This is in response to a few posts I've seen about the US "falling behind" - in particular, someone said that the US is doomed "welcome to 3rd world America".
Instead of saying "welcome to 3rd-world America", say instead "welcome to prewar America".
Seriously - the ongoing wailing about "the US is falling behind" is getting a little tiresome.
First, lets dispense with US exceptionalism. I love my country, and there are a number of notably special things about its situation geographically, culturally, historically, etc that make it a unique place but Americans are not (and have never been) intrinsically smarter, prettier, faster, stronger, or any way different than any other cross-section of humanity. We have the same proportions of brilliant scientists and racist a-holes as pretty much any other random bunch of 330 million people you'd gather in the world.
Secondly, and more directly to my point - to fear the US 'falling behind' speaks to a staggering level of ignorance of the last 100 years of world history.
In 1912 - a mere 100 years ago - the list of great powers in the world would have been Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Austria/Hungary, and only marginally, the USA. The US was a largely agrarian country of mostly first-generation immigrants, late industrializing and largely disconnected with Old World affairs.
Yet after two catastrophic continent-spanning conflicts in 25 years (and a not-insignificant influenza epidemic), the three leading European states were prostrate - two from their almost-Pyrrhic victory (UK, France), one lay dismembered and occupied after being pummeled nearly into dust (Germany) - one of the powers entirely ceased to exist (A/H), one emerged from civil war at least superficially changed (Russia - USSR), one emerged from nowhere (Japan), and only one was basically unscathed - the United States.
In the two conflicts total deaths over the span of these listed powers totalled something more than 50 million. US fatalities were approximately 500,000. Possibly more significantly, the wars had completely devastated the industrial, technological, and even cultural infrastructure of the old world, with the subsequent Cold War arguably further contributing - paralyzing truly independent European development for 4+ decades.
The US was in the historically-unique position of being a superpower by default, not by inclination. US armies had not marched all over the world subjugating enemies, conquering colonies, and gathering territory for the motherland. (Certainly the US had engaged in its own efforts in colonialism like other Powers of the day, much of it naked military conquest barely cloaked as 'liberatory' exercises.) But it's clear that even the burgeoning jingoism of the early-20th-century US wasn't posed as a challenge to the Great Powers, except insofar as it was competitive to Old World efforts to colonize and dominate the largely-unexploited Western Hemisphere. Instead, the US was largely aimed at internal development, a patronizing benevolence toward other peoples of the Western Hemisphere, and essentially (even as late as the early 20th-century) a *revolutionary* geopolitical stance vis a vis the Old World states and their efforts to "lock down" most of the undeveloped world into agreed-upon exclusionary spheres of influence.
For emerging in 1945 as the dominant superpower on the planet, it should be astonishing that the US began the 20th century with a second-rate navy and almost no army to speak of.
In fact, as a superpower, one might point out that the US has been particularly clumsy. Certainly, many anti-Americans (and we've generated many of them) would point to the scores of bad US foreign policy decisions as clear signs of its essentially-malignant nature; in point of fact, most if not all were simply colossal blunders born of a government run by unsophisticated and unsubtle men born and raised in a country that was (in their day) fairly irrelevant. Wilson's naivete in insisting on national boundaries in post-WWI Europe almost guaranteed non-self-sufficient states vulnerable to Caesarist populism. Read about the WW2 conferences between Stalin, Churchill, and FDR - FDR, for all his (American-style) urbanity, was often easily manipulated by the others. No state's foreign policy is without mistakes, certainly. But as US arrogance grew in the 1950s and 1960s, our clumsy, shortsighted and usually reactionary choices often ran roughshod over our own interests.
The fact that the US emerged later from the Cold War as the sole superpower speaks more to the intrinsic contradictions (and weakness) of the Soviet system and the inherent systemic benefits of capitalism, than to any particular cleverness of US policies. Like 50 years earlier, the US didn't "win" the Cold War so much as "remain standing" when its opponent finally collapsed - mostly, I'd argue, as a result of America's geographic situation with abundant resources and a nearly-unassailable location, and (one of the few attributes I'd characterize as a generally unique feature of American culture) and an entrepreneurial and independently-minded populace .
The point is that now - roughly 2 decades after the Cold War ended with a whimper, and 2 full generations since WW2 - the Old World has finally essentially recovered. European states no longer act as simple proxies for Superpower policies, they have formed their own agglomeration that allows them finally to pursue truly independent foreign policy. (Further, it's not trivial that much of what's left of the US industrial base is pre-WW2, when European infrastructure is a good 20-30+ years younger.)
So in this broader context it shouldn't surprise anyone that the US, which has always been a deeply religious, insular country EXCEPT when superpowerhood was thrust upon it (and which it wore fairly uncomfortably), is losing its dominance in technology, economy, etc. Not much here has changed, everyone else is returning to normal.
As a Minnesotan, one of the least-attractive characteristics of my fellow-staters is often a seemingly-pathological need to be "noticed". We're considered flyover country by the bulk of the population on both coasts, and this seems to activate a sense of insecurity and a need for attention. I see a disappointing parallel in histrionic comments from Americans arguing "we're not falling behind!". Sure we are, if you want to put it that way. I'd rather recognize that finally the rest of the world has recovered. I'd rather be enjoying the fruits of being in the middle of a pack of successes, than being the sole superpower upon which the rest of the world depends.
