Who could ever have imagined what was being unleashed on the world when Thomas Gage ordered 700 Redcoats to march out from Boston and seize supplies in the town of Concord? Who could have dreamed, 250 years ago, what would be built by the descendants of those 56 men who put their names to the Declaration of Independence while gathered in the Pennsylvania State House?
The United States of America turns 250 having enjoyed a near-uninterrupted run of success unmatched in world history. By her 100th birthday, the US was already master of an entire continent. By her 200th, she had won two world wars, invented the airplane, the atomic bomb and the transistor; created the motion picture and rock ’n’ roll; become the first automobile nation and put a man on the Moon. America in 1976 had just lost a major war for the first time ever, but she was anything but finished. Instead, she promptly embarked on a fresh run of global dominance during which she vanquished communism and launched the global digital revolution.
For all her vulnerabilities and all her struggles, America at 250 remains an exceptional country
No nation’s golden age lasts forever. America arrives at her latest milestone still the world’s premier economic and geopolitical power, but one facing tests unlike any that have come before. No nation has ever absorbed as many immigrants as America has in the 50 years since its bicentennial. Today, the political bill is finally coming due on that decision. American politics is now defined by repeated battles over the country’s ethnic, religious and ideological identity. Statues have come down; new ones have been erected in their place. A nation with too many heroes to count now finds that few of them are acceptable to everyone. Donald Trump’s own efforts to celebrate America’s anniversary have become a partisan issue – a split that would have been unthinkable at the nation’s bicentennial.
Fifty years ago, America responded to the oil shock and the pressure of the welfare state by beginning a program of persistent deficit spending. Today, its debt stands at almost $40 trillion, 123 percent of GDP – and political leaders seem indifferent to changing course, instead hoping they are not the ones holding the debt bomb when it finally explodes. America remains the world’s largest economy, but has lost its manufacturing crown to China. Its technological lead looks vulnerable as well.
On the world stage, America’s proverbial status as “leader of the free world” is under pressure like no time since World War Two – and not just externally. President Trump has been openly dismissive of NATO’s value, and seems eager to pivot America to a role as hegemon of the Americas rather than being the “essential country” of every region on the planet. Europe and even Canada speak more openly than ever of forging their own power blocs, less reliant on Washington.
Most troubling of all, America’s position as a global military superpower, long beyond question or even doubt, is in peril. The war with Iran has forced a confrontation with challenging truths. The nation that once built 5,000 ships and 300,000 planes to win World War Two will now need half a decade or more to replace a few months’ worth of missiles expended bombarding the Islamic Republic – and that bombardment has failed to dislodge the Iranian regime or even win convincing mastery over the Strait of Hormuz. China increasingly looks less a rising military threat, more a military peer.
Global observers and more than a few world leaders, irritated at the current administration’s thuggish, often clownish arrogance, appear eager on this anniversary to observe that America’s best days are behind her and her fall from grace is at hand. Yet for all her vulnerabilities and all her struggles, America at 250 remains an exceptional country, and by far the greatest fount of vitality and dynamism in an ailing West. In 2008, incomes in western Europe were nearly on a par with America. Eighteen years after the Global Financial Crisis, America now trounces the Old Continent, boasting average incomes otherwise only seen in microstates or oil monarchies. The ongoing World Cup, hosted across 11 US cities, has given Europeans a rude awakening about the scale of the wealth distributed across the American heartland. However sclerotic Washington becomes, America’s fiercely competitive state governments find ways to build, grow and generate a broad-based prosperity that remains the envy of the planet.
Of the world’s “unicorn” startups, valued at more than a billion dollars, America has as many as the rest of the world combined. Despite the justified fretting about America’s eroded manufacturing base, the largest IPO in history, SpaceX’s debut on NASDAQ, was for an American manufacturer making cutting-edge rockets and satellites at factories in America. The unfolding AI revolution is yet another forged in Silicon Valley, and America is driving that revolution with an unprecedented buildup in computing capacity.
Even the Trump administration, for all its flaws, represents something special about America: namely, her continued ability to dramatically reorient herself despite the constraints imposed by constitutional and democratic government. America’s borders, long left open to every manner of intruder, have been secured. While Europe seems set on impoverishing itself with deliberate energy scarcity, America has gone from being a net oil importer to the world’s biggest exporter.
America’s strengths go beyond the economic, too. Whatever her faults, America continues to exert a magnetic pull upon the world. The country remains a global trend-setter for culture, politics, technology and society. Whether America is taking many immigrants or only a few, it’s the country where those immigrants above all want to be – especially the most ambitious ones. To borrow from Winston Churchill, one might well say that America is the most dysfunctional of all countries – save for every other country one might settle in. And as long as that remains the case, Americans have every reason to feel proud of their country.
Here’s to the next 250 years.
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