Boeing 737

Source: Bigstock

For an advanced economy like the United States, such deficits are milestones of national decline. We have been running them now for 40 years. But in the era of U.S. economic supremacy from 1870 to 1970, we always ran an annual trade surplus, selling far more abroad than Americans bought from abroad.

In the U.S. trade picture, even in the darkest of times, the brightest of categories has been commercial aircraft.

But to watch how we allow NATO allies we defend and protect getting away with decades of colluding and cheating, and then to watch Boeing transfer technology and outsource critical manufacturing to rivals like Japan, one must conclude that not only is the industrial decline of the United States inevitable, but America’s elites do not care.

As for our corporate chieftains, they seem accepting of what is coming when they are gone, so long as the salary increases, stock prices and options, severance packages, and profits remain high.

By increasingly relying upon foreign nations for our national needs, and by outsourcing production, we are outsourcing America’s future.

After Munich in 1938, Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax visited Italy to wean Mussolini away from Hitler. The Italian dictator observed his guests closely and remarked to his foreign minister:

“These men are not made of the same stuff as the Francis Drakes and the other magnificent adventurers who created the empire. These, after all, are the tired sons of a long line of rich men, and they will lose their empire.”

If the present regime is not replaced, something like that will be said of this generation of Americans.