A Promised Land

I nodded. “Well, Mike, I’ll take your word on that. And I give you my word that I’ll make my decision about Stan’s proposal based on the Pentagon’s advice and what I believe best serves the interests of this country. But until I do,” I said, leaning in for emphasis, “I’d sure like to stop having my military advisors telling me what I have to do on

loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring a

Given its growth rate and sheer size, China’s GDP was guaranteed at some point to surpass America’s. When you added this to the country’s powerful military, increasingly skilled workforce, shrewd and pragmatic government, and cohesive five-thousand-year-old culture, the conclusion felt obvious: If any country was likely to challenge U.S. preeminenc

resignation

Was it possible that abstract principles and high-minded ideals were and always would be nothing more than a pretense, a palliative, a way to beat back despair, but no match for the more primal urges that really moved us, so that no matter what we said or did, history was sure

Consistent with the adage that 80 percent of success is a matter of showing up,

tacitly acknowledge the bankruptcy of their own anti-government, anti-regulation rhetoric. If, on the other hand, they fought a rearguard action, if they generated controversy and threw sand in the gears, they at least had a chance to energize their base and slow me and the Democrats down at a time when the country was sure to be impatient.

None of this made China unique. Just about every rich country, from the United States to Japan, had used mercantilist strategies at various stages of their development to boost their economies. And from China’s perspective, you couldn’t argue with the results: Only a generation after millions died of mass starvation, China had transformed itself in

could see people laughing and hugging, waving flags to the beat of a song by country artists Brooks & Dunn that had become a staple on the campaign trail: “Only in America.”