Not Fade Away: The Myth of American Decline

Not Fade Away: The Myth of American Decline

Robert Kagan - The New Republic, 11/01/2012.


I.

Is the United States in decline, as so many seem to believe these days? Or are
Americans in danger of committing pre-emptive superpower suicide out of a
misplaced fear of their own declining power? A great deal depends on the answer
to these questions. The present world order—characterized by an unprecedented
number of democratic nations; a greater global prosperity, even with the current
crisis, than the world has ever known; and a long peace among great
powers—reflects American principles and preferences, and was built and
preserved by American power in all its political, economic, and military
dimensions. If American power declines, this world order will decline with it. It
will be replaced by some other kind of order, reflecting the desires and the
qualities of other world powers. Or perhaps it will simply collapse, as the
European world order collapsed in the first half of the twentieth century. The
belief, held by many, that even with diminished American power “the underlying
foundations of the liberal international order will survive and thrive,” as the political
scientist G. John Ikenberry has argued, is a pleasant illusion. American decline, if
it is real, will mean a different world for everyone.

But how real is it? Much of the commentary on American decline these days rests
on rather loose analysis, on impressions that the United States has lost its way,
that it has abandoned the virtues that made it successful in the past, that it lacks
the will to address the problems it faces. Americans look at other nations whose
economies are now in better shape than their own, and seem to have the
dynamism that America once had, and they lament, as in the title of Thomas
Friedman’s latest book, that “that used to be us.”

The perception of decline today is certainly understandable, given the dismal
economic situation since 2008 and the nation’s large fiscal deficits, which,
combined with the continuing growth of the Chinese, Indian, Brazilian, Turkish,
and other economies, seem to portend a significant and irreversible shift in global
economic power. Some of the pessimism is also due to the belief that the United
States has lost favor, and therefore influence, in much of the world, because of its
various responses to the attacks of September 11. The detainment facilities at
Guantánamo, the use of torture against suspected terrorists, and the widely
condemned invasion of Iraq in 2003 have all tarnished the American “brand” and
put a dent in America’s “soft power”—its ability to attract others to its point of
view. There have been the difficult wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which many
argue proved the limits of military power, stretched the United States beyond its
capacities, and weakened the nation at its core. Some compare the United States
to the British Empire at the end of the nineteenth century, with the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars serving as the equivalent of Britain’s difficult and demoralizing
Boer War.

With this broad perception of decline as the backdrop, every failure of the United
States to get its way in the world tends to reinforce the impression. Arabs and
Israelis refuse to make peace, despite American entreaties. Iran and North Korea
defy American demands that they cease their nuclear weapons programs. China
refuses to let its currency rise. Ferment in the Arab world spins out of America’s
control. Every day, it seems, brings more evidence that the time has passed when
the United States could lead the world and get others to do its bidding.

Powerful as this sense of decline may be, however, it deserves a more rigorous
examination. Measuring changes in a nation’s relative power is a tricky business,
but there are some basic indicators: the size and the influence of its economy
relative to that of other powers; the magnitude of military power compared with
that of potential adversaries; the degree of political influence it wields in the
international system—all of which make up what the Chinese call “comprehensive
national power.” And there is the matter of time. Judgments based on only a few
years’ evidence are problematic. A great power’s decline is the product of
fundamental changes in the international distribution of various forms of power that
usually occur over longer stretches of time. Great powers rarely decline suddenly.
A war may bring them down, but even that is usually a symptom, and a
culmination, of a longer process.

The decline of the British Empire, for instance, occurred over several decades. In
1870, the British share of global manufacturing was over 30 percent. In 1900, it
was 20 percent. By 1910, it was under 15 percent—well below the rising United
States, which had climbed over the same period from more than 20 percent to
more than 25 percent; and also less than Germany, which had lagged far behind
Britain throughout the nineteenth century but had caught and surpassed it in the
first decade of the twentieth century. Over the course of that period, the British
navy went from unchallenged master of the seas to sharing control of the oceans
with rising naval powers. In 1883, Britain possessed more battleships than all the
other powers combined. By 1897, its dominance had been eclipsed. British
officials considered their navy “completely outclassed” in the Western hemisphere
by the United States, in East Asia by Japan, and even close to home by the
combined navies of Russia and France—and that was before the threatening
growth of the German navy. These were clear-cut, measurable, steady declines in
two of the most important measures of power over the course of a half-century.

