Thank Goodness the Cold War’s Over . . .
and now the Russians are our friends. I don’t suppose I should blame them, really. It’s not like we hadn’t set Hussein on his way, and our military-industrial complex is no less opportunistic.

The new world order we face has gone from progressive to regressive in a remarkably brief period of time. It is not so very long ago that everyone was speaking of a “peace dividend,” a result of the “fall of communism” and the correlative decreased need for high defense expenditures. We never got it. The Clinton health plan, for example, was beaten flat even before it was formulated, and nobody ever cuts taxes anyway. We did think we could rely on the world to become a better place, and for America to be free of its self-imposed obligation to protect the world from anti-capitalist forces. We mocked the ubiquity of Starbucks and Nike and other symptoms of globalization, even as we relied upon their reach across the face of the globe; this would, after all, provide us with the comforts of home wherever in an ever-smaller world we happened to be. It was mostly just funny when the French demonstrated against McDonalds. It didn’t so much matter if every toy on the shelf at Christmas had been manufactured in China, possibly using prison labor. The repressive regimes of the Middle East weren’t a problem: they were business partners, and it was their countries they were repressing anyway. The US had stood athwart the world, fearless and armed to the teeth, amidst the perils of the Cold War, waged on behalf of individual liberty. But when that passed, we started to realize that the triumph was about a system of capitalism that overlooks individuals. This is globalization in its essence, an economic phenomenon driven by the US and facilitated by the collapse of the Soviet regime, dragging along the rest of the world as participants with varying degrees of reluctance. Some would argue that the independence of the United States has always been about economics, but that’s just cynicism. The freedom enshrined in the Constitution is undeniably collective, but it affirms the essential requirement that individuals, too, are free within that system of independence. (It’s a remarkable construct when you consider it, nearly fractal.) Has it come to this, though, that systems are predominant? Are collective industries more powerful and more important than the individuals that comprise them? Isn’t this what gave us Enron and Tyco? Isn’t this the same problem that doomed the Soviet Union and South Africa’s apartheid? We spent decades breaking down systems in favor of individual rights, but we’ve been spending the last twenty years, indeed even just the last two years, undoing the freedoms we thereby achieved, among others for good measure. What are we setting up for ourselves when we pare away layer upon layer of our formative principles? And can we face the future, will we be capable of envisioning and grasping that future if we allow government to be driven by the values of business over those of a responsible philosophy?

We fear the world too much, and it fears us in return.