Is the statement, 'America's
position as pre-eminent world power will not last indefinitely' a truism? That
is to say, is this a statement too obviously true to be worth making? It was not
blindingly obvious to Nately, Catch-22's embodiment of east coast
rectitude and privilege. Whilst visiting his whore he was taunted by an old
Italian with the knowledge that Italy was winning the war. After all, her
soldiers were no longer fighting, whereas Americans and Germans were still dying
every day. In consequence
'Italy will
survive this war and still be in existence long after your own country has been
destroyed.'
Nately could
scarcely believe his ears. he had never heard such shocking blasphemies before,
and he wondered with instinctive logic why G-men did not appear to lock the
traitorous old man up. 'America is not going to be destroyed!' he shouted
passionately.
'Never?' prodded the old man
softly.
'Well . . .' Nately
faltered.
The old man
laughed indulgently, holding in check a deeper more explosive delight. His
goading remained gentle. 'Rome was destroyed, Greece was destroyed, Persia was
destroyed, Spain was destroyed. All great countries are destroyed. Why not
yours? How much longer do you really think your country will last?
Forever?
Well, they're still on top, and with no immediate end in
sight, but that day will come. Do Americans now know this, and if they don't
does it matter?
To begin with, let's leave the American people out of
this. They no more think about abstruse matters of foreign policy than any
people anywhere else. Instead let's consider the leaders and the thinkers. One
of the latter, Prof. Kenneth Waltz [1] , is sure that 'American leaders seem to believe that America's
pre-eminent position will last indefinitely'. Since any such conviction amongst
the governing class is likely to have at least been shaped by what the thinkers
have thought, it's instructive to listen.
Elliot Abrams [2] considers the US's current position such as to render irrelevant
traditional notions such as the 'balance of power'. Implying a very considerable
degree of choice in the matter, the key question facing America is, he suggests,
'whether to preserve this dominance, or whether to view it as a danger to
ourselves and others'. Mr Abrams is all for preserving, because that,
fortunately, will also, 'preserve peace and promote the cause of democracy and
human rights'. Let's not forget that America has 'been the greatest force for
good among the nations of the earth'. So America staying as top nation is not
merely likely from this viewpoint, but also, for each and every one of us, a
thoroughly good thing.
To still any dissenting voices Eliot Cohen [3] assures us that 'there are, of course, a few first principles. No one
(probably not even some members of the Chinese Politburo) would like to see the
US lose its status in the international system as the fundamental guarantor of
an open trading order'. Nor need we be worried that this vista of an endless
horizon to US power will intimidate Americans. As James Heilbrunn [4] proclaims with almost Natelyesque confidence: 'the new realists have
it backward. America is not overcommitted. It is not committed enough'.
Thankfully American hegemony is not only buttressed by rational foreign
governments being aware of all these facts, foreign people are also up to speed.
Michael Ledeen [5] points out, 'oppressed people everywhere know that if we fall, they
are doomed'. It is difficult to think of America at moments like this without
hearing the cadences of Star Wars
'The purpose of power, Luke, is the opportunity to do
good'.
In short, America's on top, and she's staying on top.
For confirmation of that you have only to appreciate that even a bum like
Clinton wasn't able to dissolve American power. All of our quotations are from
conservative thinkers made during the Clinton era (when US exercise of power
was presumably less than congenial to them) to be found at home in journals
such as The National Interest, Commentary, National Review and the Weekly Standard, and sufficiently
distinguished that not even their right wing beliefs can deny them a place in
more stolid, establishment publications like Foreign Affairs. Yet, despite being
conservatives (or more often than not, neo-cons) their watchword is sunny
optimism, improving enthusiasm even. For they all seem to share a common
certainty of American power, world without end.
At most when the possibility of decline is considered
it's in the context of, 'well as long as we don't do this or that unutterably
foolish thing, we'll endure'. However there are very good reasons for believing
that, whatever the US does, decline happens.
These come under four broad headings. First, are the
faulty assumptions which underlie much of the ugly talk of 'new paradigmatic
shifts' such as globalisation. Second, the power of the United States, both in
absolute terms today, and in comparison to previous hegemons, is greatly
overstated. Third, and perhaps least significantly, there are the factors
already at work which indicate ongoing US decline. And fourth, there are the
systemic problems inherent in the idea of a perpetual
hegemon.
