Why hasn’t America tried to export its own distinctive constitutional ideas? In all those new nations supposedly inspired by American democracy, you’ll search in vain for, say, a First Amendment, or a Second. Even when the U.S. has expended a decade’s worth of blood and treasure in “nation-building,” the nation it’s built is not in its own image but a sharia state complete with child marriage, legalized rape, and death for apostasy.
For years, the foreign-policy “realists” have assured us that economic liberalization would force political liberalization. Instead, we’ve helped China come up with the only economically viable form of Communism. So, sometime this decade or next, the dominant economic power will be a totalitarian state with no genuine market, no property rights, no free speech, an abortion policy that’s left it with the most male-heavy population cohort in history, and, a little ways inland from the glittering coastal megalopolises, 40 million people who live in caves.
A prosperous Europe (subsequently joined by China, Singapore, Korea, India, Brazil, you name it) suckered U.S. taxpayers into picking up the tab for global security and signing on to an economic order that turned America into a cheap service economy.
Now America is ceding economic dominance to China; the transnational talking shops are hollowed out by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation; in Central and Eastern Europe, a resurgent Russia is selling itself as an effective bad cop to Washington’s ineffectual good cop.
Yes, it was a wonderful life.
But what’s next?