Some of the arguments for America’s relative decline these days would be more
potent if they had not appeared only in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008.
Just as one swallow does not make a spring, one recession, or even a severe
economic crisis, need not mean the beginning of the end of a great power. The
United States suffered deep and prolonged economic crises in the 1890s, the
1930s, and the 1970s. In each case, it rebounded in the following decade and
actually ended up in a stronger position relative to other powers than before the
crisis. The 1910s, the 1940s, and the 1980s were all high points of American
global power and influence.

Less than a decade ago, most observers spoke not of America’s decline but of its
enduring primacy. In 2002, the historian Paul Kennedy, who in the late 1980s had
written a much-discussed book on “the rise and fall of the great powers,”
America included, declared that never in history had there been such a great
“disparity of power” as between the United States and the rest of the world.
Ikenberry agreed that “no other great power” had held “such formidable
advantages in military, economic, technological, cultural, or political capabilities....
The preeminence of American power” was “unprecedented.” In 2004, the pundit
Fareed Zakaria described the United States as enjoying a “comprehensive
uni-polarity” unlike anything seen since Rome. But a mere four years later Zakaria
was writing about the “post-American world” and “the rise of the rest,” and
Kennedy was discoursing again upon the inevitability of American decline. Did the
fundamentals of America’s relative power shift so dramatically in just a few short
years?

The answer is no. Let’s start with the basic indicators. In economic terms, and
even despite the current years of recession and slow growth, America’s position
in the world has not changed. Its share of the world’s GDP has held remarkably
steady, not only over the past decade but over the past four decades. In 1969,
the United States produced roughly a quarter of the world’s economic output.
Today it still produces roughly a quarter, and it remains not only the largest but
also the richest economy in the world. People are rightly mesmerized by the rise
of China, India, and other Asian nations whose share of the global economy has
been climbing steadily, but this has so far come almost entirely at the expense of
Europe and Japan, which have had a declining share of the global economy.

Optimists about China’s development predict that it will overtake the United
States as the largest economy in the world sometime in the next two decades.
This could mean that the United States will face an increasing challenge to its
economic position in the future. But the sheer size of an economy is not by itself a
good measure of overall power within the international system. If it were, then
early nineteenth-century China, with what was then the world’s largest economy,
would have been the predominant power instead of the prostrate victim of smaller
European nations. Even if China does reach this pinnacle again—and Chinese
leaders face significant obstacles to sustaining the country’s growth indefinitely—it
will still remain far behind both the United States and Europe in terms of per
capita GDP.

Military capacity matters, too, as early nineteenth-century China learned and
Chinese leaders know today. As Yan Xuetong recently noted, “military strength
underpins hegemony.” Here the United States remains unmatched. It is far and
away the most powerful nation the world has ever known, and there has been no
decline in America’s relative military capacity—at least not yet. Americans
currently spend less than $600 billion a year on defense, more than the rest of the
other great powers combined. (This figure does not include the deployment in
Iraq, which is ending, or the combat forces in Afghanistan, which are likely to
diminish steadily over the next couple of years.) They do so, moreover, while
consuming a little less than 4 percent of GDP annually—a higher percentage than
the other great powers, but in historical terms lower than the 10 percent of GDP
that the United States spent on defense in the mid-1950s and the 7 percent it
spent in the late 1980s. The superior expenditures underestimate America’s actual
superiority in military capability. American land and air forces are equipped with
the most advanced weaponry, and are the most experienced in actual combat.
They would defeat any competitor in a head-to-head battle. American naval
power remains predominant in every region of the world.

By these military and economic measures, at least, the United States today is not
remotely like Britain circa 1900, when that empire’s relative decline began to
become apparent. It is more like Britain circa 1870, when the empire was at the
height of its power. It is possible to imagine a time when this might no longer be
the case, but that moment has not yet arrived.

But what about the “rise of the rest”—the increasing economic clout of nations
like China, India, Brazil, and Turkey? Doesn’t that cut into American power and
influence? The answer is, it depends. The fact that other nations in the world are
enjoying periods of high growth does not mean that America’s position as the
predominant power is declining, or even that “the rest” are catching up in terms of
overall power and influence. Brazil’s share of global GDP was a little over 2
percent in 1990 and remains a little over 2 percent today. Turkey’s share was
under 1 percent in 1990 and is still under 1 percent today. People, and especially
businesspeople, are naturally excited about these emerging markets, but just
because a nation is an attractive investment opportunity does not mean it is a rising
great power. Wealth matters in international politics, but there is no simple
correlation between economic growth and international influence. It is not clear
that a richer India today wields greater influence on the global stage than a poorer
India did in the 1950s under Nehru, when it was the leader of the Non-Aligned
Movement, or that Turkey, for all the independence and flash of Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, really wields more influence than it did a decade ago.

