Bravo to Time’s Peter Beinart for coining the right phrase to describe the necessities of an Obama administration. To reconcile the idiotic neocon global overreach with the plummeting domestic standard of living, the President and Congress are going to need a Solvency Doctrine.
America’s military and ideological commitments grew and grew, far beyond our capacity to carry them out. And now the power bubble has popped. Militarily, savvy and savage guerrilla movements have learned how to bleed us of money, lives and limbs. Economically, resources are scarce; it’s hard to pay to transform the Middle East when we’re deep in debt trying to prop up the Midwest. And ideologically, democracy no longer looks like the inevitable destination of all humankind.
Or, put another way, the permanent war footing of the economy – and I refer to the footing established in 1945, not 2001 – is quite literally killing us. Supporting nearly eight hundred military bases around the world is, it turns out, no way to preserve a standard of living and is instead a great way to endanger it. The military-industrial complex economy is soon to suffer the same repudiation that free-market fundamentalism has with the meltdown of 2008 (and the continuing aftershocks of 2009), and a Solvency Doctrine is the natural compass point leading away from these canards of Cold-war conservatism. Great piece by Beinart.
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