A World without America

The Blogfather writes:

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: The administration’s pathetic, dithering response to the Arab uprisings has been both cynical and naive.

I think what we’re seeing is a sort of John Birmingham-lite scenario. In Birmingham’s page-turner books Without Warning and After America, the mysterious disappearance of most of the United States causes all sorts of economic and security chaos to unfold, once America is no longer there to keep the lid on things.

Whether deliberately or accidentally, the Obama Administration has substantially reduced the United States’ military and economic leverage over the past couple of years. The result is that we’re seeing a lot of stuff bust loose. America hasn’t vanished. We’ve just become, as Hitchens says, about as important as Switzerland.

18 Doughty Street is no longer on the Interwebs, but was sort of the Tory prototype for PJTV. I wrote a profile of the pioneering British Internet TV channel for Tech Central Station in mid-2007. In those early days of video, when just getting a video on YouTube seemed like a major accomplishment, they really seemed to put all the pieces together to create a virtual TV network; sadly it couldn’t sustain itself, however.

Back in 2007, 18 Doughty Street did a video that asked viewers to imagine “A World without America” — not knowing at the time how quickly our stature and presence would be diminished. At one point, the narrator intones, “A world without America would be a world without Israel” — which I imagine lots of people would listen to and think, “Ah–a twofer!”*

Fortunately, it’s still up at YouTube; click here to watch:

[youtube JwAtNILh6uY]

* Speaking of twofers…