Before we turn to each of these, there is one more thing
to understand about how hegemons understand themselves. Much like a baby boomer,
although they're likewise aware of the concept of death, they simply don't
believe it can apply to them. Psychologically this manifests itself in the
doctrine of exceptionalism. All hegemons, whilst hegemonic, subscribe to this
self-belief system. In circular fashion they assume that because they're top,
they deserve to be top it being too absurd for words that they might have got
there by 'accident' or that hegemonic status is devoid of moral meaning. From
Philip II to Palmerston, the message they tell themselves, and the rest of the
world is the same: 'we stand at the head of moral, social and political
civilisation . . . our task is to lead the way and direct the march of other
nations'. Palmerston, as we know, was wrong, Britain was simply powerful, not
God's instrument on earth.
Everything's different, everything's
better
To start with faulty
assumptions: these tend to revolve round notions of the new. 'Globalisation' is
a prime example. Always an overdone concept given the superior credentials of
the pre-Great War international economy, globalisation is used by many
proponents of American ascendancy as proof positive of its likely long-lasting
nature. They point to the recent health of the US economy, forget that their
academic peers spent previous decades pointing to then healthy economies (e.g.
Germany or Japan) and drawing infallible conclusions from them, and announce
that, because of the crucial importance economic strength plays in maintaining
power, American pre-eminence is locked in.
In The
Weary Titan: Britain and the Experience of Relative Decline, 1895-1905
Aaron Friedberg [6] self-consciously examined America's predecessor as hegemon with a
view to illuminating how power is kept or lost. Turning to the debates which
preoccupied Edwardian Britain would global free trade, which was held to have
made Britain top nation, keep her that way, or to that end should protection be
adopted? Friedberg goes to the heart of the dispute, and the arguments are
just as valid of today as they were of 1900:
the classical
theory of free trade made no promises of permanent national advantage.
Unencumbered exchange meant optimum efficiency and maximum global welfare, but
it did not guarantee the lasting predominance of any one political unit. The
free play of economic forces would undoubtedly result in shifts in comparative
advantage in certain crucial industries, and it might also cause one nation to
displace another as the leader in overall production and
wealth.
This last fear gripped the US as regards Japan for much
of the late 70s and 80s. As Britain displayed in the twentieth century, after
economic mastery has departed, diplomatic leadership can linger for some time.
The globalist/free trade point remains this theory guarantees no nation
permanent retention of economic primacy. Indeed, employing the stock reasoning
about British economic decline the inevitable consequence of a prolonged
head-start if the United States has, or is enjoying a new information age
climacteric, what's to say that when others catch up they won't there and then
surpass a dinosaur?
Another fallacy of the new is the 'Revolution in
Military Affairs' (RMA). This is the belief that the United States has, or is
about to achieve 'full spectrum dominance'. That there has been, or is fairly
soon about to be, a qualitative shift in the very nature of war-making, so that
it will be impossible for any military power to contest an issue with America
and win. Very crudely this means, 'we have better bombs than you, and we're
smarter at using them too'.
According to taste, some believers in RMA hold that it
is a permanent evolutionary advantage, like opposable thumbs, and that in no
meaningful timescale is anyone else going to catch up with this undeniable
advantage. Others hold that the US merely enjoys a window of superiority,
similar in kind perhaps to that afforded to imperial Britain by the invention of
the dreadnought: she outclasses everyone else thanks to her technological lead,
but, unavoidably, mostly everyone else catches up. This second, smaller, school
is divided as to whether the ultimate consequence of the RMA will be to denude
the US of her comparative military advantage (e.g. dreadnoughts not only made
Germany's pre-dreadnought battleships obsolete, they also made the far larger
number of British pre-dreadnoughts obsolete when Germany started building her
own dreadnoughts), or, simply that competition will continue on this new, higher
plane of military achievement making it incumbent upon future administrations
to spend as vigorously as their predecessors are held to have
done.
