Outsourcing some defense and intelligence makes sense because the West is united and why waste money on redundant systems. The real problem is that America is not a superpower it is a hyper power. As Bill Gates said recently:
"Nation-state competition is not zero-sum competition. It was not good for the world for the United States to be so far ahead, for 5 percent of the global population to generate 30 percent of the economic activity and 60 percent of the scientific R&D."
But we don't want the world to catch up by the US slowing down but by the world speeding up, that way progress is more rapid.
The real problem is that America is not a superpower it is a hyper power.
Is it? Really?
I can't help thinking that many of the less welcome trends in recent years, security-related or otherwise, could be explained by (a) the US no longer being a superpower in one sense or another, or not likely to remain so beyond the near future, and (b) senior US political and business figures finally noticing this.
From the outside, the modern United States of America looks a lot like some of its long-standing tech giants: some wise/lucky moves in the past brought success and created a vast amount of resources to use today, but if you keep squandering those resources on little things that aren't done properly and then add occasional big misses, sooner or later your fortunes will inevitably change.
US culture has long been obsessed with military matters and more recently with security, and clearly the US is still the world's leading military power in numerical terms. But at some point, you have enough firepower to level the planet a few times over, and adding another 0 doesn't really make any meaningful difference.
Meanwhile, among other things, a substantial part of the US population does not have access to effective healthcare, a noticeable proportion of US children appear to be learning more in school about religion than science (and their parents are OK with that), some of the big businesses generating all that economic activity Gates mentioned also managed to trigger the biggest global economic crisis in living memory, US workers have some of the worst conditions of any first world country (including so little paid time off in a year that sometimes even doubled it would still be illegal in many places), a cavalier attitude to energy consumption and damaging the environment is pervasive in both political and business leadership, and childish squabbling at the highest levels of federal government recently brought huge parts of that government to a standstill with adverse consequences for millions of ordinary people.
I'm not sure more rapid progress toward the US approach to these kinds of things is something any of us should aspire to. If anything, public sentiment and media commentary in other first world countries seems to be turning more to the attitude that the US is toxic and the best thing to do is distance yourself as much as possible, in security-related matters and otherwise. This article is interesting because it's the first obvious, practical embodiment of that sentiment I've seen, but I'll be very surprised if it's the last.
Only to the extent that intelligence has been outsourced to the US, at least in the West.
http://cphpost.dk/news/denmark-is-one-of-the-nsas-9-eyes.761...
Outsourcing some defense and intelligence makes sense because the West is united and why waste money on redundant systems. The real problem is that America is not a superpower it is a hyper power. As Bill Gates said recently:
"Nation-state competition is not zero-sum competition. It was not good for the world for the United States to be so far ahead, for 5 percent of the global population to generate 30 percent of the economic activity and 60 percent of the scientific R&D."
But we don't want the world to catch up by the US slowing down but by the world speeding up, that way progress is more rapid.