[Webstral]

There is a mood of pessimism in the US these days that Waiting is giving a voice. Unfortunately, as a people we Americans tend towards very black-and-white viewpoints. We struggle with nuance. In the 1960's, the Soviets were the Devil incarnate and bent on our destruction. Back in the 1980's, the world was coming to an end because Japan was about to eclipse us. Now it's China. We like extreme interpretations for the same reason that we love our fiery sermons: they get the blood pumping.

The idea that a country with a population the size of Massachusetts is going to somehow outcompete the United States is a bit alarmist, to say the least. We might as well say that the US has suffered from the recovery of the Netherlands after WW2. After all, the Netherlands has larger population, a better-educated population, and a more-established industrial base.

Of course, there is the possibility that a new Libya would want to take over for the Cayman Islands as a tax haven. That problem, though, is an internal problem for the US. Reform of the IRS is what's needed to deal with the Cayman Islands, not a totalitarian regime in the Cayman Islands.

The real danger, as always, is that a nation with a distinctly non-Western culture will learn to combine Western economic, industrial, and scientific tools with its own culture and produce something that causes us to question our assumptions about how things go. Oh, yes--that's been happening, hasn't it? It just hasn't happend with a Muslim country yet--not really. The Persian Gulf States have plenty of oil wealth and all the trappings of Western society, but representative government has eluded them thus far. One never knows, though. What if a Westernized Muslim state emerged that learned to make peace between Islam and modernism? This is not hard to imagine when one converses with moderate Muslims or reads their work. A moderate Muslim regime with oil wealth is exactly who we need on our side and exactly what we fear because we don't have ready-made answers for dealing with them. I hope Libya manages to make something better of itself than just another state that kicked out the old bums only to fall under the control of a crowd of new bums.