This, though, remains only an idea. Its flaws are
apparent from Britain in eighteenth century America and nineteenth century
Afghanistan, to America in twentieth century Somalia and twenty first century
Afghanistan. In each war cited, whether the coacervation of loss of will, and
war with more important adversaries leading, by default, to victory 'by' the
technology-retarded over the advanced military machine in the first example, to
the shifting goals and deficient war fighting capabilities exposed in the last
(no Bin Laden captured, no appetite for maintaining a victory with one's own
troops) of the last, wars are, were and always will be won by those who know what their goals
are, and are willing to see them met. Like globalisation, the idea of an 'RMA'
illuminates the willingness of a substantial number of American intellectuals to
believe in the prospect of in-my-lifetime new rules. In this scenario these are
invariably to the benefit of the player currently leading the game. As I will
discuss in the final section, on systemic problems for unending American
primacy, there is very little to back up any of these notions that
'transformative factors' have at all changed the basic rules of inter-state
competition.
The most powerful nation
ever?
If nothing miraculous has
thus occurred which petrifies the present level of American dominance, what is
the nature of that power? Is the United States quite as omnipotent as she is
habitually made out to be? Bluntly this boils down to: is, at her presumed
heyday, the US as powerful as preceding hegemons were during theirs? Arguably
not. Jacky Fisher, when forcefully communicating the nature of Edwardian British
world power, would have been able to point to his 'five keys': Dover; Gibraltar;
Singapore; Alexandria; and the Cape. In their day these were the strategic
prerequisites to power, as they controlled the sea. And the Royal Navy
controlled them. As Britain's heir, America has inherited this same appreciation
that 'power projection' amounts to world power. Crucially, however, the US
controls very few of her strategic assets.
Take away bases granted to her by allies, in Britain,
Turkey, Germany, Australia or Japan, or in their dependencies e.g. Okinawa or
Chagos Arch (the British Indian Ocean territory where the bombers fly from to
bomb Iraq or Serbia or Afghanistan) and you substantially diminish American
power. Even today, the continental US is still a long way away from anywhere
interesting. Moreover, as this network of foreign bases indicates, there is a
fundamental difference between British hegemony and American. The latter is at
root conducted through the medium of alliance diplomacy, the former was,
outside largescale warfare, unilateral in kind. US leadership rests much more
upon the consent of her 'western' followers than is commonly allowed for.
Subtract from the calculus of American power the sheepish behaviour of say
Britain, Germany and Japan, and again, the equation is markedly different. These
(rather than basket cases like Iraq, China and Russia) are precisely the
countries which could most plausibly
'compete' with the United States, being rich, militarily capable, and most
importantly, on the whole underexerted. If her Western allies took repeated
American advice and raised their percentage of GDP allocated to defence to
American levels, that would have an astonishing effect on those tables which
presently show the US to be spending as much on defence as the next seven powers
combined.
Euroland, the single currency zone, is already at a par
with the US in terms of resources. If this incipient power takes the decision to
offer a challenge to the global power of the US, then it, unlike China and
before that, the USSR, is more than capable of making one. Imagine a European amount of money spent in a British fashion on defence. Which brings
us to a most unusual ally: Britain.
Perhaps it has something to do with the partially
voluntary liquidation of her power, but Britain has not, as previous hegemons
have been inclined to do, conducted a hate campaign against her replacement.
Commonplace wisdom has it that for centuries (long predating her own occupation
of the top spot) Britain coalesced with the weak against the strong. From
Catholic Spain, through revolutionary France, to German Germany, the theme seems
simple: resist the top nation when you're not it. Yet today she is the most
loyal ally the strongest power can muster. And a very handy thing that is too
for American primacy. Apart from the obvious virtues already discussed the
bases, the manpower, and the intelligence and technology relationship which
Britain provides, she plays a crucial role in terms of the alliance diplomacy
through which the US is obliged to exercise her primacy
through.
Contrary to what the most self-avowedly self-interested
American conservatives believe, the United Nations is an extremely useful tool
of American foreign policy. Here, as elsewhere, Britain provides the US with
'cover' for her actions. This works in two ways. The first is between other
states, the second is in the context of the American domestic viewing electorate
having Britain always to hand allows US politicians to point to at least one
bunch of foreigners being on side. Having Britain in her pocket further helps
the US in that Britain's
peer-competitors (especially France and Germany) often join in 'Western'
ventures so as to prevent London from having sole access to Washington. Lastly,
Britain lined up behind America, whatever else it means, means that there is one
less power available to be lined up against her.
No crisis, but some
decline?
If American power is in fact
somewhat less than it's usually made out to be, let alone being at the
'post-balance, unprecedented heights' some have claimed for it, are there signs
of US decline already in existence? Well . . . as you would expect, there are
difficult, often intangible factors to appreciate. If the form and exact
consequences of British decline are still debatable a century later, we can
perhaps be forgiven for a degree of vagueness in assessing immediate and
categorical American problems.
