A good friend asked me the other day, “Is our country in bad shape today?” I pondered this serious question and answered, “The earth is not the same confident place it was between 1945 and 2000.”
Most people my age remember the Great Depression of the 1930s, when banks across the country closed, 25 million jobs were lost, and there was no Social Security to help people. It was only after the rearmament of Europe in 1939, when war was inevitable, that employment began to recover in the United States.
At the end of World War II, in which the US won at a terrible cost, President Harry Truman and his advisers realized that they had to change our isolationist policies and prepare America to assume its leading role in the world.
As a result, the world enjoyed 65 years of relative peace, with the exception of the Korean and Vietnam wars.
In the spring of 1999, when Bill Clinton gathered all NATO countries on the 50th anniversary of the signing of NATO, our country was at the zenith of its power and reputation in the world. There was no other nation on the horizon that could challenge the United States.
In 2001, President-elect George W. Bush took an economic and political hit after the 9/11 attacks. As a result, Bush launched a concerted effort to defeat al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The following year, he decided to intervene in Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
In both cases, Bush pursued hugely expensive nation-building programs that included the US occupation of Afghanistan, which President Biden ended in 2021 after 20 years.
Barack Obama, elected in 2008, backed away from America’s ever-expanding global intervention, and America’s allies wondered if our nation was retreating into isolationism.
In 2016, Donald Trump was elected president and declared that America comes first, and he doesn’t really care what happens to the rest of the world. However, he continued to support collective security but fiercely criticized NATO members for not spending enough on their own defense.
Fortunately, Trump was soundly defeated by Joe Biden in the 2020 national election. Since taking office, Biden has been rebuilding relationships with allies around the world.
The saving grace for the United States in the 2020 election was the constitutional requirement that limits the president’s term to four years, unless the incumbent is re-elected to a second and final four-year term.
Many die-hard nationalists refuse to accept that Donald Trump did not win a second term, but the outcome of the election made it clear that Biden won the 2020 presidential election.
So where does this leave a divided country in its ability to deal with crises such as Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, China’s growing aggressiveness in East Asia and the Pacific, and inflation in this country?
All this has been exacerbated by the decline in the amount of oil flowing to the West as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and NATO sanctions on Russian imports.
The dire domestic problems currently engulfing the US, including high inflation, rising gas prices, ongoing mass shootings and extreme weather, are distracting America from crises abroad. In addition, the Black Lives Matter movement has amplified the ongoing racial issues that continue to plague this country.
The reason I am deeply concerned about the future of the country is that we are so divided politically that it will be very difficult to solve domestic and international problems.
What does this suggest? That America is in the process of gradually withdrawing from global interference, and the world will be a more dangerous place as a result. I hope I’m wrong, but the 2022 trend lines don’t look good for a favorable outcome.
The 2022 Congressional elections will be very interesting to watch.
Don Nuechterlein is a political scientist and writer who lives near Charlottesville.
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