Awakened Colossus

This is the new America

“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” - Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

The quote is apocryphal, inexact but true in capturing what imperial Japan’s top admiral believed was an ill-fated and unnecessary attack on the United States (see Wikipedia for the quote’s origins). The sleeping giant, we know now, was young. Today, eight decades later, the United States is a nation in its prime, and yet its hegemonic grip on the world has been the most gentle in the history of great powers. That is about to change.

I hold that American postwar economic power is improperly characterized as a hegemony, and is more accurately understood as Promethean power. To summarize that viewpoint, a democratic people in the one country in the world founded on universalist principles are unsurprisingly sympathetic to the liberty of their fellow man, regardless of religion, race, and even nation. People from other countries do not feel the common brotherhood with oppression of foreigners that Americans feel. We recoiled at the genocide in the Balkans, and did more to stop it than neighboring European powers. Consider why. This world was inevitable in 1776: (1) that America would rise to be the strongest economy on the globe and (2) its universalist philosophy would lead to a benevolent era of international prosperity and human rights. That much has played out. What comes next?

I think it is also inevitable that rearguard forces of ethno-nationalism and theocratic nationalism will continue, even as they continue to lose. The world wars were a final spasm of the dominance of the Old World View: that ethnic polities could view for the fixed sum of wealth and also that wealth could be defined narrowly in the ways that had forever been the norm since hunter-gathers until the industrial revolution: control of land, gold, women. Rape and re-education. Look at what China is doing to Tibet and what Russia is doing to Ukraine, and you see echoes of a millennia of Old thinking.

What Americans know is that wealth is dynamic. Land is almost irrelevant. Brains and Liberty are the key to innovation and human flourishing. It doesn’t matter if the New thinking can convince the Old, because we will simply outgrow them. Their children will be more attracted to the freedom, health, and joy of universalist nations, something Francis Fukuyama articulated so well in 1989. The death of the Soviet Union was all but inevitable, something we now see but that Cold Warriors could not. So, what is opaque today, I wonder?

What has Awakened?