'Problems' for a hegemon can cover a wide range of
nuisances. Apart from the near-theological questions of 'fundamentals' (and who,
after fifty thousand International Relations texts has any idea what they are?),
we have questions like: does the power wish to remain a power? is she undergoing
cultural changes inimical to the discharge of great power status? is a rival
rising? are competing pressure groups (ethnic lobbies, humanitarian campaigns,
unrelated political activists) distorting US foreign policy? is the US making
'mistakes' (e.g. by picking the wrong allies; sustaining client-liabilities i.e.
Israel, Taiwan; picking the wrong enemies etc.)?
Although I promised to leave them out of it, it's worth
dragging 'the American people' back in, given how often their sacerdotal embrace
is invoked by the academic avatars of American global engagement. China was
(remember) the policy issue of the
pre-bellum world. How many of the varied aspects that make up the China question
would be singled out by the famed American people as 'important'? Taiwan? the
fate of North Korea? the alliance with Japan? Tibet? the American military
presence in East Asia? These are surely circular, bureaucratic issues. They
matter only because of the posture of global engagement the US is already
committed to. They are not matters which would, unbidden, arouse great
excitement in the hearts of the American people. In short, do Americans actually
wish to bear the financial and moral burdens of empire to which their governors
have long ago indentured them?
As is much discussed when considering Britain's fall
from place, the quality of 'the people', in a democracy, is moderately to quite
important when assessing matters of empire and world-power. Dispensing with the
near-racism which many progressive European commentators employ when opining on
the average American, is this in truth rather placid creature up to the
bloodthirsty business of keeping an empire? Just how many foreigners can you
afford to kill in front of CNN before domestic support for imperial policing
collapses? The most fanatical prophets of American exceptionalism claim that
'the people' will always endorse what they call 'engagement' (i.e. empire)
because of the moral component to American foreign policy. Even if for a moment
one accepts this dubious reasoning, the point at issue is means not ends.
Regardless of how good the cause a neo-Reaganite foreign policy might have taken
America to war for, will the public support the gory details that such a war
will entail? This leaves entirely to one side the opposite but related matter of
your own casualties. Precisely how many of those are 'the people' prepared to
endure to fight foreign wars, whyever they're being fought? As a mere six months
on from September 11th shows, for the people, striking back is one
thing striking first, quite another.
Moving from the led to the leaders, the foreign policy
class upon which this empire truly rests is hardly without flaw. Anatol
Lieven [7] wrote damningly (and well before the lunatic, and literally
indefensible central Asian overreach of post 9/11) of the self-conceived heirs
to the Great Game:
the rhetoric of
US engagement in central Asia has moved far ahead of America's interests in the
region, and the resources it is willing to commit there. Present US strategy in
the region is not, as is frequently stated, 'dual containment' of Iraq and Iran.
It is quadruple containment, of those two states as well as Russia and now
Afghanistan (and one might even consider adding Pakistan to that list). This is
not diplomacy, it is strategy by autopilot, with the course set a generation
ago. It also commits the cardinal sin of badly overstating the real power that
the United States is willing to commit to achieve its aims in the
region.
Worse still, 'the United States has neither reason,
power, nor the will to replace a largely vanished Russian hegemony in the
Caspian region with a hegemony of its own. This argument, of course, runs flatly
counter to the assumptions on which US policy in the region has been based [in
recent] years. These assumptions are false in just about every particular. Some
are indeed so historically illiterate that it is difficult not to see their
proponents as blinded either by a truly pathological degree of Russophobia, or
by personal ambition'. Long before 9/11, central Asia was hardly the only
instance where policy had outrun resources and
sanity.
One danger that that most realistic of commentators,
Owen Harries (editor emeritus of The
National Interest) has identified, and warned against, is hyperactivity. In
this case it is not so much the self-justifying sort that imperial security
bureaucrats always engage in that he
cautions against, but what in American terms is known as 'neo-Reaganism'. The
danger in this sub-Wilsonian, derived from bogus exceptionalism,
only-marginally-tempered-by-realism-when-spouted-by-conservatives line, promoted
in descending order of merit by William Kristol [8] , Robert Kagan [9] , Norman Podhoretz [10] and Michael Ledeen, is that it can only but consume the finite
physical and moral capital of American power in pursuit of trifles. This, when
as Charles Krauthammer [11] soundly observed (before
9/11 see if you can spot a theme here), there's very little point in going out
looking for trouble, because trouble will go out of its way to find you, the
hegemon. Most of all though, Harries advocates
restraint
because every
dominant power in the last four centuries that has not practised it that has
been excessively intrusive and demanding has ultimately been confronted by a
hostile coalition of other powers. Americans may believe that their country,
being exceptional, need have no worries in this respect. I do not agree. It is
not what Americans think of the United States but what others think of it that
will decide the matter.
