Can We Quit This Great Power Crap? Can We? Please!

Can the US resign its status as a Great Power? (Be advised: The History Geek refuses on principle to use the media generated abomination, "superpower" in the belief that there is already too much hyperbole involved with foreign policy and war.)

A lot of our fellow citizens would answer that question with a resounding, "Yes!" in something less than a New York second. The Geek understands the appeal of dropping the Great Power role. No more interventions. No more body bags coming back from one remote armpit or another. No more spending great gobs of gigabucks on one Pentagon toy or another. It sounds great. Let's do it!

Leave Fartistan to the Fartistanis!

Hell! They didn't appreciate what we were trying to do for them anyway. And, we didn't have any business there anyway. And, we were lied to. And, we can't win.

That's it! We quit. Take this Great Power crap and stuff it!

Trouble is we've tried to quit before. After the Vietnam defeat, we pulled in on ourselves, stared at our collective navels and felt bad. We turned isolationist not to protect ourselves from foreign contamination as during the Twenties and Thirties. No. After we defeated ourselves in Southeast Asia, we became isolationist to protect the world from our contaminating presence.

We moaned and whimpered any number of mea culpas. We were arrogant. We had hubris. We were imperialistic. No more. We stood in the corner and hung our heads vowing, "No more Great Power adventures for us. Never again!"

It didn't work. The world refused to accept our resignation.

A Great Power cannot resign. It can lose its status from defeat in a critical war. It can drop from the ranks of Great Powers because of economic exhaustion. It can simply fade away as political will and the capacity for national sacrifice become drained after decades or generations of struggle.

But, no Great Power in history has ever voluntarily resigned its status. Not even us.

What defines a Great Power?

That should be an easy question to answer. Add up the tangibles--the nuclear weapons, the missiles, the warships and planes, the troops, the gross domestic product, the population--all the factors that can be counted.

Did you notice any commonalities in the list?

They all point directly (or in the case of two items, indirectly) at a nation's capacity to coerce. Historically, and contemporaneously as well, we humans have a love affair with coercion. We get wet contemplating how we might force another individual, or country to do our bidding.

Coercion is seductive. It seems so easy. So direct. Give and order. Make a threat. Shock and awe.

Perhaps that is why the perceived capacity to coerce has always been the chief measure of a country's ability to operate as a Great Power. The key word in the previous sentence is "perceived." How other actors on the international stage view a nation's capacity for coercion has always been an important, perhaps the most important definition of Great Power status.

Get a grip on this. A country can neither claim nor resign from the role of Great Power. The role is assigned by consensus, a tacit agreement by other nations that this country or that possesses the capacity to coerce appropriate for Great Powerness.

But, wait. The perceived capacity to coerce is not the big enchilada of a Great Power, at least not for the United States as Great Power.

"Wait one!" You object.

"We've got nuclear weapons out the ying-yang. That's what it takes. We can nuke the planet twice over and still have missiles in the silos."

The Geek replies, "So what?"

By the nuclear weapons criterion the world is overrun with Great Powers. It only takes a handful of not impressively large mushroom clouds to ruin a continent's whole day--even if the Nuclear Winter hand-wringers are wrong.

Military power is not, repeat not, the sole, nor even the most important measure of a a nation's Great Power attribute. If it was, the US could have easily lost its status in the wake of Vietnam. We had a hollow military, a navy that was darn near unready to take to sea, an unwillingness to project even minor force to counter Soviet ambitions in Africa. We had resigned from that game.

Nor is it the strength of the economy by itself. During the Seventies, the era of Ford's Whip Inflation Now! mantra, the decade of stagflation, of Carter's "Thinking Small is Thinking Better" efforts, the US economy was New Orleans after Katrina. The Eighties weren't that much better. Japan Incorporated was supposed to cruise right on by us. Think back, those of you old enough to have memories of disco and Saturday Night Fever.

So, if it isn't the bombs, or the bucks that make the United States generally recognised as a Great Power, what is it?

Answer: Intangibles.

What?

Intangibles. The Geek will explain next post. He has to. It's central to why we can't afford to defeat ourselves in Iraq. It's essential to understand how we can avoid losing there.