As for the effect of these growing economies on the position of the United States,
it all depends on who is doing the growing. The problem for the British Empire at
the beginning of the twentieth century was not its substantial decline relative to the
United States, a generally friendly power whose interests did not fundamentally
conflict with Britain’s. Even in the Western hemisphere, British trade increased as
it ceded dominance to the United States. The problem was Britain’s decline
relative to Germany, which aimed for supremacy on the European continent, and
sought to compete with Britain on the high seas, and in both respects posed a
threat to Britain’s core security. In the case of the United States, the dramatic and
rapid rise of the German and Japanese economies during the Cold War reduced
American primacy in the world much more than the more recent “rise of the rest.”
America’s share of the world’s GDP, nearly 50 percent after World War II, fell
to roughly 25 percent by the early 1970s, where it has remained ever since. But
that “rise of the rest” did not weaken the United States. If anything, it strengthened
it. Germany and Japan were and are close democratic allies, key pillars of the
American world order. The growth of their economies actually shifted the balance
irretrievably against the Soviet bloc and helped bring about its demise.

When gauging the impact of the growing economies of other countries today, one
has to make the same kinds of calculations. Does the growth of the Brazilian
economy, or of the Indian economy, diminish American global power? Both
nations are friendly, and India is increasingly a strategic partner of the United
States. If America’s future competitor in the world is likely to be China, then a
richer and more powerful India will be an asset, not a liability, to the United
States. Overall, the fact that Brazil, India, Turkey, and South Africa are enjoying a
period of economic growth—which may or may not last indefinitely—is either
irrelevant to America’s strategic position or of benefit to it. At present, only the
growth of China’s economy can be said to have implications for American power
in the future, and only insofar as the Chinese translate enough of their growing
economic strength into military strength.


II.

If the United States is not suffering decline in these basic measures of power, isn’t
it true that its influence has diminished, that it is having a harder time getting its way
in the world? The almost universal assumption is that the United States has indeed
lost influence. Whatever the explanation may be—American decline, the “rise of
the rest,” the apparent failure of the American capitalist model, the dysfunctional
nature of American politics, the increasing complexity of the international
system—it is broadly accepted that the United States can no longer shape the
world to suit its interests and ideals as it once did. Every day seems to bring more
proof, as things happen in the world that seem both contrary to American interests
and beyond American control.

And of course it is true that the United States is not able to get what it wants much
of the time. But then it never could. Much of today’s impressions about declining
American influence are based on a nostalgic fallacy: that there was once a time
when the United States could shape the whole world to suit its desires, and could
get other nations to do what it wanted them to do, and, as the political scientist
Stephen M. Walt put it, “manage the politics, economics and security
arrangements for nearly the entire globe.”

If we are to gauge America’s relative position today, it is important to recognize
that this image of the past is an illusion. There never was such a time. We tend to
think back on the early years of the Cold War as a moment of complete
American global dominance. They were nothing of the sort. The United States did
accomplish extraordinary things in that era: the Marshall Plan, the NATO alliance,
the United Nations, and the Bretton Woods economic system all shaped the
world we know today. Yet for every great achievement in the early Cold War,
there was at least one equally monumental setback.

During the Truman years, there was the triumph of the Communist Revolution in
China in 1949, which American officials regarded as a disaster for American
interests in the region and which did indeed prove costly; if nothing else, it was a
major factor in spurring North Korea to attack the South in 1950. But as Dean
Acheson concluded, “the ominous result of the civil war in China” had proved
“beyond the control of the ... United States,” the product of “forces which this
country tried to influence but could not.” A year later came the unanticipated and
unprepared-for North Korean attack on South Korea, and America’s
intervention, which, after more than 35,000 American dead and almost 100,000
wounded, left the situation almost exactly as it had been before the war. In 1949,
there came perhaps the worst news of all: the Soviet acquisition of the atomic
bomb and the end of the nuclear monopoly on which American military strategy
and defense budgeting had been predicated.

