FIGHTING OR RIDING THE COURSE OF HISTORY

"...As I found 45 years ago researching my first book, Economic Diplomacy and the Origins of the Second World War, Hitler took a particular lesson from Germany's defeat in the First World War. The future of the world, he believed, belonged to superstates on the scale of the USSR, the British Empire, and the United States.  Germany could only take its place among this company by radically expanding its territory to the east and securing critical resources, particularly in food and energy, that it had hitherto purchased on the world market.  International trade had already fallen by 2/3 when Hitler came into power in 1933, and his regime continued to regulate it tightly, while stimulating the German economy with public works and rearmament.  That in turn stimulated demand for foodstuffs and raw materials which Germany could not produce, leading by 1935 to shortages of both.  In a temporary solution to the food problem, Germany bought very large amounts of grain from poor countries in Eastern Europe who had to accept German Reichsmarks, which had lost their value as an international currency, in payment.  By 1939 Germany was also very short of labor.  Germany was not yet ready for war with Britain, France, or the USSR, but war had become the only way to solve these resource problems and continue building up more armaments.  To win wars, the Germans successfully used the blitzkrieg strategy against Poland and France, breaking through their front lines and bringing about a French political collapse in 1940.  That in turn persuaded him to try the same strategy in 1941 against the USSR, gambling that a series of victories on the frontier would produce its political collapse as well.  When the regime survived intact into the fall, while the German forces fell short of critical supplies, the strategy had failed.  The German divisions that reached the outskirts of Moscow in early December 1941 had almost no functional tanks left.  A Soviet counterattack drove them back, and by 1942 Hitler found himself in an all-out struggle with three economically superior powers. His defeat was only a matter of time...." DK

I am going to make some comments with reference to this post excerpt shortly, regarding concepts like sustainability, self sufficiency, isolationism, globalization, internet security, trade, and industrial and commercial policy and strategy.

Let's just start the conversation with a prior post of mine:

"Saturday, August 4, 2012

Re GEOGRAPHY AND TECHNOLOGY

You won't hear something like this from an economist, or an American politician (except perhaps someone like Perot, Buchanan, Nader: either nationalist right, or globalist left, back then...) 

It takes a sociologist, citing a geographer:

"...the United States has been the wealthiest of all industrial societies, not because it is technologically and organizationally the most advanced, but most importantly because it controls the wealthiest territory upon the earth."Collins citing Bartholomew, Physical World Atlas.

This is not the economists', (from Adam Smith onward), product, natural resource, industry, education, or technology- centered, notions of comparative or competitive advantage, but, if anything, the geographic antithesis of most of these, in a situation such as the United States, 

(because virtually all economists' examples of comparative advantage assume relative national scarcities of capital and resource inputs, thus inherently encouraging presumptively mutually beneficial, or at least not harmful, international trade among nations).

"Hence the United States' world leadership in GNP (both absolute and per capita) must be attributed to geographical peculiarities that cannot simply be imitated by other countries.  This fact has often been lost in discussions of economic development that attribute the observed world patterns to social organization or culture, and which hold out the United States as a stage through which all societies will pass.  In explanations of current American social structure, it is important to see that the high level of economic productivity is determined by factors other than the output of the educational system or by the shape of the modern professions; indeed, these appear primarily to be luxuries that a resource-rich society has been unusually able to afford.  Thus introducing geographical peculiarities into our view of an economy enables us to see the direction of causality more clearly." Collins, The Credential Society, p. 77."

Now, what kinds of implications, and what kind of history of the United States does this suggest?

There are really so many different directions one can speculate about, both counter factuals of various kinds, and counter Whig interpretation actuals of others.