Today the NYT has an article titled "China Wages Classroom struggle to win friends in Africa". A small article that illustrates how China is out maneuvering Washington in the never-ending battle to expand each countries power and influence for the benefit of each countries elite. One of the fascinating aspects of current culture in America is the open acceptance and much greater understanding of "hard power" vs. the lost appreciation for the art of soft power.
We all know what hard power and soft power is. To keep things simple hard power is forcing someone to do something. Soft power is getting someone to do something without truly forcing them. Soft power might be described as enticing your child to take out the garbage by convincing him/her that it is proper and helpful to do chores, or by simply paying them an allowance to do it. Hard power is beating that boy until he does it. Force. The conservative paternalistic side of people loves the hard power, particularly if there appears to be some (possibly illusionary) justification in using force. War is the largest and most explicit means of a sovereign nation using hard power. Every nation with a military goods industry has a special interest group who will always benefit from the use of those military goods.
The United States has the largest military industry in the world. We alone spend over 500 billion dollars on our military. Our military industrial complex sells arms to the world. Thus our military industrial complex is the most powerful special interest group in the country. The seniors got nothing on Lockheed. Need proof? The Social Security initiative. One of the most important reasons is our military goods are considered to the technologically the best on the planet. This occurred because our scientific minds were the best. Intelligent students were rewarded with the best institutions of higher learning in the world. The fact that the Republicans and the Christian right are doing their best to kill science and education in America is a subject for another day, but here I will quickly state the simple fact that if they get their way and solidify their control over this country, our technological know-how will go down the drain and our soldiers will live in fear of out opponents weapons instead of the other way around. Simply put, if the Christian Right wins America's military dominance will go down the drain. In the more short term the Republican party is killing America's military by spending money on weapons programs without requiring that the programs work (see missile shield) or by spending money on weapons systems that do not pass the most basic cost/benefit test. The cost being the expense in dollars, the benefit is will this weapon help us win the next war we expect to fight. In case you haven't noticed we are spending 500 billion (I don't believe this even includes money spent specifically on the Iraq war), that is more than the next 10 nations combined, to lose a war to a bunch of rag-heads in the desert. Pathetic.
So back to our discussion of hard v soft power. Hard power was once a great method of getting your way. Want that land and the people on it? Just lock and load and go take it. The land is yours and the people will do what you say because they don't want to die. And it is right here where we reach the limits of hard power. You can force someone to do something if they have a fear of death, but once they just don't care anymore, i.e. once they are ready to become a suicide bomber threatening to shoot them will just not get them to take out the garbage. You just kill them and then have to take out the dang garbage yourself. This is where we are in Iraq. We are a conquering nation who cannot get the people to give us our tribute. Rather we pump millions of tax dollars into our military and into a country and get nothing in return. Oh wait, we are spreading "freedom". Right. The Iraqi's are now free to have their asses blown off by us or their neighbor, with no chance of ever seeing justice unless they take the initiative to blow up the offenders ass. Which is what they are doing. Fantastic.
This is quite clearly a war where the only winner is the military industrial complex. America is having its coffers drained, the dollar will soon plummet along with our markets and the world markets, and we will have nothing to show for it. Just an economy based on a resource that has hit its peak in worldwide production. If the elites had tried to come up with a scheme of killing the country they could not have done a better job. The Soviet economy collapsed 25 years before ours will. What a win boys, way to go.
Back to China, which is building up its military while maintaining a budget surplus. By not using it's military in an outright war it is keeping the threat of military force very real in the eyes of its neighbors without the expense. There is not a nation on earth that is currently worried about the US military because everyone knows that we have shot our load. This is the one concept that the Republican voter does not seem to understand. They are not afraid of us now because of our use of the military. See we used it and it didn't work. We are still there and we have no troops to spare elsewhere. If the Canadians and Mexicans got together they could meet in Kansas before you could say "hombre".
This administrations love of hard power, with the tacit acceptance of the American people, has allowed China to go around the world and paint us as the bad guys. The bottom line is we will no longer be able to defend our interests globally. African nations will sign treaties trading oil and other resources to China. South American nations will do the same. Countries will spurn us because they know that we cannot use our military against them, we cannot force them through hard power. We will not be able to influence them through soft power like the Chinese because they simply do not like us. We are no longer standing up for the values which the rest of the world admired. We torture people (with 9 Christian GOP senators explicit voting for the government to legally torture non-civilians). We lie and attack nations based on false pretenses. We are the moral wrong, we are the bad guys to them. So the nations of Africa and South America (once our subdued backyard) will side with China on whatever issue or interest is important at the time, and America will become like Brazil in the 80's. A country of medium influence with a serious inflation problem. The interesting thing is everyone (left and right) expects the US to still be one of the few big boys in ten years. We are doing everything in our power to undercut our big boy status. One of those things is giving up the ability to influence others without force. Another is losing the ability to influence others with force. By our focus on hard power the United States is neutering itself. Our power, both hard and soft is already far diminished, and if we "stay the course" we will only get weaker. But you read dkos, so you already know all this. But tell a republican, it's simple enough for them to understand, and its an argument in their language.