From Indispensable to Meh

“The challenges we face are the greatest in living memory. No one person can meet them on their own. Only this country can do that.” -- Beto O’Rourke announcing Thursday that he will be another one.

Oh? Beto must not have read Andrew J. Bacevich’s article “A World without the West” in the March 22 Commonweal. I’d give you a link but, as I have mentioned, Commonweal’s computer has deemed that I no longer technically exist. Bacevich’s point is that in the post-post-Cold War world the old “West,” led by the United States and promoting democratic values, is dead. Britain followed Bush II into Iraq and decided that was a terribly crumby idea. So Britain didn’t follow Obama into Syria, nor were there any other volunteers, which caused Obama to decide that maybe that would be a terribly crumby idea to enforce his own "red line."

 Bacevich didn’t say that, despite Trumptalk, Chinese hardware will run the G5 wireless internet world. But there’s that. And there’s the former Socialist slave states of Hungary and Poland, having had a whiff of democracy, drifting back to something more familiar, like strong men backed by the police and their big mouths. But Bacevich could have noted that.

 

 O’Rourke must have been writing his announcement anthem while a very strange news story was partially unfolding. Two Boeing 737 Max 8’s crashed within five months. Boeing said the plane is safe. U.S. crash investigators said the plane was safe enough, as far as they knew, to keep it flying. For the first time in history, the rest of the world ignored what the United States and its state-of-the-art crash experts were  saying about an airplane. The rest of the world grounded 737 Max 8's, but not us.

 Then the story went from odd to spooky.

 

 The Tweet-in-Chief opined on airplane safety in terms that proved that just because you are rich enough have your name on the tail of one doesn’t mean you know anything about planes. Followed by: The Tweet-in-Chief announced that the United States would join the rest of the world in grounding an airplane made in U.S.A. (with subcontractors everywhere there is a national airline).

 Usually, a decision like this is announced by the National Transportation Board. In fact, that was always the case before America became great again. But there is only one person that counts in this government  -- as in Hungary or Turkey. The NTSB, like so much else in our government these days, is headed by an acting administrator. He explained his reversal by saying the NTSB is “data-driven.” He said it eight or nine times. He also cited that cliche, “an abundance of caution.”

Caution seems to be another thing other countries have more of than the U.S.A. Which may be why they have stopped paying attention. When it’s an existential threat to a country to have a bunch of poor people fleeing from war and violence at its doorstep, that country is no longer capable of tackling great problems. Right about the time the U.S.A. started to blow its lead, Madeleine Albright called us “the indispensable nation.” It seems that we have been  dispensed with already.