When I first came here as an exchange student at age 16, I fell in love with the US. Compared to my native Germany, I felt a wonderful sense of possibility. That is still the case today for many of the businesses we look at and invest in, but I worry about the future of the US.
There appears to be a parallel between the US today and Great Britain at the end of the colonial period in the 20th Century. Great Britain expended its resources on ruling a large empire. Those resources were not available for investment in domestic infrastructure. In the meantime there was a rapidly growing country – the US – that had essentially no foreign obligations and was pursuing a policy of non-intervention allowing it to accumulate resources (despite the brief Spanish-American war and the engagement in WWI). I believe this internal focus accounts for the US ability to marshal huge resources during WWII and for its rise to global superpower.
Now it seems we are in the position of Great Britain. We are expending huge resources in Iraq and to a lesser degree Afghanistan while our infrastructure at home is crumbling (the bridge collapse in Minneapolis is only the most literal example). At the same time, China’s economy is growing rapidly, while China has virtually no foreign obligations. I am not suggesting that there will be some cataclysmic event such as WWII that will precipitate the fall, but rather that we don’t have the wherewithal to compete effectively in a global economy marked by high oil prices and a rapidly globalizing market for labor (due to the Internet).
Having lived here now for nearly half of my life, having become a US citizen, and raising three children here this is does not feel abstract or removed, but like a worry about “my” country. The most worrying part about it is that none of the candidates likely to be on the ballot in November appears to be even acknowledging the extent and true sources of our challenge (let alone have a plan for how to deal with it). Thomas Friedman hits it on the head in his column “Who Will Tell the People?”
