Congressional wars underlying the health care summit are making cynical headlines around the world but the US still has what it takes for domestic and foreign policy success. Its economy is 25% of global GDP and it has the ability to project power forcefully across oceans and continents.
Combined with these unique powers, are two other great strengths. The US has the most innovative and educated people and the dollar remains the de facto reserve currency to the world. Talk of America’s decline is premature despite the Congressional dysfunction but the politics paralyzing President Barack Obama’s domestic agenda are starting to undercut his foreign policy assets.
This gives cause for disquiet since solutions to the gigantic budget deficits central to healthcare depend greatly on international inputs that require successful foreign policies. Health care may seem internal but it is tied to foreign policy because its success requires increased tax revenues and deep spending cuts.
Increasing revenues requires more jobs and economic growth, both of which involve economic, financial, trade and labor policy coordination with the world’s chief economies represented in the G-20. In turn, reducing spending involves open markets to import lower cost health care equipment and generic medicines while attracting some of the best medical professionals from around the world.
On a broader level, reducing the trade deficit requires a major boost in exports. That involves persuading foreign countries to not only stimulate domestic demand and but also buy more from America. Reducing the budget deficit requires building more trust with creditors like China and other sovereign lenders during the long transition period needed to bring the budget into better balance.
Currently, foreign policy is not just about winning America’s foreign wars. Importantly, its success is a determinant of jobs, prosperity and quality of life. Members of Congress rail across the partisan divide to protect the interests of their local constituencies. But their voters’ lifestyles are no longer separated by oceans from the murky fights of global politics. Only foreign policy provides the prods needed to steer foreign countries in favor of American goals, including jobs and security, or not to undermine them.
The US faces possible decline despite numerous strengths because it is transferring power to foreign creditors to pay for health care, homeland security, wars, infrastructure and financial bailouts etc. But this mostly debt-based waning is a relative notion. The numbers may mean little. They are alarming or not depending on a country’s total wealth. If the economy and jobs grow, the indebtedness will have been a worthwhile bridge to higher levels of prosperity and security.
Foreign policy is conducted for two main purposes: assure the security of Americans and promote their prosperity. Some decades ago, additional purposes were added in various measure e.g. winning over hearts and minds abroad to support American values like personal freedoms, human rights, democracy, rule of law and private enterprise-based open markets. The messianic elements of these goals have made foreign policy complicated, very broad in scope, expensive and dangerous.
Since 9/11 and the 2008 financial tsunami, life for each citizen and Member of Congress has changed irrevocably. The wider world has become important as an indispensable partner of the daily prosperity and safety of each American, and not just a nuisance-maker or chessboard with “for us or against us” pawns.
To those caught up in the heat of partisan battles, American strengths may seem enduring but no world power in history ever imagined its own dismantling. Decline is not yet here but it may creep in if domestic America continues to pretend that it can build more quality of life, including health care, without the cooperation of others.