Eccentric Ideas

I thought I would try this out on you all before kicking this as far upstairs as people are willing to listen. To get to the meat of what I hope will happen, there are a few things that must be accepted.

For the people who are roughly my age, we remember how we felt as Americans at the end of the Seventies and the “malaise” that had settled over most of us. At the time, we were facing inflation above 14 percent, unemployment more than 10 percent in most states and as much as 15 percent in some areas. Interest rates on mortgages got as high as 21 percent for a brief time but were always up in the high teens (imagine people complaining about 7 percent mortgage rates these days). In addition, Iranian student revolutionaries held 66 Americans captive, 52 of them for 444 days. In effect, this held America captive and made us all feel powerless, especially so after a botched attempt to rescue them failed miserably. Of course the crisis in the oil rich region caused gas prices to rise dramatically and shortages to occur.

All of the negativity that seemed to swallow us whole during that time was within five or six years of the U.S. military retreating in defeat from Vietnam and from the embarrassment of a president and vice president resigning in disgrace. For you younger folks, I think you had to live during that time to understand how small we felt as Americans. Perhaps only during the Depression 50 years earlier did America suffer from such collective anxiety.

The rough news to this story is that I think we are headed down the same path as we were 30 years ago. America is deep in the middle of a downward spiral with no real expectation of pulling out before we crash. We have no faith in our political leadership, we’re mired in a war with no real way to declare a victory, our dollar has become a joke with no corresponding benefit because our country produces very little worth selling to the world, having shipped that work out to the Developing World. We’ve had two bubbles burst due to avarice and the expectation that the stock market and housing market are required to rise at 20 percent per year, we’re viewed by many others around the world as, let’s face it, losers, and with the rise of Russia, Europe and China, we’re looking less like the world’s only superpower and more like a paper tiger. Again, malaise has settled in and nobody seems to have a prescription.

When Reagan was elected in 1980 he did very little from a policy perspective to change things. All he really did was make Americans walk a little taller and convince people that we are a great nation with great personal strengths and we needed to get out there and get the economy going again. I remember him telling the nation during one of his press conferences to go out and buy that washing machine and new car because there was no reason not to. And people did and the economy grew at the fastest and longest pace in U.S. history. It didn’t take Congress to enact new laws – although the tax cuts didn’t hurt – or any great change to the fundamental way our economy was structured. It took a grandfatherly man to tell us things were OK and for us to believe him.

This brings me to my grand idea, which is really not a grand idea at all, just an opportunity for nationwide redemption and something positive for us as Americans to be judged. The sad part is, we have been wearing the Ruby Slippers to accomplish this goal for years, but we’ve been programmed by many to believe it to be impossible.

While Reagan improved the American psyche, he ratcheted up the rhetoric against our enemies both real and imagined. Russia, or the Evil Empire as he noted, took most of the brunt, but there was plenty left for others who were considered our mortal enemies. In the end, the Russian Knight had been dead for years and was just waiting for the coroner’s report on the time of death. We did a little to help out, but mostly we kicked them while they were down.

In 2000, in the middle of the Russian economic meltdown, I attended a World Economic Forum summit which generally focused on what a mess Russia was. I sat next to a man I considered a friend for a number of years who happened to be the leader of the Duma at the time. The Russians were hit hard by every speaker and virtually blamed for all the ills of the world. I asked my friend how he could stand by silently while his country was trashed so thoroughly. He told me his country deserved the criticism but added they were learning from their mistakes and would be well again soon. He also warned that the tide will turn and America will face the same condemnation from the rest of the world. All of his predictions have come true as Russia is indeed well and we are facing worldwide scorn for our economic and foreign policy transgression.

All of this long-winded blather is to say we need to change our ways and reach out to others to become relevant again and regain our prestige. And the benefit to this relevance will send a message to Americans and the rest of the world that we are not bad people and we still matter.

President Bush is about as lame as any lame duck president has ever been. He has no hope of passing any sponsored legislation and is left merely as a caretaker for a war he started but will not be able to finish. Nobody even thinks about him much anymore unless it’s as a punchline for a joke. The only power he has as president that can help America, and not coincidentally his own image, is to reshape foreign policy and our place in the world. While he shows no sign of making any positive changes, the good news is the changes I want to recommend would be playing from his strong suit.

The President’s current Secretary of State and former National Security Advisor, Condi Rice, is an original Russophile. She was a Fellow at the Hoover Institute on Russian affairs and was a key advisor to Bush 41 on the delicate issue of how to deal with a collapsing adversary with thousands of nuclear weapons. She’s been forced into on-the-job training to learn the ways of the Muslim world, something that hasn’t come easy for her. So why not go back to what she knows and go to work with the Russians and solve problems that can actually be solved? It also wouldn’t hurt to change the public debate away from war in Iraq and escalating rhetoric of future wars.

We haven’t had a real summit with real goals with the Russians since 1991. This is puzzling because we still have not reached an agreement on short range nuclear missiles and the thorny issue of a missile shield, especially one in Eastern Europe. Russian President Vladimir Putin is on record suggesting an end to the missiles – the only real potential mass destructive weapon that could get in the wrong hands – but is understandably bothered by a missile shield in Eastern Europe, especially when the reason given is to protect the Poles, et al, from an attack from a rogue nation like Iran. That doesn’t pass anyone’s smell test.

Putin, to his own detriment, has been using his short term energy supply to bully his neighbors, sells military hardware to Iran and North Korea and other undependable states that could turn them on his country some day. Like Bush, Putin needs to leave a better legacy, in his case a legacy other than presiding over an economy fueled by petrol-dollars, and his time to do so is running out as he is forced to leave office next April. The good news is he has amassed such power that the ability to make changes rest solely in his hands.

While Bush needs Congress to ratify any treaty he makes, changing the dialogue will throw off his adversaries, and who would want to oppose a reduction in the nuclear threat, especially in an election year?

So let’s get together and make a deal on nukes. While we’re at it, let’s work on dealing with our shared threat posed by radical Islam, the looming problem in Pakistan, poverty in Africa and the flailing dollar. In the end, success will make both our countries feel better about ourselves and put us back in the same position we have occupied for 70 years as the only two superpowers. Together we can do more than we can do alone and working with each other will push back the European smugness and China’s petulance.

Bush has been surrounded by people who are used to a Cold War approach and most of official Washington is negative on Putin. The Russians are nervous about a uni-polar, one superpower world and are still understandably a bit prickly over our actions in Ukraine and NATO’s advancement to their borders. Having said this, Russia has a need to be reinstated as a legitimate superpower and Americans need to believe we are still capable of doing good in the world. It won’t take much to begin this process, just the desire for the two leaders to do what’s right and good for each of them. Hopefully they will see the value for what’s in it for themselves and be satisfied that it will have the ancillary benefit of helping those they lead walk with a little lighter step. At least one can hope, can we?