America's Economic Death Spiral by the Pentagon Allows China to Prosper as a World Leader in Civil Technology

Journalists photograph the bullet trains of a new high-speed railway linking Shanghai with Hangzhou Tuesday, Oct. 26, 2010 in Shanghai, China.

Shortly after entering office, President Obama , a candidate who ran on closing Guantanamo Bay and ending the war in Afghanistan, told an audience at the National Defense University in Washington D.C. “ Make no mistake, this nation will maintain our military dominance”. Later at a commencement address to the cadets of the U.S. Naval Academy, Obama stressed, “we will maintain America’s military dominance and keep you the finest fighting force the world has ever seen".

What the President failed to tell those two groups as well as the American people as how the United States is going to pay to keep that military dominance and finest military force in the world.

As Chalmers Johnson observed in one of his books,

“the United States no longer has the capability to remain a global hegemon, and to pretend otherwise is to invite disaster”.

To further highlight his point, the late Mr. Johnson quoted Robert Pape from the University of Chicago.

America is in unprecedented decline. The self-inflicted wounds of the Iraq war, growing government debt, increasingly negative current-account balances and other internal economic weaknesses have cost the United States real power in today’s world of rapidly changing knowledge and technology. If present trends continue, we will look back on the Bush years as the death knell of America’s hegemony.

While most Americans are kept blissfully ignorant of the ever-declining status of their country by the news media, most political scientists agree that the United States is a crippled economic power. Most anti-imperial political scholars like Chalmers Johnson and Andrew Bacevich, will add that no world empire can sustain the military dominance that Obama spoke about, without risking insolvency.

It should be alarming to more Americans that China’s largest maker of rail vehicles, and partner General Electric Co. may bid to build high-speed train lines in California and Florida. Adding more insult to a recent story of China bidding on two rail projects in Florida and California, China has also said it may offer financing for a planned California high-speed line costing at least $40 billion to help local train makers break into the U.S. market.

The fact that China is also offering and is available to offer financing to cash strapped states to build high-speed rail lines in California and Florida, show how badly an overly expensive and inefficient military is costing the country. Instead of devoting national resources funding the next generation stealth destroyer or some other widely expensive weapons system, the United States should be developing its own high speed and light rail trains. To fund the critically needed infrastructure projects, all the government has to do is close some of the 800 foreign military bases it has around the world.

Even if the Pentagon was forced to close only 10 military bases a year, it would take 10 years to reduce only 12 percent of the American bases the US has around the world in wealthy countries such as Italy, Germany , and Great Britain. Not to mention undemocratic and despotic countries like Qatar, Bahrain, and Jordan.

While China recently built the fastest supercomputer in the world and is the leading maker of solar panels and wind turbine engines, America is wasting trillions of dollars on a bloated and inefficient military.