The danger ahead

SOS From A Troubled Sowell

Commentary: Doomsters are a dime a dozen. But when a leading economist who's been called "the nation's greatest contemporary philosopher" sees serious trouble ahead, we'd better listen up.

Thomas Sowell's 45th book, "Dismantling America," is a collection of 100 of the Hoover Institution scholar's best newspaper columns. For book purposes, they're called essays — but they retain the brevity, clarity and simple profundity of the columns that have graced our "On The Right" column for years.

Like Sowell's other books, they range over many political, economic, cultural and legal topics.

As a whole, they amount to a stern denunciation of America's direction. Sowell sees the national equivalent of a "perfect storm," a gathering of "dangerous forces (that) have been building .. . for at least a half-century."

Yes, he says, our great nation has weathered many storms. But, he quickly notes, so did the Roman Empire before it collapsed. "Is that where America is headed?" Sowell asks upfront. "I believe it is. Our only saving grace is that we are not there yet — and that nothing is inevitable until it happens."

Given the desperate times our ancestors lived through, we have no reason, Sowell says, "to whine today because the stocks in our pension plans have gone down or the inflated value that our houses had just a few years ago has now evaporated."

In another sense, he adds in a piece titled "A Fatal Trajectory," "looming ahead of us — and our children and their children — are dangers that can utterly destroy America. Worse yet, there are moral corrosions within ourselves that weaken our ability to face the challenges ahead."

Chief among those challenges, Sowell makes clear, is a nuclear Iran. He recoils at our "preoccupation with the pay of corporate executives while the leading terrorist-sponsoring nation on earth is moving steadily toward creating nuclear bombs. Does anyone imagine that we will care what anyone's paycheck is when we see an American city in radioactive ruins?"

The fact that America is still the world's strongest military power means "absolutely nothing," Sowell says, "if our enemies are willing to die and we are not. It took only two nuclear bombs to get Japan to surrender — and the Japanese of that era were far tougher than most Americans today.

"Just one bomb — dropped on New York City, Chicago or Los Angeles — might be enough to get us to surrender. If we are still made of sterner stuff than it looks like, then it might take two or maybe even three or four nuclear bombs. But we will surrender."

A keen observer of history (having lived through 80 years of it himself), Sowell is not at a loss for precedents to illustrate " how long people have been doing the same foolish things with the same disastrous results."

On the topic of national security, and of international "negotiations as the 'new' alternative to the use of force," he often speaks of France.

After World War I, a conflict in which it lost more men than the U.S. has lost in all its wars put together, that country can be forgiven for pursuing a path of peace in the 1920s and '30s, Sowell says.

"But now we know that Utopian, feel-good policies led to even worse horrors in the Second Word War. ... A whole generation of Frenchmen raised in the spirit of 'moral disarmament' faced a new German invasion. France, which had held out for four long years in the First World War, collapsed and surrendered after just six weeks of fighting in 1940. We have no excuse in our own time — not with nuclear terrorism as a looming danger," Sowell says in an essay titled "Are We France?"

Needless to say, Sowell has little patience with the "squeamishness, indecision and wishful thinking of the West" in dealing with Iran, the "diplomacy of nothing" at the United Nations or the rights of enemy combatants or the bruised feelings of people profiled in airport security lines.

Or, for that matter, Barack Obama. The Obama administration "is not the root cause of the ominous dangers that face this country at home and aboard," Sowell says. But "it is the embodiment, the personification and the culmination of dangerous trends that began decades ago. Moreover, it has escalated those dangers to what may be a point of no return.

"That such an administration could be elected in the first place, headed by a man whose only qualifications to be president of the United States at a dangerous time in the history of the world were rhetoric, style and symbolism — and whose animus against the values and institutions of America had been demonstrated repeatedly over a period of decades beforehand — speaks volumes about the inadequacies of our educational system and the degeneration of our culture."

Sowell pursues all this and more in "Dismantling America," a must read for those who haven't been exposed to Dr. Sowell and an important reread for close followers of his outstanding column.