A year later, NSC-68, the famous strategy document, warned of the growing gap
between America’s military strength and its global strategic commitments. If
current trends continued, it declared, the result would be “a serious decline in the
strength of the free world relative to the Soviet Union and its satellites.” The
“integrity and vitality of our system,” the document stated, was “in greater
jeopardy than ever before in our history.” Douglas MacArthur, giving the keynote
address at the Republican National Convention in 1952, lamented the “alarming
change in the balance of world power,” “the rising burden of our fiscal
commitments,” the ascendant power of the Soviet Union, “and our own relative
decline.” In 1957, the Gaither Commission reported that the Russian economy
was growing at a much faster pace than that of the United States and that by
1959 Russia would be able to hit American soil with one hundred intercontinental
ballistic missiles, prompting Sam Rayburn, the speaker of the House, to ask,
“What good are a sound economy and a balanced budget if we lose our national
lives and Russian rubles become the coin of the land?”

Nor was the United States always able to persuade others, even its closest allies,
to do what it wanted, or to refrain from doing what it did not want. In 1949,
Acheson tried and failed to prevent European allies, including the British, from
recognizing Communist China. In 1954, the Eisenhower administration failed to
get its way at the Geneva Conference on Vietnam and refused to sign the final
accords. Two years later it tried to prevent the British, the French, and the Israelis
from invading Egypt over the closure of the Suez Canal, only to see them launch
an invasion without so much as a heads-up to Washington. When the United
States confronted China over the islands of Quemoy and Matsu, the Eisenhower
administration tried and failed to get a show of support from European allies,
prompting John Foster Dulles to fear that NATO was “beginning to fall apart.” By
the late 1950s, Mao believed the United States was a superpower in decline,
“afraid of taking on new involvements in the Third World and increasingly
incapable of maintaining its hegemony over the capitalist countries.”

But what about “soft power”? Wasn’t it true, as the political scientist Joseph S.
Nye Jr. has argued, that the United States used to be able to “get what it wanted
in the world” because of the “values expressed” by American culture as reflected
through television, movies, and music, and because of the attractiveness of
America’s domestic and foreign policies? These elements of soft power made
other peoples around the world want to follow the United States, “admiring its
values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness.”

Again, the historical truth is more complicated. During the first three decades after
World War II, great portions of the world neither admired the United States nor
sought to emulate it, and were not especially pleased at the way it conducted itself
in international affairs. Yes, American media were spreading American culture,
but they were spreading images that were not always flattering. In the 1950s the
world could watch televised images of Joseph McCarthy and the hunt for
Communists in the State Department and Hollywood. American movies depicted
the suffocating capitalist conformism of the new American corporate culture.
Best-selling novels such as The Ugly American painted a picture of American
bullying and boorishness. There were the battles over segregation in the 1950s
and 1960s, the globally transmitted images of whites spitting at black
schoolchildren and police setting their dogs on black demonstrators. (That “used
to be us,” too.) The racism of America was practically “ruining” the American
global image, Dulles feared, especially in the so-called Third World. In the late
1960s and early 1970s came the Watts riots, the assassinations of Martin Luther
King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the shootings at Kent State, and then the
government-shaking scandal of Watergate. These were not the kinds of images
likely to endear the United States to the world, no matter how many Jerry Lewis
and Woody Allen movies were playing in Parisian cinemas.

Nor did much of the world find American foreign policy especially attractive
during these years. Eisenhower yearned “to get some of the people in these
down-trodden countries to like us instead of hating us,” but the CIA-orchestrated
overthrows of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala
did not help. In 1957, demonstrators attacked the vice president’s motorcade in
Venezuela, shouting, “Go away, Nixon!” “Out, dog!” “We won’t forget
Guatemala!” In 1960, Khrushchev humiliated Eisenhower by canceling a summit
when an American spy plane was shot down over Russia. Later that year, on his
way to a “goodwill” visit in Tokyo, Eisenhower had to turn back in mid-flight
when the Japanese government warned it could not guarantee his security against
students protesting American “imperialism.”

Eisenhower’s Democratic successors fared little better. John F. Kennedy and his
wife were beloved for a time, but America’s glow faded after his assassination.
Lyndon Johnson’s invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 was widely
condemned not only in Latin America but also by European allies. De Gaulle
warned American officials that the United States, like “all countries that had
overwhelming power,” had come “to believe that force would solve everything”
and would soon learn this was “not the case.” And then, of course, came
Vietnam—the destruction, the scenes of napalm, the My Lai massacre, the secret
incursion into Cambodia, the bombing of Hanoi, and the general perception of a
Western colonialist superpower pounding a small but defiant Third World country
into submission. When Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, visited West
Berlin in 1967, the American cultural center was attacked, thousands of students
protested American policies, and rumors swirled of assassination attempts. In
1968, when millions of Europe’s youth took to the streets, they were not
expressing their admiration for American culture.

