The problem -- our problem -- is that the economic part of that three-legged stool is waning and in decline. At the same time, China, India, Brazil and other nations are building new economies to compete in the world. He includes Iran in this mix.
This, Huntington says, has led to a world of more equal, and more conflicting, civilizations. Members of the developing world are no longer looking to the West and the United States for answers. Our culture is exactly that -- OUR culture, not so much a universal culture that all want to join. More and more, former "third world" nations are looking into their own cultures, exploring their own regional identities.
Here's how Huntington sees it:
"Western powers in the form of European colonialism in the nineteenth century and American hegemony in the twentieth century extended Western culture throughout much of the contemporary world. European colonialism is over; American hegemony is receding. The erosion of Western culture follows, as indigenous, historically rooted mores, languages, beliefs, and institutions reassert themselves. The growing power of non-Western societies produced by modernization is generating the revival of non-Western cultures throughout the world."
This is the world we live in, the stormy sea, if you will, that President Obama sees as he looks out the wheelhouse window of the ship of state.
The title of Obama's memoir aside, Dreams From My Father, the current argument of right-wing writer Dinesh D'Souza criticizing Obama as a second-generation pawn of a socialist, anti-colonialist Kenyan father willfully misses the mark by a mile. If President Obama is about anything he seems to be about not rocking the boat or throwing overboard any portion of American exceptionalism in the world.
When it comes to Huntington's thesis, Obama's circumstance may be analogous to the big city African American mayor who turns out to be harder on poor black crime than a white mayor would be. Like the big city black mayor, Obama shows no special empathy for the formerly colonized and dominated in relation to the colonizer and dominator. He's like Caesar's wife: Because of his race and anti-colonial family backstory, he seems concerned about being above reproach as an American in the current "clash of civilizations."
If Huntington is right, there is ample room for argument for a much different approach to the world than the one now in force inherited from the Bush administration, an approach based on US "air power capable of bombing virtually any place in the world."
Thus, the 21st century American dilemma: On one hand, we are a people patriotically encouraged to feel "exceptional," while, on the other hand, our civilization is in decline economically and culturally in relation to a host of civilizations formerly dominated by the US and the West. The trump card we're holding is an outrageously expensive and super-lethal military.
As if this is not bad enough, we make it even worse. Any suggestion of addressing the decline engages the exceptionalism trigger and sends our politics swinging to the reactionary, often irrational, blockheaded right. Plus, this is now occurring as the decline is speeding up.
As Huntington sees it, when the decline began circa 1920 it advanced at a quite slow and gradual pace. But as time moves forward the problems compound and the pace of decline tends to increase. At the same time, the pace of positive economic development in the former colonies picks up speed.
We're now 90 years into this process and bogged down in two resource-sucking wars with a "Defense" budget that uses up 59% of our tax revenues.
Getting our priorities right
As the United States engages this new competitive world, it more and more feels like we're cutting our own throat. Instead of falling back on our working population as a resource to be invested in for a competitive future, our leaders keep holding onto a fading past.
Post 9/11 fear has so gripped Americans and demagogues have so whipped them into a frenzy that, in conjunction with an incredible strain of anti-intellectual dumbness and religious chicanery, we may be doomed to the worst possible policies.
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