I don't know how many sddialedin.com readers know Cullen Hendrix, but he was the first person ever to write a profile about me as a blogger that appeared in
San Diego Music Matters Magazine. He's also a sick-ass drummer for the band The North Atlantic. Anyway, he moved to Colorado several years ago and has made a good life for himself in academia where he's a professor and Director of the Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security and Diplomacy at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies. He
wrote this great op-ed that I've been meaning to share, and since I'll probably take the weekend off, I'll leave it here for your reading list:
The United States set a single-day record for new COVID cases on Wednesday, surpassing what we had hoped would the highest point of the curve back on April 24. Instead of flattening, the US curve is starting to look more like Long’s Peak: a small uplift followed by a small dip that then gives way to a long and precipitous climb.
This has many observers saying the United States is a failed state. It is not. It is something much more disturbing: it is a society that has decided not to try.
Failed states lack the resources, equipment, and government capacity to provide public safety and public services. States like Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen fit this description. The governments of these countries can often barely project authority beyond the walls of their government buildings.
This is not the case in the United States. By any objective measure, the United States is the wealthiest, most powerful country on Earth. It is home to more Nobel laureates than any country, and its universities are the envy the world. Its technology sector is the world’s most dynamic. Most public services work reasonably well. The demand for the H1B high skilled worker visas recently halted by President Trump vastly outstrips their supply. Failed states see mass out-migration. Even at our most xenophobic, the United States is still a preferred destination for migrants the world over. We have the talent and the resources.
So no, the United States is not a failed state. Rather, the United States is a country that has lost the political will to do anything with that vast capacity. If we had the will, we could be implementing the same kinds of procedures that helped countries from New Zealand to South Korea and Japan, many of which lack the United States’ economic and military might, to flatten their curves.
In this way, the United States is a creature without modern precedent. One has to go all the way back to the disastrous reigns of Nero in Rome (first century CE) or Czar Nicholas of Russia in the early 20th century to find such fecklessness in the face of huge threats. And while it’s tempting to say Trump is fiddling while the nation burns, this is not just about presidential leadership. It is about a society that has forgotten that our well-earned freedoms come with responsibilities, chief among which is the responsibility to make personal sacrifices for the good of the community. Our individualism has mutated into selfishness at a time when selflessness—the recognition that we are indeed all in this together—is necessary.
We do not live in a failed state. We live in a capable state—we are just choosing to fail one another, and that is inexcusable.
Cullen Hendrix is Professor and Director of the Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security and Diplomacy at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies.
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