The statement has been widely reported and often repeated. Lawrence Summers was talking to an official from a developing country. The official described American foreign policy thusly:
Describing America’s increasing loneliness on the world scene, Mr. Summers said, “Somebody from a developing country said to me, ‘What we get from China is an airport. What we get from the United States is a lecture.’
So, we have become world leaders in what Walter Russell Mead calls “moralistic posturing:”
Too many self-described democracy activists want the U.S. to dissipate its diplomatic energy in moralistic posturing. They would rather we prioritized sermons and sanctions over building a multilateral coalition to check Chinese expansion. Their problem is not that they love righteousness too much. It is that they have thought too little and too superficially about what righteousness really demands.
Some believe that China and Russia and India and other countries around the world are ganging up on the United States. That is, these countries are producing an international realignment, one where we are no longer the world’s leading superpower. The age of American hegemony seems largely to be over.
We have been reporting this for quite some time now. The moment when the Biden administration decided to weaponize the dollar, and to confiscate assets that foreign countries held in dollars told many countries to move out of dollars, into yuan. Today, that includes Saudi Arabia and Brazil.
Some believe that China wants to rule the world. Others believe that we are involved in a clash of civilizations. When New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, in a rare moment of lucidity, declared that we could not even build high speed railroads, a chorus of shrieky schoolgirls intoned that China was using slave labor. Said chorus did not explain how Western Europe had built high speed railroads without using slave labor. And had been doing so for decades.
Besides, we believe that we are on the side of history and justice and all that is good and ideal. We believe, as Francis Fukuyama has proclaimed, that liberal democracy will prevail. It will do so because Hegel said so.
Aside from the amusing fact that a certain number of American conservatives have flocked to the Hegelian view-- isn’t Hegel the godfather of Marxism?-- the truth remains, we are engaged in a competition against a number of the world’s nations. And, as long as we believe that we are too idealistic and too pure to compete in the world of manufacturing and industry, we are going to lose.
One understands that the Biden administration has been throwing massive gobs of money into restoring American manufacturing. Reports in the business press suggest that this is a good thing and that we are in the process of onshoring industry.
One likes to feel optimistic about these matters, but the truth remains. We are lagging in manufacturing and, we seem not to understand that the products that are being friendshored to Mexico are produced in China. We have conveniently ignored the advance of China in selling goods throughout Asia.
And we seem not to understand that we do not have the personnel, the human capital to do the job. One will not mention the esteemed columnist who said so, but an important columnist averred the other day that we could find human capital in the immigrants who are flooding the country from Central America. Said columnist did not remark that the average IQ of people in these countries is around 78-- meaning that they are not going to be running robots or writing code.
As for the larger worldview, Mead explains that the Biden administration, incapable of engaging in competition in the new world order, had been reduced to being a chronic scold:
Internationally, it was another grim week for the Biden administration, the United States of America, and world peace. Brazil, the country with the largest population, economy and landmass in Latin America, reinforced its alignment with China as its president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva pledged to work with Xi Jinping to build a new global order and called on the European Union and the U.S. to stop shipping weapons to Ukraine. Indian officials reported that China is supporting the development of a military listening post on Myanmar’s strategic Great Coco Island in the Bay of Bengal. Saudi Arabia, which flirted a few weeks ago with opening diplomatic relations with Israel, is intensifying its oil cooperation with Russia and now seeks a meeting with Hamas. Farther south, a Sudanese military faction backed by Russia’s Wagner Group battles for control of Africa’s third-largest nation.
Biden administration policy, ineffective, ineffectual, and generally weak and pathetic. We have become the world’s scolds, and as Mead points out, no one likes a scold.
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