Covid-19 has made us more aware of civilization's fragility. With the virus added to problems such as global warming, terrorism, nuclear weapons proliferation, religious strife, migration pressures and U.S. political tensions, the world seems to be falling apart. Unfortunately, there are few adults qualified to take care of the store. Leaders with the compassion, brains and power to accomplish much, such as Germany's Angela Merkel, France's Emmanuel Macron and the United Nations' Antonio Guterres, are hard to find.
During the past four years we've shown, in case there were any doubt, that the U.S. is no longer fit to be "leader of the free world." We filled that role during most of World War II and for a few subsequent years, but went off the rails sometime prior to the Vietnam War.
With President Trump, our international status has reached embarrassing new lows. Consider the first Trump/Biden debate. Our president behaved like a spoiled little boy: constantly interrupting, pouting, fidgety, making faces, impatient, selfish, unable to get along with Biden or his television host. I shudder to think how this looked to other nations. Statesmanship requires graceful disagreement and compromise. How can this man be regarded as leader of anything, much less the "free world?"
Other nations must be asking what gives America the right to instruct the entire planet? We are unable to handle even our own affairs, much less everybody else's. Consider, for example, covid-19. With our wealth and technology, we should be a leader in suppressing this disease. Yet our 4 percent of the world's population has 21 percent of cases and 20 percent of deaths. We have failed miserably.
Other examples abound. Among the 37 developed nations comprising the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, we have one of the highest poverty rates and one of the highest income inequalities. Although the United States was once a leader in health care and education, it now ranks 27th in the world in both. The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the entire world, ironically accompanied by one of the highest homicide rates among OECD nations. We are the world's second-largest carbon dioxide emitter and one of the highest emitters per capita. We seem to excel only in military budgets, where we spend more than the next ten nations--China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea and Brazil--combined.
My only consolation is that covid-19 and Trump's presidency have the beneficial effect of awakening the rest of the world to the obvious fact that the U.S. should give up its claim to leadership and cooperate more with others to mutually solve our problems.
But we must not isolate ourselves from the world. Far from it. We're already too isolated, provincial, selfish. Our outreach to other nations is predominantly about guns and dollars, priorities that are far out of whack with our real security need, namely a safer world. Our 2019 foreign aid budget was $39 billion -- less than 1 percent of the federal budget -- while our 2019 military budget was $732 billion. If we cut our bloated military budget in half we would still be far ahead of the second-place contender, China, and the money could be put to more positive uses such as a ten-fold increase in foreign aid. Instead of guns and fighter jets, the world needs education, medical assistance, a clean environment, durable infrastructure, encouragement, friendship and respect.
How can we, with a straight face, tell other nations how we think they should conduct their own domestic affairs when we fail to fix or even understand our own domestic problems? One in eight Americans still lives below the poverty line -- $25,000 for a family of four -- and this in a nation with one of the highest income inequalities in the industrialized world. Again, our priorities are far out of whack. The blindingly obvious solution is to tax the rich and provide for the poor. After all, the U.S. income tax rate on the richest bracket was above 70 percent between 1950 and 1980, and even above 90 percent during the eight-year Eisenhower presidency, yet the economy functioned well. The rate then dropped to 28 percent during the 1980s (President Reagan), and has remained between 35 and 45 percent ever since. With our enormous wealth, we can do much better.
Humankind is in dire straits. America can best help by putting its own house in order, lecturing less, listening more, and cooperating with friend and foe alike toward mutual solutions.
Art Hobson is a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Arkansas. Email him at [email protected].