End of Western Civilization Watch: The Winner’s Dilemma IV
I hold my light beside the open door
America suffers from victory disease. We have been so successful for so long that we are frozen into patterns of behavior that no longer fit the current world scene. Worse, when we’re wrong, we’re aggressively wrong. Change is not impossible. However, change is hard. We must live with uncertainty since we can’t predict exactly how we’ll need to change in order to adapt. However, we can take comfort (and hints, if extracted conservatively) from the example of past American eras.
Second Era of Intervention (1891-1917): After the Era of Reconstruction, during this period America embarked on a series of interventions aimed at:
- Securing the remainder of the Second Circle (Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, Pacific Island Territories, Cuba, Panama Canal Zone, powerful Atlantic Naval Fleet).
- Keeping overseas markets threatened by consolidating European colonization open, even if it meant colonizing them ourselves
- Securing a place in the global pecking order
Adaptations included:
- Securing the outer circle of defense by taking Puerto Rico, Hawaii, the Panama Canal Zone, and Guam as territories and reducing Panama and Cuba to client states.
- Creating an American national identity with formal measures like adopting a standard flag layout, synthesizing a common historical mythos, and the Pledge of Allegiance.
- Easing class divisions within American society by Progressive legislation.
- Adopting the Open Door policy and annexing the Philippines to keep foreign markets open to American exports
- Seeking to expand the American ideal of republican nation states through interventions in Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Columbia (Panama), and Mexico. Said Thomas Woodrow Wilson: I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men.
- Entering the Third Circle (British Isles, West European Littoral, Japanese Islands, Formosa (Taiwan)) by expanding the US Navy, forcing the British to appease us by de facto ceding their sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere, and reducing the British and French to net debtors of the United States in the lead up to our intervention in World War I.
- Intervening in overseas conflicts diplomatically such as Theodore Roosevelt’s negotitation of the end of the Russo-Japanese War and American efforts to mediate European squabbles like the Moroccan Crisis and World War I.
Over-the-top supervillian
The Great Intervention (1917-1943): Intervention in Europe during World War I led to an unstable international order whose most powerful member was an unwilling American Republic. The new world order was created by Thomas Woodrow Wilson as a perhaps conscious implementation of the worldview of American supervillian John C. Calhoun. A League of Nations would act as a weak central authority (Calhoun’s vision of the Federal government) with the nations of the Earth accepting or rejecting its mandates as they pleased (Calhoun’s super-strong States of the Union). This States’s Rights world would be the international model into the 21st century. Essentially, the result was a beginning of American domination of the Third Circle by contesting its rule with Imperial Germany and later Nazi Germany and Japan. Adaptions during this era included:
- Developing a distributed transportation system that included airplanes and cars in addition to horses and railroads.
- Consolidating American populations into a more cohesive unit by severely cutting back on immigration in the 1920s.
- Creating the Four Powers framework to formalize American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, institutionalized in the United Nations and Bretton Woods framework.
- A consumer economy to absorb more of the products produced by American industry domestically.
- A global culture epitomized by jazz music and motion pictures that extended American cultural influence into the Third Circle.
- Creating a more stable society through a more equitable distribution of wealth to an expanded American middle class.
- Development of air power and nuclear weapons to further insulate America from the Second Circle inwards from Eurasian penetration.
- Eclipsing England through the negotiated parity of the Washington Treaty.
