The Winner’s Dilemma Part I
America is suffering from the winner’s dilemma. We’ve been so successful for so long that we assume that our place atop the greasy pole is the ordained natural order of things. We keep doing what we’ve always done. Our old school tricks won’t work in a new school world. This old dog needs new tricks. We’ve had to learn them in the past. This learning happened in several phases.
Era of Encirclement (1607-1819): Early America was encircled by two menacing seas: the Atlantic Ocean and the trans-Appalachian forests. These pathways easily conveyed hostile Frenchmen and Englishmen across the ocean and hostile Indians across the woods. Invasion could come from any point in the circle. American survival demanded that it break this circle of wood and water. It had to deny its enemies the routes to attack America. America by the end of this period had hit upon a strategy:
- Politically unify to prevent Europeans from dividing and conquering the states and to increase resource base.
- Use the expanded resource base to pay down debt in order to attract European capital at lower interest rates.
- Use the expanded resource base to build a navy and fortifications strong enough to deter Great Britain while using the British Navy as a shield against other European powers, a subsidy by British taxpayers that paid a huge portion of America’s defense bills until the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922.
- Breed like there is no tomorrow. Women in New England had as many as nine children apiece until the 1820s, an achievement that provided the margin of safety for the North in breaking the land side of the circle and in the later Civil War. To govern is to populate, as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento observed.
- Raise a tariff wall to protect indigenous industries needed to produce the weapons of war.
