The Committee of Public Safety

William McChesney Martin

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.

Era of Hegemony (1943-1973): At the end of the Great Intervention, America assumed control of the Third Circle. The nations of the British Isles, Western Europe up to the Elbe, Japan, Formosa (Taiwan), and Indonesia became American satellites. America had a nuclear monopoly. America was responsible for half of the world’s economic output. America was at her fully capitalized zenith. America was positioned for securing the Heartland of Eurasia and removing it as a threat. Adaptations of this era include:

• Opening its markets as an indirect subsidy of economic recovery in the Third Circle and using its consumers to consume foreign products.
• Establishing a framework for managing its client states without assuming direct rule through institutions like NATO, the IMF, the Common Market, and Bretton Woods.
• Spreading the prosperity of its hegemony throughout the American population.
• Massive aid to buy political affiliation through programs like the Marshall Plan and other foreign aid.
• A institutionalized military that reduced the ad hoc approaches to defense America had taken in the past.
• Formal infrastructure for fighting non-kinetic war and establishing cultural hegemony like USIA, the CIA, and Radio Free Europe and informal structures like the films and television programs produced by America’s entertainment industry.
• Establishment of a superior university system through subsidies like the GI Bill.
• Successful pursuit of monetary policy by the Fed under William McChesney Martin.
• A policy of cheap victory by fighting proxy and cultural wars with the Soviet Union instead of a direct great power confrontation. Victory in a nuclear war with Russia was not impossible until the mid-1960s.
• Building a massive infrastructure of highways needed to protect the First Circle:
  

  President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was influenced by his experiences in 1919 as a young Army officer crossing the country in a truck convoy (following the route of the Lincoln Highway), and his appreciation of the German Autobahn network as a necessary component of a national defense system. In addition to facilitating private and commercial transportation, it would provide key ground transport routes for military supplies and troop deployments in case of an emergency or foreign invasion.

Gross

Era of Strategic Leverage (1973-?): During this era, America leveraged the capital it had accumulated in the preceding 197 years in order to maintain the level of consumption that prevailed during the Era of Hegemony. This leverage was also used to force Soviet Russia to spend itself into oblivion. However, American society became so dependent on consuming foreign capital to fund its consumption that it morphed, as Bill Gross has argued, from a industrial or service economy to a finance economy. However, this era, drawing to a close, had its own share of adaptions:

• The building of a first rate military force capable of defeating middle tiered countries and occupying small ones.
• The adoption of digital computers for automating certain routine tasks and even some non-routine ones (like the models that deluded Wall Street).
• The introduction of some flexibility into the economy that made it better able to adapt to a narrow range of changing conditions.
• The use of a preemptive arms buildup to destroy an imperial adversary without significant cost to the world’s infrastructure.
• The spread of computer networks to form new mechanisms of adaption.