Shifting Sands of Empire

Hope and dread on in a time of new life

The following piece is one in a series of letters to my now-newborn granddaughter.

Dear Leila,

When I was born in December of 1962, the United States of America was at the zenith of its power. Six weeks earlier, the administration of President John F. Kennedy had stared down the Soviet Union in the Cuban Missile Crisis, averting a nuclear war and affirming American military dominance. That dominance was unquestioned in agriculture, manufacturing, finance, technology, and just about any other category you could imagine.

A decade later—about the time I became aware of a wider world—a pervasive air of gloom had settled over the country. Defeat in Vietnam, an energy crisis, stagflation, and presidential scandal had corroded the sense of seemingly unstoppable confidence of the last generation. I spent my high school years in an environment where it was widely believed the nation’s best days were behind it.

And then, in the 1980s, an unexpected revival. A lot of this was attributed, rightly, to President Ronald Reagan (whom I opposed). But the nation’s rising tide was also a matter of technological revival (in terms of the computer revolution), dropping energy prices—and, in particular, the sagging and collapse of the Soviet Union from within. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the United States became the sole superpower on the planet.

It was an Era of Good Feeling (here I’m alluding also to a period given this name in the aftermath of the U.S. non-defeat by Great Britain in the War of 1812, which was quite an accomplishment). The 1990s were a time of tremendous economic expansion and technological innovation, thanks in no small part to the internet. There had been a moment of panic about the rise of Japan, but this faded relatively quickly. It was also in these years that China began to accelerate its modernization, a development largely greeted with optimism by Western policymakers, who saw a vast new market for their products and the seeming inevitability that China’s embrace capitalism would undermine its traditional authoritarianism.

For me and millions of my fellow Americans, the twenty-first century began on September 11, 2001, when a series of planes hijacked by Islamic fundamentalists crashed into important buildings in New York and Washington. It was a body blow to the invincibility of the republic, and it was followed by a series of subsequent shocks—botched wars in the Middle East, a botched response to a terrible hurricane in New Orleans, a near collapse of the financial markets. The second decade of the century was little better. While many of us were buoyed by the election of the first African-American president in 2008, that sense of momentum in the March of Progress was interrupted by the election of Donald Trump in 2016. The years that followed were marked by political tumult and the arrival of a global pandemic that brought the world to a halt in the opening years of the 2020s.

Your arrival coincides with a moment of foreboding, even gloom. The financial markets are roiling; China, once a potential power, now seems like an unstoppable force. Beyond my worries for the state of the nation now, I’m even more worried about where it’s headed—where it will be as you come of age. Will your childhood be marked by turmoil? Will you have the kind of security your parents and grandparents enjoyed? To what degree will your choices be limited by circumstances that can now only be barely, if darkly, imagined?

As this very short chronicle indicates, history, like the stock market—unpredictable, and as such a source of confidence no less than despair. Nor do I assume you will be particularly concerned with the larger geopolitical circumstances of your time, which for me has not all that been different from following a favored professional sports franchise (God forbid you have the misfortune of being a New York Jets fan). But weighing such considerations aside, my principal source of hope is you as a locus of possibility. I don’t mean that so much as a matter of you having a satisfying career, much less contributing to the salvation and resurrection of your country—but hey, stranger things have happened—than the notion of happiness and satisfaction existing independent of the fate of nations. Amid my fears that you are born too late, you’ve arrived just in time for me. You have my gratitude as a source of hope in a dark time.