All of which at last brings us to whether the system in
which the United States finds itself will allow it to be perpetual
hegemon.
It's not easy to rule the
world
In one sense this is an
exceptional moment, and it would be misleading, not to say cold blooded, to deny
it. Ever since the United States rose to being the most powerful nation on the
planet it was consistently dogged by a competitor: first Britain, and then the
Soviet Union. Today she is without peer, and that of course is the direct cause
of this essay. She's not the 'first universal nation' (that was of course us
here in the mother country), but she is now, for the first time in her history, clearly on a different
plane to all the other current powers. However, this state of affairs is
arguably the norm in diplomatic history. You have several powers, but one always
seems to be in a different league to the others. This power is constantly beset
by the temptation of hubris. But whatever it believes about itself (and, mostly
Americans are realistically modest) it doesn't, because it can't, render the
other actors irrelevant.
All the practical consequences of classical realism
that the United States will be 'balanced' come what may; that she lacks the
power to surmount the current order by which inter-national affairs are
organised; that, for the US, there's not the reason, the will or the means even
to attempt genuine global domination argue that the position of America vis-ΰ-vis other powers will retract
rather than improve. The only way that it could possibly hope to do otherwise
would be if that wily provocateur Edward Luttwak's [12] take on the Clinton era continue holds good. That is, a shambolic
external policy disguises American strength and thereby disinclines others to
coalesce against her. To put it mildly, the modesty some of us saw inherent in
Dubya's likely approach to foreign policy has been a trifle difficult to
maintain after 9/11.
Sadly for Mr Luttwak, his kinsmen on the right are, as
we have seen, all too willing to proclaim America uber alles. This noise
carries. American 'conservatives' are (I ambitiously guess) near certain to be
the principal solvent of US power. America will decline more, then fall, largely
because neo-conservatives will spend vast, unnecessary sums on defence; boast
about American power, thereby provoking determined opposition; and, make
significant strategic errors principally regarding China as a preordained foe,
and, overcommitting resources on Wilsonian fancies due to pursuit of
neo-Reaganite goals. Perhaps the neocons know this they're very smart
perhaps the reason they'll destroy the thing they claim they love most, American
pre-eminence, is because they realise at some level of consciousness its basic
incompatibility with their creed's fundamentally moral raison d'κtre (liberty, freedom, all
that jazz). Maybe neocons are secretly yearning to scream out too, 'A republic,
not an empire'. Of course the opposite might be true if we look to the under
considered field of geopol-psychology for an answer perhaps neo-cons are so
loudly triumphalist because of deep-rooted anxiety, perhaps they're simply
screaming at the night?
As to America's fall, the most important factor since
every exit requires an entrance is that she potentially faces a genuinely
capable rival, which, in Euroland, she now does. This is an entity that will
come into being for the delicious reason that Britain is no longer able to
prevent it from doing so. And whose fault is that?
[1] Research Associate of the Institute
of War and peace Studies and adjunct professor at Columbia
University.
[2] President Ethics and Public Policy
Center, Washington DC; former assistant Secretary of State under
Reagan.
[3] Professor of strategic studies at the
Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, John Hopkins
University.
[4] Senior editor of The New
Republic
[5] Holds the Freedom chair at the
American Enterprise Institute; author of Machiavelli on Modern
Leadership.
[6] Assistant Professor of Politics and
International Affairs at Princeton
University.
[7] Editor Strategic Comments, IISS; author of Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian
Power.
[8] Founder & publisher, the Weekly
Standard.
[9] Senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; co-editor (with William Kristol) of Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy.
[10] Editor-at-large Commentary; author of Ex-friends.
[11] Contributing editor, The New
Republic.
[12] Senior fellow Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington DC; author of Turbo-Capitalism: Winners and Losers in the Global Economy.