Special to WorldTribune.com

By Gregory R. Copley, Editor, GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs.

Voters in the United States of America could not have spoken more clearly than they did on Nov. 4, when, in the mid-term Congressional and gubernatorial elections, they resoundingly rejected the polices of President Barack Hussein Obama and — by default — the Democratic Party. The question is, however: what does it really mean, strategically, for the U.S. and the world?

Firstly, as the great strategic philosopher Dr. Stefan Possony was wont to say: governments are rarely voted in; they are voted out. This is what the voters did with the 2014 elections. Of course, President Obama has two more years in office, but now has lost control of both houses of Congress, and significantly more states have gone to the Republican Party. And yet the vote was not for the Republicans as much as it was against the President; not even, in deep structural terms, against the Democratic Party. This will be important as both parties prepare for the 2016 Presidential and Congressional elections.

In the immediate term, the 2014 election has strengthened the U.S. dollar in international markets, although this process was already underway with the end of “quantitative easing” (QE: the printing of economically unbacked currency to cover unrestricted spending and lending). At least the headlong decline of the U.S. economy has been tempered. Nonetheless, the U.S. will be strategically (as well as economically) hampered for the foreseeable future by the reality that it has become the world’s most seriously indebted nation.

Rupert Murdoch, the U.S.-Australian media entrepreneur, in Washington, DC, in October 2014 was the first outsider to address a meeting of the G20 economic ministers, and became one of the first public figures to declare that “the king had no clothes” when he delivered an indictment on the impact of the unrestricted printing of unbacked currency (QE) by the U.S., European, and other nations in the recent period of economic challenge.

Murdoch noted: “In America, the most highly-paid one percent [of the population] now pay 46 percent of all income tax. In Britain, the top one percent pay 28 percent of all income tax. This is a massive shift from what our society looked like 30 years ago. We should all be concerned about this polarization which was never the intent of policy but is certainly a consequence.”

This polarization of society will determine political outcomes in many Western societies for the coming decade at least. It forges a disunity which will plague the U.S., European, and many other governments and make them less able to act cohesively. Arguably, the only answer to this situation would be a transformation which would wipe away dysfunctional political structures and debt. This, to a limited degree, occurred with the collapse of the USSR, enabling the Russian Federation to emerge with less constraints than would have otherwise been the case.

Collapse and reconstruction, though, is no easy process, and is fraught with uncertainty. The French, Russian, Iranian, and Chinese revolutions were testament to that. The other option is to introduce political reforms to stimulate so much economic growth that the debt, in effect, becomes minimized proportionally. Inflation, too, can wipe away debt, and U.S. President Jimmy Carter was saved (if indeed that is the right word for it) by hyperinflation destroying the relative value of debt. Even he, however, was not faced with the debt and paralysis levels for which Barack Obama was punished in the November 2014 U.S. elections.

Absent a deliberate policy of hyperinflation, or a total systemic collapse, the U.S. only has the option of reducing government spending, freeing the economy (from bureaucratic interference) as far as possible to stimulate investor confidence, and totally re-thinking the way it prosecutes its strategic policy. This would entail a streamlining of the Defense and State departments, as well as a transformation of the tone of U.S. foreign policy projection. The two remaining years of the Obama Administration will not, however, countenance any of these solutions; they are anathema to President Obama’s — and the Democratic Party’s — thinking, which is to increase government spending and taxation to overcome problems.

This solution continues to deter investment and job creation. And it is time to also highlight the fraudulent nature of U.S. unemployment statistics, which the Obama Administration has manipulated to give the impression of declining unemployment in recent years. The voter backlash was a reflection of the uncertainties and fears held by an under-employed population.

The strategic transformation can only begin at the end of the Obama Administration, when a new President takes office in early 2017. Until that time, the new Congress, starting its term in early 2015, can only act to curb President Obama’s spending and excesses (Congress may even impeach him, although this would serve little purpose). And even then, there is no certainty that the next President of the U.S. will not be Democratic Party favorite Hillary Clinton, who (to a greater extent than her husband, former President Bill Clinton) would merely be “Obama lite”. She would continue heavy government spending, and heavy bureaucracy. We know enough of her to know that there would be no innovation in her to rebuild the U.S.

This puts the onus on the Republican Party to immediately formulate a new strategic policy for the U.S., one which would specifically outline how it would stimulate the economy, how it would reduce the bureaucracy at the Defense and State departments (and remove the power which State has accumulated over strategic policy), and how it would develop totally new technologies and doctrine which would take U.S. defenses back into leadership.

But there have been no stirrings so far in this regard.

  Strategic impact of mid-term elections: GOP still silent on new U.S. policy, WorldTribune.com