The left and America's "decline"

Shades of Jimmy Carter. I haven't seen many articles like this since Carter left office but here is Tom Friedman on the op-ed page of the NY Times discussing the decline of the US.

There has been much debate in this campaign about which of our enemies the next U.S. president should deign to talk to. The real story, the next president may discover, though, is how few countries are waiting around for us to call. It is hard to remember a time when more shifts in the global balance of power are happening at once — with so few in America’s favor.

Let’s start with the most profound one: More and more, I am convinced that the big foreign policy failure that will be pinned on this administration is not the failure to make Iraq work, as devastating as that has been. It will be one with much broader balance-of-power implications — the failure after 9/11 to put in place an effective energy policy.

It baffles me that President Bush would rather go to Saudi Arabia twice in four months and beg the Saudi king for an oil price break than ask the American people to drive 55 miles an hour, buy more fuel-efficient cars or accept a carbon tax or gasoline tax that might actually help free us from, what he called, our “addiction to oil.”

The failure of Mr. Bush to fully mobilize the most powerful innovation engine in the world — the U.S. economy — to produce a scalable alternative to oil has helped to fuel the rise of a collection of petro-authoritarian states — from Russia to Venezuela to Iran — that are reshaping global politics in their own image.

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No Friedman, it is not hard to remember such a time, because you too were around when people were writing the same thing during the Carter Administration that your guy Obama is so eager to emulate. The reason we are in the bind we are on energy is because of people like Friedman who have joined with the Democrats in strangling domestic production. Friedman has this magical thinking that by denying us energy we can come up with a perpetual motion machine to make energy unnecessary.

The fact is that if Democrats would get out of the way, we would have abundant energy from domestic sources, including nuclear, wind and whatever. It is they who are waiting around for the magic machine that are the problem. They are going back to the Carter era energy policy along with the Carter era foreign policy that led to humiliation in Iran and lines at the gas pumps. They will then say the decline was inevitable because they did not want to let the things happen to reverse it.