The Antiplanner rarely comments on geopolitics, but the conflict in Georgia provokes some broader-than-usual thoughts. This war, and the coinciding Olympics, suggests that we have spent the last seven years worrying about the wrong dangers in the world. While we concentrated on so-called Islamofascists, the real danger facing America and democracy was somewhere else.
Published in 1987, Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of Great Powers makes it clear that, to be a great military power, you first have to be a great economic power. More specifically, you have to be able to build wealth. Kennedy points out that Britain was a superpower in the nineteenth century, and its economy grew throughout the century. But because some other countries were able to grow a little bit faster, by the mid-twentieth century Britain was relatively unimportant.
