly that sets the record straight. It shows that America is actually in extremely good shape by any measure and is not about to be eaten alive by China. It is worth reading the whole thing, but we'll give a brief summary.
Clark starts out by admitting that America is far from perfect. Immigration is a problem, the political system is dysfunctional, the national debt is growing, schools are a mess, and entanglements in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Middle East don't help our image in the world.
But Trump conveniently forgets that the U.S. economy is the envy of the world, and ultimately military power, diplomatic power, and technological power all flow from the economy. Bidenomics, or whatever it is now called, works on the demand side of the economy, not the supply side as Reaganomics did. It uses public investment, empowering middle-class workers, and promoting business competition to produce an economy that works for everyone, not just a sliver of the population at the top. The Infrastructure and Jobs Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act all worked towards achieving these goals.
The results have been remarkable. During the Biden administration 15 million new jobs (including 800,000 in manufacturing) were created, 5 million new small businesses have been started, unemployment has been below 4% for the longest streak since the 1960s, and GDP is way up, from 24% of world GDP in 2019 to 26% now. The date at which China's GDP would overtake America's has been pushed back from the 2020s to the 2030s and maybe the 2040s, if ever. Investments in renewable energy are soaring, huge chip plants are being built in Ohio and Arizona, many drug prices have been reduced, competition-reducing mergers have been blocked and much more.
The U.S. has crucial leads over China in AI, quantum computing, and biotech. The Chinese COVID vaccine didn't work. U.S. anti-satellite warfare is ahead of China's. The U.S. is the world's leading producer of oil—ahead of Russia and Saudi Arabia. It also has abundant natural gas. While hydrocarbons are not the future, they will continue to be important for years to come until sustainable energy catches up.
The U.S. stock market is the biggest and strongest in the world. Since Biden took over, the S&P index is up 41%, the NASDAQ is up 30% and the Dow is up 24%. For the 12th year in a row, the U.S. is the top destination for foreign investment. When people want to park money safely it is in T-bills, not C-bills (or whatever Chinese paper is called). The dollar, not the euro or the renminbi, is the world's reserve currency. Half of Europe's trade is in dollars and 70% of the rest of the world's trade is in dollars. And payments for that trade use the SWIFT network and flow over U.S. underseas fiber-optic cables.
China has the lead in rare earth minerals, simply because it accepted the huge environmental costs for refining the ores. But the U.S. actually has plenty of deposits of them and is making rapid strides in cleaning up the processing of them.
On the diplomatic front, the U.S. has formed The Quad, consisting of the U.S. Japan, Australia, and India, to counterbalance China in the Pacific. It also is building new bases in the Philippines and working with island countries in the Pacific. There are challenges on the diplomatic front, especially since China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have formed a loose alliance based on thwarting the U.S. But ultimately, diplomacy rests on hard power, which in turn rests on the economy. The North won the Civil War because its economy was stronger than the South's. The same applied to World War I and World War II. It's the economy, stupid.
Clark concludes by saying that American power is on the rise. Trump is simply wrong: It is not declining. The U.S. has the ability to meet every challenge. It only needs the will to do so, and that depends on the voters in November. (V)