Futureworkers might like to read a first-class article about America's
"decline" by Paul Kennedy. It's very well worth reading and puts a lot of
points in context. However, I think he misses two very important topics.
One is that the world is poised on a currency catastrophe at present. I
think it's inevitable -- most banks and all advanced governments being deep
in debt already -- then America would be more affected by it (and any
subsequent reform) than most others. The other is that the fastest growing
scientific research of them all -- genetics -- is going to have the most
profound effects in tomorrow's world (personal health, breeding of
healthier children, manufacture of hydrogen and other important products).
America is way in the lead in genetic research at present and ought to be
able to grab first place in developing the services and technologies.
However, talented researchers are notoriously footloose and could easily be
tempted away from America in future years (Just as America has been able to
recruit the cream of Europe's scientists [and at least one historian, as
below!] in the last 60 years.)
Keith
From The New Republic.
Back to Normalcy
Is America really in decline?
Paul Kennedy
Where on earth is the United States headed? Has it lost its way? Is the
Obama effect, which initially promised to halt the souring of its global
image, over? More seriously, is it in some sort of terminal decline? Has it
joined the long historical list of number one powers that rose to the top,
and then, as Rudyard Kipling outlined it, just slowly fell downhill: Lo,
all our pomp of yesterday / At one with Nineveh and Tyre ? Has it met its
match in Afghanistan? And has its obsession with the ill-defined war on
terrorism obscured attention to the steady, and really much more serious,
rise of China to the center of the worlds stage? Will the dollar fall and
fall, like the pound sterling from the 1940s to the 1970s?
It is easy to say yesto all those questions, and there are many in Latin
America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and in the United States itself,
who do so. But there is another way to think about America's current
position in todays mightily complicated world, and it goes like this: All
that is happening, really, is that the United States is slowly and
naturally losing its abnormal status in the international system and
returning to being one of the most prominent players in the small club of
great powers. Things are not going badly wrong, and it is not as if America
as becoming a flawed and impotent giant. Instead, things are just coming
back to normal.
How would this more reassuring argument go? Well, we might start with a
historical comparison. In about 1850, as the historian Eric Hobsbawm points
out in his great work Industry and Empire, the small island-state of
Britain produced perhaps two-thirds of the world's coal, half its iron,
five-sevenths of its steel, and half of its commercial cotton cloth. This
extraordinary position was indeed abnormal; that is, it could not last
forever. And as soon as countries with bigger populations and resources
(Germany, the United States, Russia, Japan) organized themselves along
British lines, it was natural that they would produce a larger share of
world product and take a larger share of world power and thus cut Britain's
share back down to a more normal condition. This is a story which economic
and political historians take for granted. It is about the tides of history
and the shifts of power that occur when productive strength moves from one
part of the world to another. Its actually a sensible way of thinking about
history over the long term.
So why should we not look at America, and America's present and future
condition, in the same calm way? It is of course a much broader and more
populous country than Britain was and is, and possesses far more natural
resources, but the long-term trajectory is roughly the same. After 1890,
the United States had slowly overtaken the British Empire as the world's
number one by borrowing critical technologies (the steam engine, the
railway, the textile factory), and then adding on its own contributions in
chemical and electrical industries, and blazing the way in automobile and
aircraft and computer hardware/software production. It was assisted by the
good fortune of its geographic distance from any other great power (as
Britain was by its insularity), and by the damage done elsewhere by World
Wars I and II (as Britain was by the damage done elsewhere by the
Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars). By 1945, therefore, America possessed
around half of the world's GNP, an amazing share, but no less than Britains
a century earlier when it held most of the worlds steam engines. But it was
a special historical moment in both cases. When other countries began to
play catch-up, these high shares of world power would decline.
In the American case, we might tease out this argument by returning to a
point made almost 20 years ago by the Harvard scholar Joseph Nye, that
America's strength and influence in world affairs was like a sturdy
three-legged stool; that is, the nation's unchallenged place rested upon
the mutually reinforcing legs of soft power, economic power and military
power. In all three dimensions, Nye suggested, the United States was
comfortably ahead of any other competitor. Global shares of relative
strength were being diffused, perhaps, but in no way enough to shake
Americas dominant role.
How does this assessment look today? Of the three legs to Nyes stool, soft
powerthe capacity to persuade other nations to do what America would
likelooks the shakiest. This is not a measure of strength that can be
computed statistically, like steel output or defense spending, so
subjective impressions enter into the debate. Nevertheless, would anyone
dispute the contention that Americas ability to influence other states
(such as Brazil, Russia, China, India) has declined during the past two
decades? When Nye wrote, he pointed to the significance of popular culture
(Hollywood, blue jeans), the dominance of the English language, the
increasing standardization of U.S. business (from chain hotels to
accounting rules), and the spread of democracy, all as signs of Americas
influence.
Those were interesting thoughts, but we have since seen that radical
students from Ankara to Amsterdam can still wear blue jeans but demonstrate
against the United States, and that it is quite possible that a totally
free voting system in (say) Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and China would lead to
parliamentary majorities highly critical of Washingtons policies. The Pew
Foundations regular poll of global opinion suggests diminishing approval of
America, despite a short-term upward blip in favor of Obama. Soft power
comes and goes very fast.
