The other day a good friend asked me, “Is our country in a bad state today?” I pondered this serious question and replied, “The country is not the same self-confident place as 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 tide people. It was not until the rearmament of Europe in 1939 when war was imminent that employment began to recover in the United States.
At the end of World War II, which the United States won at a terrible cost, President Harry Truman and his advisers realized that they must change the isolationist policy and prepare the United States to take its proper leadership role in the world. As a result, the world had 65 years of relative peace, with the exception of the Korean and Vietnam wars.
In the spring of 1999, when Bill Clinton brought together all NATO nations for the 50th anniversary of the signing of NATO, our country was at the zenith of its power and prestige in the world. There was no other nation on the horizon that could challenge the United States.
In 2001, newly elected President George W. Bush was hit with economic and political outcry after the September 11 attacks. As a result, Bush has launched a coordinated effort to crush al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The following year he decided to intervene in Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein. In both cases, Bush has implemented extremely costly nation-building programs to include U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, which President Joe Biden ended in 2021 after 20 years.
Barack Obama, elected for two terms in 2008, has withdrawn from the expanding U.S. global intervention and the U.S. allies have questioned whether America is retreating into isolationism. In 2016, Donald Trump was elected President and declared that the United States was the first and he really didn’t care about what happened to the rest of the world. However, he continued to support collective security but heavily criticized NATO members for not spending enough for their own defense. Fortunately, Trump was deeply defeated in the 2020 national election by Biden. Since taking office, Biden has been rebuilding relationships with allies around the world.
The saving factor for the United States in the 2020 election was the constitutional requirement that limits the president’s term of office to four years unless the incumbent president is re-elected for a second and final four-year term. Many staunch nationalists refuse to accept that Donald Trump did not win a second term, but the election result showed that Biden won the presidency in the 2020 election.
So where does this leave a divided country in its ability to deal with crises like Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, China’s growing aggression in East Asia and the Pacific, and inflation in this country? All this is exacerbated by the decline in the amount of oil flowing westward as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and NATO sanctions on Russian imports. The terrible domestic problems engulfing the United States, currently including high inflation, rising gas prices, ongoing mass shootings and extraordinary weather events, are diminishing the U.S. attention of crises abroad. In addition, the Black Lives Matter movement has exacerbated ongoing racial problems that continue to plague this country.
The reason I have deep concerns about the future of the country is that we are so divided politically that it will be very difficult to solve both domestic and international problems. What does that suggest ?: that America is in the process of a gradual withdrawal from global commitments and the world will be a more dangerous place as a result. I hope I’m wrong, but the trend lines during this summer of 2022 don’t look good for a favorable result.
The 2022 congressional elections will be very interesting to watch.
Nuechterlein, 97, is a retired diplomat, professor of international relations, and naval officer. A frequent Roanoke Times contributor, he intended his June 12 column to be his final newspaper column, but later produced one more.
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