The decline and fall of the American empire …

Re-read a classic – Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon – not long ago and something caught my eye.

If you’ve forgotten the book, it’s a cold-war classic from the late 1950s and was an après-le-bomb story set in Florida.  It came out around the same time as Neville Shute’s powerful On the Beach. Both dealt with survivors of an all-out nuclear war between the superpowers.   

Anyway, in the latter part of the book a retired admiral – a former member of the Joint Chiefs – is talking to another character about how and why the world came to such mass devastation from nuclear war.  And how America had practically invited the attack. 

As he was writing his behind-the-scenes account – mainly for future generations, if any – he said he’d been trying to find parallels in history.  He kept coming back to Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

He said when candidates spent fortunes to win an election, and politicians plied voters with free bread and lavish entertainment spectacles to divert attention from real problems, the writing was on the wall.  It meant Roman leaders were acting tactically, focusing on short-term fixes, postponing the hard decisions, and ignoring or downplaying the real threats.   

This created vulnerabilities – windows of opportunity – that encouraged attacks on what adversaries perceived as a soft and weakened entity.   

It struck me as all too familiar, even though it was written in the late 1950s

Obama and the Democrats are repeating that history in many ways. Current Republicans aren’t helping much either. 

Our political system has been corrupted by once unimaginable amounts of money.  Politicians keep handing out more and more entitlements to the masses to placate them and get their votes.  Our leaders don’t really lead anymore; they are far more likely to follow what pollsters tell them. 

So those who should be running the government and making the hard decisions simply aren’t – they keep kicking the can down the road hoping nobody notices.  

Frankly, we should demand more from our elected officials.  We should demand that they do their jobs, and not just what they think they need to do to get re-elected.  They are putting us all in jeopardy, more so every day, by making us a weaker nation economically, militarily, and – at the risk of sounding narrow minded – ethically and morally. 

We all know this country is a mess. 

The years of Obama with the Democrats controlling the Senate have made it worse.  Before my liberal friends deny that, check your facts.  By practically any rational metric, we’re worse off than before.  HHI is way down.  Labor participation is way down.  The number of people claiming disability and food stamps has soared.  And Obama’s policies have driven down full-time employment and dramatically increased the debt, while making the rich even richer.  

Plus, his foreign policy is a disaster for the United States. That’s most dangerous.   

Our foreign adversaries are emboldened.  All you need to look at is what happened in Benghazi, and how we handled the Syrian crisis. Then we have Iran building nukes, North Korea testing nukes, Russia invading Crimea, and Islamic radicals tearing up the Middle East and Africa. 

Our adversaries aren’t worried about what we might do; they know Obama won’t do anything except talk. Plus, make promises and threats he has no intention of keeping.

Obama continues to try to marginalize all this for domestic consumption. He refuses to acknowledge that his “leading from behind” strategies and diplomatic solutions have all failed.  In Iraq.  In Iran.  In Afghanistan.  In Syria.  In Libya.  In Egypt.  In the Crimea.  And in North Korea. 

In fact, everywhere you look. 

Now he can’t bring himself to admit that there are organized, violent, merciless Islamic extremists who want to kill us all; Hell, he can’t even call them what they are. 

He’d rather hand out free stuff here – like free community college tuition, and the tease of middle-class tax cuts – to distract the American public from what’s really going on in the world.   

It’s bread and circuses all over again.  And the barbarians are at the gates.     

We’ve created a window of opportunity for our enemies. We’ve abandoned peace through strength. Obama believes that if we are less threatening to the world, we’ll face fewer threats ourselves.  He’s promoted a new strategy – peace through weakness – which shows our few remaining allies and our enemies alike that he’s clueless to how the world actually works.  

But most of all, he’s shown the world that he doesn’t want to get his hands dirty. 

He’s afraid of military confrontations that involve real U.S. troops fighting and killing real bad guys up close and personal. He doesn’t want any possibility that some of our troops might get killed – and he might get blamed – in the process.  He prefers a more antiseptic approach – more like a video game – where our soldiers sit safely in a bunker somewhere and maneuver unmanned drones to unleash Hellfire missiles elsewhere. 

When the Commander in Chief is clearly afraid to send our soldiers into actual combat – no matter how justified the reason – then no one in the world need fear us.   

Now let’s be honest.  There was a time in our youth when we had posters that said “Suppose we had a war and nobody came.”  We might have even believed that.  Everything – including war – had a simple solution to us. Just withdraw, go home, and refuse to fight. 

In hindsight, that was amazingly stupid. Then again, we were probably stoned at the time, too.  Everything seemed simpler when you were stoned.   

Unlike our parents who fought in WWII or Korea, and our friends who served in Vietnam, most of us had never faced a real enemy trying to kill us. Sure, we were children of the Cold War, and we worried about nuclear attacks, but in our heart of hearts we felt the Soviet people were probably just like us and didn’t want to die. War was a somewhat abstract concept to us.

Then came Vietnam and the horrors of war confronted us every night on network news. Soldiers and civilians died in horrible and gruesome ways we never imagined. Cameras recorded fire fights, executions, and monks burning themselves in protest. We had friends who came back wounded, and some who never made it back at all. 

Those of us of a certain age blamed politicians and their ties to the “military/industrial complex” for this. It hardened our views about war in general as useless and wasteful.  It spawned a whole generation of politicians who wanted to gut our military budgets for use in social programs.  For the most part, a lot of us cheered them on, I am sorry to say.   

A tipping point was reached during the brief yet regrettable Jimmy Carter term, which was heavy on symbolism and short on results. When Iran seized our diplomats and held them for 444 days while Carter and the Democrats dithered, we reached a new low. 

We had become the paper tiger. Nobody feared us.

Then Ronald Reagan was elected.  The Iranians quickly released our hostages because they feared what Reagan might do.  And despite continued resistance from the hardcore left and their political allies, we built up our military, advanced our killing technologies, and sent a clear message to the world not to screw with us … or else.

The anti-war, anti-military wing of the Democrat Party was still around, still preaching peace and love, and accusing Reagan and many Republicans of being war mongers and in the pockets of defense contractors.  Reagan blew them off and continued amping up our military. 

By the time the Berlin Wall fell, and a little later the Soviet Union collapsed, most of us had had an epiphany – we understood, finally, that the only realistic path to peace was to scare the crap out of anyone who even thought about attacking you.  

Reagan and the hawks were right, after all.   

Then came Obama. 

He’s managed – singlehandedly – to make America look weak, indecisive, untrustworthy and vulnerable.  Say what you will about George W., while other world leader may have dismissed him as a “cowboy,” they also knew that if he promised something, he would do his best to deliver. 

And he wasn’t afraid to pull the trigger.  Neither was Clinton, for that matter.  Nor was George H.W.  Nor, of course, was Reagan. 

Obama is different.  He doesn’t want us to be a superpower, much less the preeminent superpower.  He strives to be universally loved and praised by the rest of the world for humbling America. Something he, and the far left supporting him, feel is long overdue.   

So far, he's doing a good job at that.  

And that puts us all in jeopardy.