Hattip Alaska Paul. Long, historic perspective, and elaborates on the Churchillian observation, “Americans will always do the right thing, after exhausting all the alternatives.” A taste:
[PeterZeihan] Third, Americans are cocky. When your national founding myth is one of achievement with minimal adversity, it is eaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaasy to become convinced you are the Chosen People and life is simply about navigating oneself from success to success. Of course, I think we all realize this isn’t how things actually work. From time to time something or someone punches you in the face. And when that happens to Americans, we absolutely, positively, lose our shit.Americans have no sense of proportion. The same thing that gives us our can-do optimism and arrogance means that when we face unexpected challenge we fear the covenant with God has been broken and doom doesn’t so much beckon, but instead will crash down upon us presently. And so we panic. We overreact. But we overreact with the power of the world’s largest and most stable and most technologically advanced economy. We overreact with the strength of a continent. We overreact with the world’s most powerful long-range military, a military that absolutely controls all global waterways. And in doing so we reshape the world. Not on purpose, but simply as a side effect of our panic.
Apparently, viruses can trigger America’s fear-response too.
In the past 96 hours the United States has gone from functionally zero actions against coronavirus
...the twenty first century equivalent of bubonic plague, only instead of killing off a third of the population of Europe it kills 3.4 percent of those who notice they have it. It seems to be fond of the elderly, especially Iranian politicians and holy men...to among the world’s most invasive. And unlike other countries ‐ China comes to mind ‐ who have only instituted constraints on specific areas where there are known coronavirus outbreaks, the Americans have instituted their restrictions nationwide. America now hosts the largest population in the world under lockdown.
The speed and depth of the change is something only Americans can culturally manage, and this is only the beginning.
The scale of resource application that is about to occur is nothing less than historically unprecedented, rivaled only by American actions in previous fear-response incidences.
- The Federal Reserve’s new bond-buying program to support the markets? Its only analogue is what the same Federal Reserve did back during the 2008 Financial crisis, but this time it was done in a day instead of a month.
- The industrial plant’s re-tooling to make medical supplies? Completely unprecedented…unless you compare it to America’s post-Sputnik industrial overhaul.
- Want to see something really impressive? Watch the process for crafting, manufacturing and distributing the coronavirus vaccine. The US just [started] human trials on March 16. That’s a solid two months faster than any such trials, ever.
Americans are capable of incredible ideological, economic, technological, logistical, military, and cultural leaps when the panic sets in. The coronavirus
...the twenty first century equivalent of bubonic plague, only instead of killing off a third of the population of Europe it kills 3.4 percent of those who notice they have it. It seems to be fond of the elderly, especially Iranian politicians and holy men...
crisis is by no means anywhere close to being over, but the switch has been flipped. Now comes mobilization.
These are "merely" things the United States is doing at home. With a few weeks (maybe days?) the Americans are going to do what they’ve done during every other fear-response. Apply (perhaps unfairly) that fear to all aspects of all of their international relationships.