An Unnatural Disaster

In a month of horrific natural disasters—the China quake, the Burma cyclone—it's instructive to consider what one of the biggest unnatural disasters in memory looks like. That is the decline in America's position in the world from where we were when George W. Bush inherited power on Jan. 20, 2001, to what he will bequeath to the next president eight months from now.

In many articles and in book after book American "declinists" nowadays tend to portray America's reduced stature as a largely natural phenomenon. Never mind that on the eve of the Bush presidency we were still seen as the most powerful nation in the history of the world. Decadent powers always wane in influence, and it seems we've just been doing a lot of waning very quickly. As other countries around the world partook of the ideas we pressed on them in the post-cold war era—free markets, democracy—they started to prosper and catch up to us. Meanwhile we grew fatter (literally) and more spoiled. It was all very organic.

Sure, there's something to this thesis. I argued it myself in a book—“At War With Ourselves"—I published back in 2003. Some relative U.S. decline was always inevitable. But these ruminations still miss the main point. Most of what has happened over the last seven years is the result of strategic misconceptions, awful policy decisions, and botched opportunities for leadership by the major players in Washington. What happened to America wasn't natural, it was almost entirely self-inflicted.

The issue goes way beyond Bush's decision to invade Iraq in the middle of the war in Afghanistan. U.S. government literally broke down during the Bush years. The interagency process was destroyed as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld set up what was effectively a "black" alternative government (the veep's shadow national security council, and Doug Feith's Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon). The White House treated its coequal branch, Congress, like an interloper (to the annoyance of Republicans as well as Democrats). Junk science infected the policy-making apparatus on key issues of importance to our allies in Europe and Asia, like global warming. Junk legal reasoning by White House and Justice Department lawyers was used to publicly justify torture, decimating our once high moral stature around the world. Junk economics—an excess of free-market fervor—infected the Federal Reserve and other regulators, who slumbered while Wall Street ran amok selling fraudulent mortgage securities to foreign markets. Congress went to sleep while the administration ran up record deficits. (The fallout from the subprime debacle and budget imbalance has cost us as much prestige in the economic sphere as Iraq has cost us in the foreign policy arena.) The Department of Homeland Security, misconceived and oversized even at its birth, grew into an unmanageable monstrosity, leading directly to the disaster of the Hurricane Katrina response.

All this dysfunction might have been bearable had the right strategic decisions emerged from the black box that Bush's Washington became. But not surprisingly, given the absence of most checks and balances, precisely the wrong decisions emerged. Invading Iraq, of course, was the biggie—a decision that has possibly cost as much in innocent life and limb as the Burma and China disasters put together. As most countries saw it, taking on the "root cause" of Al Qaeda by targeting Arab tyranny a thousand miles away from the enemy—while the terrorist network continued to flourish in Afghanistan and Pakistan—was like holding a conference on fire safety while your house is still burning down. In any case, along with their trumped-up case on WMD, the Bushies never successfully made the argument that Al Qaeda grew out of a lack of democracy in Arabia rather than out of the anti-Soviet jihad in the mountains of Afghanistan, which was the group's real lineage. (Check the record: there was not a single scholarly or intelligence study cited for that argument.) And even if you accept that forcing the defiant Saddam to surrender his "WMD" at that historic juncture was a necessary exercise of U.S. power—we were all pretty riled up, after all—going ahead and invading after Bush had won a 15-0 Security Council vote that gave him complete inspection access to Iraq was seen abroad as an act of recklessness.

But Congress and the punditocracy never really challenged the Bush team on these seemingly simple points. Indeed, scratch a theorist of American decline today, and underneath you'll often find an Iraq war supporter. Because they are vested in justifying themselves—thinking that other presidents would have made mostly the same strategic choices Bush did—it may be easier on their consciences to conclude that our problems are more inevitable than self-made.