Back in the early 1990s, Bill Clinton asserted that the nation's overall security was inextricably intertwined with the condition of its economy. His contention had a nice rhetorical ring to it, and seemed relatively plausible in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. One of the towering ironies of the past decade however, would appear to be the operational refutation of that thesis. America has never been so insolvent, and yet its global grandiloquence has never been more immense. Bankrolled by a bitter, but helpless People's Republic of China (another towering irony...the geopolitical ambitions of the world's mightiest democracy being underwritten by the last great Communist country), the U.S. strides forth as the planet's policeman and social worker.
It would seem that Clinton was wrong, that a great imperial power can cast fiscal sense to the winds and pursue a utopian agenda indefinitely, that the laws of economic gravity have been suspended, and that a Pax Americana need not be buttressed by sturdy finances at home...
It will be the single greatest test of the notion of American exceptionalism, far beyond anything that Winthrop or Wilson could have conceived...