As to the weakening of the second leg of the stool, America's relative
economic and foreign-currency heft, well, a person would have had to have
been blind and deaf not to observe its obvious deterioration in recent
years. If anything surprises me, it is how fast and how large the relative
weakening has been: A truly competitive great power should not have its
trade deficits widening so fast, nor its federal, state and municipal
deficits ballooning at such a pace, literally, into the trillions of
dollars. It is unsustainable, although that fact has been obscured by the
thousands of American economists and investment advisers who emit positive
noises to their clients and who themselves simply cannot think
strategically. The collective folly of portfolio advisers is compounded by
the current congressional baying for China's currency to get stronger and
stronger and stronger. Is that what the United States really wantsto get
relatively weaker? At a certain stage in the past 500-year history of
currencies and power, the Dutch guilder hustled the Spanish escudo off the
scene; then the pound sterling hustled the guilder (and franc and mark) off
the scene; then the dollar hustled the pound off the scene. What is
Washington risking as it presses for a stronger Chinese currency? My
apprehension is that it risks a much stronger Chinese political influence
in the world.
America's military strengths are, by contrast, still remarkable; at least
this one leg of the stool is sturdy. But how sturdy? Well, almost half of
the worlds current defense expenditures come from the United States, so it
is not surprising that it possesses a gigantic aircraft carrier Navy, a
substantial Army and Marine Corps that can be deployed all over the globe,
an ultra high-tech Air Force, and logistical and intelligence-gathering
facilities that have no equal. This is the strongest leg of the three. But
it is not going unchallenged, and in several regards.
The first is in the rise of irregular or asymmetricalwarfare by non-state
actors. Anyone who has seen the recent award-winning movie The Hurt Locker,
about the U.S. Army's uncomfortable and bloody experiences in Iraq, will
know what this means. It means that the narrow streets of Fallujah, or,
even more, the high passes of the Helmand mountains, equalize the struggle;
high-tech doesnt quite work against a suicide bomber or a cunningly placed
road mine. General Patton's style of warfare just doesn't succeed when you
are no longer running your tanks through Lorraine but creeping, damaged and
wincing, through the Khyber Pass. Sophisticated drones are, actually,
stupid. They help avoid making the commitment to winning on the ground, and
they will eventually lose.
Secondly, there is the emergence, along the historical pattern of the rise
and fall of the great powers, of new challenger nations that are pushing
into America's post-1945 geopolitical space. Putin's Russia is clawing back
its historic zones of control and, frankly, there seems little that
Washington can do if Belarus or a kicking-and-screaming Latvia is
re-absorbed by the Kremlin. India is intent on making the term Indian
Oceannot just a geographic expression; in ten or 20 yearstime, if its plans
are fulfilled, it will be in control. Which is rather comforting, because
it will thwart China's purposeful though clumsy efforts to acquire
much-needed African mineral supplies. But China, in its turn, and through
its very new and sophisticated weapons systems (disruptive electronic
warfare, silent submarines, sea-skimming missiles), may soon possess the
capacity to push the U.S. Navy away from China's shores. Like it or not,
America is going to be squeezed out of Asia.
Overall, and provided the gradual reduction of Americas extensive footprint
across Asia can occur through mutual agreements and uninterrupted economic
links, that may not be a bad thing. Few, if any, Asian governments want the
United States to pull out now, or abruptly, but most assume it will cease
to be such a prominent player in the decades to come. Why not start that
discussion now, or begin a rethink? American hopes of reshaping Asia
sometimes look curiously like former British hopes of reshaping the Middle
East. Don't go there.
Finally, and most serious of all, there is Americas dangerous and growing
reliance upon other governments to fund its own national deficits. Military
strength cannot rest upon pillars of sand; it cannot be reliant, not
forever, upon foreign lenders. The president, in his increasingly lonely
White House, and the increasingly ineffective Congress, seem unable to get
a harsh but decent fiscal package together. And now, the Tea Party nutcases
are demanding a tax-cut-and-spend policy that would make the famous Mad
Hatter's tea party itself look rather rational.
This is not a way to run a country, and especially not the American nation
that, despite its flaws, is the world's mainstay. This is worrying for its
neighbors, its many friends and allies; it is worrying for even those
states, like India and Brazil, that are going to assume a larger role in
world affairs in the years to come. We should all be careful to wish away a
reasonably benign American hegemony; we might regret its going.
But the ebb and tides of history will take away that hegemony, as surely as
autumn replaces the high summer months with fruit rather than flower.
Americas global position is at present strong, serious, and very large. But
it is still, frankly, abnormal. It will come down a ratchet or two more.
It will return from being an oversized world power to being a big nation,
but one which needs to be listened to, and one which, for the next stretch,
is the only country that can supply powerful heft to places in trouble. It
will still be really important, but less so than it was. That isn't a bad
thing. It will be more normal.
Paul Kennedy is a professor of history and director of international
security studies at Yale University. He is the author of
<http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-Great-Powers/dp/0679720197>The Rise and
Fall of the Great Powers. This article ran in the December 30, 2010, issue
of the magazine.
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
<http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2010/12/>http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2010/12/
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