Nor were the great majority of nations around the world trying to emulate the
American system. In the first decades of the Cold War, many were attracted to
the state-controlled economies of the Soviet Union and China, which seemed to
promise growth without the messy problems of democracy. The economies of the
Soviet bloc had growth rates as high as those in the West throughout much of this
period, largely due to a state-directed surge in heavy industry. According to Allen
Dulles, the CIA director, many leaders in the Third World believed that the Soviet
system “might have more to offer in the way of quick results than the U.S.
system.” Dictators such as Egypt’s Nasser and Indonesia’s Sukarno found the
state-dominated model especially attractive, but so did India’s Nehru. Leaders of
the emerging Non-Aligned Movement—Nehru, Nasser, Tito, Sukarno,
Nkrumah—expressed little admiration for American ways.

After the death of Stalin, moreover, both the Soviet Union and China engaged in
hot competition to win over the Third World, taking “goodwill tours” and
providing aid programs of their own. Eisenhower reflected that “the new
Communist line of sweetness and light was perhaps more dangerous than their
propaganda in Stalin’s time.” The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson
administrations worried constantly about the leftward tilt of all these nations, and
lavished development aid on them in the hope of winning hearts and minds. They
found that the aid, while eagerly accepted, guaranteed neither allegiance nor
appreciation. One result of Third World animosity was that the United States
steadily lost influence at the United Nations after 1960. Once the place where the
American war in Korea was legitimized, from the 1960s until the end of the Cold
War the U.N. General Assembly became a forum for constant expressions of
anti-Americanism.

In the late 1960s, Henry Kissinger despaired of the future. The “increased
fragmentation of power, the greater diffusion of political activity, and the more
complicated patterns of international conflict and alignment,” he wrote to Nixon,
had sharply reduced the capacity of both superpowers to influence “the actions of
other governments.” And things only seemed to get more difficult as the 1970s
unfolded. The United States withdrew from Vietnam in defeat, and the world
watched the first-ever resignation of an American president mired in scandal. And
then, perhaps as significant as all the rest, world oil prices went through the roof.

The last problem pointed to a significant new difficulty: the inability of the United
States to wield influence effectively in the Middle East. Today people point to
America’s failure to bring Israelis and Palestinians to a negotiated settlement, or to
manage the tumultuous Arab Awakening, as a sign of weakness and decline. But
in 1973 the United States could not even prevent the major powers in the Middle
East from engaging in all-out war. When Egypt and Syria launched their surprise
attack on Israel, it was a surprise to Washington as well. The United States
eventually had to go on nuclear alert to deter Soviet intervention in the conflict.
The war led to the oil embargo, the establishment of OPEC as a major force in
world affairs, and the sudden revelation that, as historian Daniel Yergin put it, “the
United States itself was now, finally, vulnerable.” The “world’s foremost
superpower” had been “thrown on the defensive, humiliated, by a handful of small
nations.” Many Americans “feared that the end of an era was at hand.”

In the 1970s, the dramatic rise in oil prices, coupled with American economic
policies during the Vietnam War, led the American economy into a severe crisis.
Gross national product fell by 6 percent between 1973 and 1975. Unemployment
doubled from 4.5 percent to 9 percent. The American people suffered through
gas lines and the new economic phenomenon of stagflation, combining a stagnant
economy with high inflation. The American economy went through three
recessions between 1973 and 1982. The “energy crisis” was to Americans then
what the “fiscal crisis” is today. In his first televised address to the nation, Jimmy
Carter called it “the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes.”
It was especially humiliating that the crisis was driven in part by two close
American allies, the Saudi royal family and the Shah of Iran. As Carter recalled in
his memoirs, the American people “deeply resented that the greatest nation on
earth was being jerked around by a few desert states.”

The low point came in 1979, when the Shah was overthrown, the radical Islamic
revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, and fifty-two Americans
were taken hostage and held for more than a year. The hostage crisis, as Yergin
has observed, “transmitted a powerful message: that the shift of power in the
world oil market in the 1970s was only part of a larger drama that was taking
place in global politics. The United States and the West, it seemed to say, were
truly in decline, on the defensive, and, it appeared, unable to do anything to
protect their interests, whether economic or political.”

If one wanted to make a case for American decline, the 1970s would have been
the time to do it; and many did. The United States, Kissinger believed, had
evidently “passed its historic high point like so many earlier civilizations.... Every
civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts
that failed.” It was in the 1970s that the American economy lost its overwhelming
primacy, when the American trade surplus began to turn into a trade deficit, when
spending on entitlements and social welfare programs ballooned, when American
gold and monetary reserves were depleted.

