RE: Ushering In a New Economic Alliance
Here's the thing. We agreed to give our allies those advantages as part of Bretton Woods, and we agreed to defend their trade routes, in exchange for their agreeing to fall in line behind us in the Cold War. We had the only economy that had not been bombed to smithereens in WWII, and the only military, in particular the only navy, that had come through in decent shape. Europe and Japan wanted access to our markets, and our protection of their trade routes, to help rebuild their economies. The only problem is that it worked, we won the Cold War, but we had no plan for what to do next.
Here's the way I'd approach it. I'd do a consumption tax to level a lot of the playing field. We still have a lot of geographic advantages, and if we narrowed that gap I think it would make a huge difference. On the military front, it is time for our allies to start picking up more of the load. I'd do some things to help, such as joint weapons development and designing our systems for better integration with theirs. (For example, the navy has spent a fortune on the Littoral Combat Ships, that are basically worthless. We'd have been better to cooperate with NATO or Asian allies to adapt their designs, which would reduce their costs because of longer production runs to amortize R&D, and also give us better ships--any of the FREMM, Horizon, F-100, Nansen, Akizuki, Sejong the Great, or Huitfeldt classes would be a better ship for about the same price, or less). I'd do a lot of cooperative defense stuff, without getting drawn into the one world government movement on other matters.
|
