US superpower status is shaken
By Paul Reynolds
World affairs correspondent, BBC News website
Will Uncle Sam still bestride the world in future?
The financial crisis is likely to diminish the status of the United States as
the world's only superpower.
On the practical level, the US is already stretched militarily, in Afghanistan
and Iraq, and is now stretched financially.
On the philosophical level, it will be harder for it to argue in favour of its
free market ideas, if its own markets have collapsed.
Pivotal moment?
Some see this as a pivotal moment.
The political philosopher John Gray, who recently retired as a professor at the
London School of Economics, wrote in the London paper The Observer: "Here is a
historic geopolitical shift, in which the balance of power in the world is
being altered irrevocably.
"The era of American global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War,
is over... The American free-market creed has self-destructed while countries
that retained overall control of markets have been vindicated."
"In a change as far-reaching in its implications as the fall of the Soviet
Union, an entire model of government and the economy has collapsed.
"How symbolic that Chinese astronauts take a spacewalk while the US Treasury
Secretary is on his knees."
No apocalypse now
Not all would agree that an American apocalypse has arrived. After all, the
system has been tested before.
John Bolton gives rumours of US hegemony's demise short shrift
In 1987 the Dow Jones share index fell by more than 20% in one day. In 2000,
the dot-com bubble burst. Yet both times, the US picked itself up, as it did
post Vietnam.
Prof Gray's comments certainly did not impress one of the more hawkish figures
who served in the Bush administration, the former UN ambassador John Bolton.
When I put them to him, he replied only: "If Professor Gray believes this, can
he assure us that he is selling his US assets short?
"If so, where is he placing his money instead? And if he has no US assets, why
should we be paying any attention to him?"
Nevertheless, it does seem that the concept of the single superpower left
bestriding the world after the collapse of communism (and the supposed end of
history) is no longer valid.
Multi-polar world
Even leading neo-conservative thinkers accept that a more multi-polar world is
emerging, though one in which they want the American position to be the leading
one.
Robert Kagan, co-founder in 1997 of the "Project for the New American Century"
that called for "American global leadership", wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine
this autumn: "Those who today proclaim that the United States is in decline
often imagine a past in which the world danced to an Olympian America's tune.
That is an illusion.
The US is seen as declining relatively and there has been an enormous
acceleration in this perfect storm of perception in the waning days of the Bush
administration
Dr Robin Niblett
Chatham House
"The world today looks more like that of the 19th Century than like that of the
late 20th.
"Those who imagine this is good news should recall that the 19th Century order
did not end as well as the Cold War did."
"To avoid such a fate, the United States and other democratic nations will need
to take a more enlightened and generous view of their interests than they did
even during the Cold War. The United States, as the strongest democracy, should
not oppose but welcome a world of pooled and diminished national sovereignty.
"At the same time, the democracies of Asia and Europe need to rediscover that
progress toward this more perfect liberal order depends not only on law and
popular will but also on powerful nations that can support and defend it."
New scepticism
The director of a leading British think-tank Chatham House, Dr Robin Niblett,
who has worked on both sides of the Atlantic, remarked that, at a recent
conference he attended in Berlin, an American who called for continued US
leadership was met with a new scepticism.
Despite its feats in space, China is said to face a future food crisis
"The US is seen as declining relatively and there has been an enormous
acceleration in this perfect storm of perception in the waning days of the Bush
administration. The rise of new powers, the increase in oil wealth among some
countries and the spread of economic power around the world adds to this," he
said.
"But we must separate the immediate moment from the structural. There is no
doubt that President Bush has created some of his own problems. The overstretch
of military power and the economic crisis can be laid at the door of the
administration.
"Its tax cuts were not matched by the hammer of spending cuts. The combined
effect of events like the failures in Iraq, the difficulties in Afghanistan,
the thumbing of its nose by Russia in Georgia and elsewhere, all these lead to
a sense of an end of an era.
The longer term
Dr Niblett argues that we should wait a bit before coming to a judgment and
that structurally the United States is still strong.
America has been stretched by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
"America is still immensely attractive to skilled immigrants and is still
capable of producing a Microsoft or a Google," he went on.
"Even its debt can be overcome. It has enormous resilience economically at a
local and entrepreneurial level.
"And one must ask, decline relative to who? China is in a desperate race for
growth to feed its population and avert unrest in 15 to 20 years. Russia is not
exactly a paper tiger but it is stretching its own limits with a new strategy
built on a flimsy base. India has huge internal contradictions. Europe has
usually proved unable to jump out of the doldrums as dynamically as the US.
"But the US must regain its financial footing and the extent to which it does
so will also determine its military capacity. If it has less money, it will
have fewer forces."
With the US presidential election looming, it will be worth returning to this
subject in a year's time to see how the world, and the American place in it,
looks then.
Paul.Reynolds- INTERNET@ bbc.co.uk
.
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