America Wrongly Thinks Its Prosperity Can't End

[Geee]

Investors Business Daily:

When the think-tank chappies ponder "decline," they tend to see it in geopolitical terms.

Great powers gradually being shunted off the world stage have increasing difficulties getting their way: Itsy-bitsy colonial policing operations in dusty ramshackle outposts drag on for years and putter out to no obvious conclusion.

If that sounds vaguely familiar, well, the State Department reported that the last Christian church in Afghanistan was razed in 2010. This intriguing factoid came deep within their "International Religious Freedom Report."

It is not, in any meaningful sense of that word, "international." For the last decade, Afghanistan has been a U.S. client state; its repulsive and corrupt leader is kept alive only by NATO arms; according to the World Bank, the Western military/aid presence accounts for 97% of the country's economy.

American taxpayers have spent nearly half a trillion dollars and lost many brave warriors in that benighted land, and all we have to show for it is a regime openly contemptuous of the global sugar daddy that created and sustained it.

In another American client state, the Iraqi government is publicly supporting the murderous goon in Syria and supplying him with essential aid as he attempts to maintain his dictatorship. Your tax dollars at work.

As America sinks into a multitrillion-dollar debt pit, it is fascinating to listen to so many of my friends on the right fret about potential cuts to the Pentagon budget. The problem in Iraq and Afghanistan is not that we are spending insufficient money, but that so much of that money has been utterly wasted.

Dominant powers often wind up with thankless tasks, but the trick is to keep it within budget. London administered the sprawling, fractious tribal dump of Sudan with about 200 British civil servants for what, with hindsight, was the least worst two-thirds of a century in that country's existence.

These days I doubt 200 civil servants would be enough for the average branch office of the Federal Department of Community Organizer Grant Applications. Abroad as at home, the U.S. urgently needs to learn to do more with less.

As I said, these are common symptoms of geopolitical decline: Great powers still go through the motions, but increasingly ineffectually.