The View From 1776

Characterizing President Bush’s foreign policies as disasters in his May 21, 2008 Op-Ed Column titled Imbalances of Power, New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman writes:

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.

Mr. Friedman has a limited memory capacity if he can’t recall (or least has not read about) the late 1960s and early 70s, when Japanese and German industry wiped out American steel producers, along with the automobile industry, machine tools, and much else in the Midwest, converting it to the Rust Bowl.  He seems also to have overlooked the Arab oil embargo of the same period that left us in hours-long filling station lines and seemed destined to permit the Arab oil producers to buy the Western world. 

In the middle 70s and early 80s, Japanese investors were buying most of America’s crown jewels in the real estate market, from Pebble Beach Golf Club to Rockefeller Center.  At the same time, German investors were buying large tracts of American farmland.

All of those things occurred under Democratic presidents: Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter.

One of President Carter’s dour fireside messages, delivered in his cardigan sweater, was that the United States had to get used to the fact that it no longer could exert any real power in foreign affairs, that we had to accept that we must curtail our heating and air-conditioning, along any efforts to project American military strength.

The New York Times applauded this declaration at the time as the new realism in foreign policy.