Military Matters: Crisis ahead -- Part 2

WASHINGTON, July 24 (UPI) -- The strategic crisis looming ahead for the United States will be compounded by the fact that the money is about to run out. The American people seem to have forgotten that no activity the state can undertake is more expensive than war. If a tanking economy cuts off the money flow, what comes next?

The July 12 Cleveland Plain Dealer quotes a local investment adviser saying, "A year ago, I would have discounted the scenario of the next depression. After what I've seen this year, I don't discount anything anymore."

The U.S. Federal Reserve is trying to head off a full-scale financial panic by turning itself into a pawnshop, but no one knows how long that trick will work. The whole Ponzi scheme that is the current U.S. economy still depends on an inflow of $2 billion in foreign money daily. What happens if, or when, that flow ceases?

Were American politics as sensible as the average flock of turkeys in a thunderstorm, the American public would be asking those running for president just how they expect to steer through this narrows filled with rocks and shoals. Instead, all the public wants are more nostrums, more empty promises that somehow Big Brother will enable them to party on.

Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, the Democratic putative presidential nominee, and his opponent, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., vie in proposing programs that cost more billions, to come from … where? Why, from the printing presses of course. Those presses are churning out dollars so fast already that we can feel the rumble all the way across the United States -- and across the world.

The bottom line reached by printing-press money is always the same: runaway inflation. Inflation is almost always one of the consequences of war, and it can be the worst, worse even than losing. If it impoverishes the middle class, the country has little if any base from which to recover.

For the United States to "run the narrows" -- or navigate its way through this difficult combination of crises and dangers -- successfully, the U.S. government and its leaders need to act boldly, not to find the one course through, but to widen their range of options while they still can. That means getting out of at least a few of the quicksand pits -- certainly not entering any new ones -- while lowering the nation's foreign policy ambitions, cutting U.S. government spending until the budget is in surplus, improving the U.S. balance of trade to bolster the dollar and getting unhooked from foreign oil. It will hurt, but not nearly as badly as a combination of defeat, depression and hyperinflation.

Would anyone happen to know Count Sergei Yulyevich Witte's home phone number? He was the Russian chief minister of Czar Nicholas II a century ago who helped the Russian Empire to -- briefly -- survive the revolution and crisis that followed its defeat in the 1904-5 Russo-Japanese War.

--

(William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation.)