With economic difficulties came political and strategic insecurity. First came the
belief that the tide of history was with the Soviet Union. Soviet leaders themselves
believed the “correlation of forces” favored communism; the American defeat and
withdrawal from Vietnam led Soviet officials, for the first time, to believe they
might actually “win” in the long Cold War struggle. A decade later, in 1987, Paul
Kennedy depicted both superpowers as suffering from “imperial overstretch,” but
suggested that it was entirely possible that the United States would be the first to
collapse, following a long historical tradition of exhausted and bankrupt empires.
It had crippled itself by spending too much on defense and taking on too many
far-flung global responsibilities. But within two years the Berlin Wall fell, and two
years after that the Soviet Union collapsed. The decline turned out to be taking
place elsewhere.

Then there was the miracle economy of Japan. A “rise of the rest” began in the
late 1970s and continued over the next decade and a half, as Japan, along with
the other “Asian tigers,” South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan, seemed about to
eclipse the United States economically. In 1989, the journalist James Fallows
argued that the Japanese state-directed economy was plainly superior to the more
laissez-faire capitalism of the United States and was destined to surpass it. Japan
was to be the next superpower. While the United States had bankrupted itself
fighting the Cold War, the Japanese had been busy taking all the marbles. As the
analyst Chalmers Johnson put it in 1995, “The Cold War is over, and Japan
won.” Even as Johnson typed those words, the Japanese economy was spiraling
downward into a period of stagnation from which it has still not recovered.

With the Soviet Union gone and China yet to demonstrate the staying power of its
economic boom, the United States suddenly appeared to be the world’s “sole
superpower.” Yet even then it was remarkable how unsuccessful the United
States was in dealing with many serious global problems. The Americans won the
Gulf War, expanded NATO eastward, eventually brought peace to the Balkans,
after much bloodshed, and, through most of the 1990s, led much of the world to
embrace the “Washington consensus” on economics—but some of these
successes began to unravel, and were matched by equally significant failures. The
Washington consensus began to collapse with the Asian financial crisis of 1997,
where American prescriptions were widely regarded as mistaken and damaging.
The United States failed to stop or even significantly to retard the nuclear
weapons programs of North Korea and Iran, despite repeatedly declaring its
intention to do so. The sanctions regime imposed against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq
was both futile and, by the end of the decade, collapsing. The United States, and
the world, did nothing to prevent the genocide in Rwanda, partly because a year
earlier the United States had been driven out of Somalia after a failed military
intervention. One of the most important endeavors of the United States in the
1990s was the effort to support a transition in post-Soviet Russia to democracy
and free-market capitalism. But despite providing billions of dollars and endless
amounts of advice and expertise, the United States found events in Russia once
again to be beyond its control.

Nor were American leaders, even in the supposed heyday of global
predominance, any more successful in solving the Israeli-Palestinian problem than
they are today. Even with a booming economy and a well-liked president
earnestly working to achieve a settlement, the Clinton administration came up
empty-handed. As the former Middle East peace negotiator Aaron David Miller
recounts, Bill Clinton “cared more about and invested more time and energy in
Arab-Israeli peace over a longer period of time than any of his predecessors,”
and was admired and appreciated by both Israelis and Palestinians—and yet he
held “three summits within six months and fail[ed] at every one.” Clinton’s term
ended with the collapse of peace talks and the beginning of the second Palestinian
intifada.

Even popularity was elusive in the 1990s. In 1999, Samuel P. Huntington labeled
America the “lonely superpower,” widely hated across the globe for its “intrusive,
interventionist, exploitative, unilateralist, hegemonic, hypocritical” behavior. The
French foreign minister decried the “hyperpower” and openly yearned for a
“multipolar” world in which the United States would no longer be dominant. A
British diplomat told Huntington: “One reads about the world’s desire for
American leadership only in the United States. Everywhere else one reads about
American arrogance and unilateralism.”

This was nonsense, of course. Contrary to the British diplomat’s claim, many
other countries did look to the United States for leadership, and for protection
and support, in the 1990s and throughout the Cold War. The point is not that
America always lacked global influence. From World War II onward, the United
States was indeed the predominant power in the world. It wielded enormous
influence, more than any great power since Rome, and it accomplished much. But
it was not omnipotent—far from it. If we are to gauge accurately whether the
United States is currently in decline, we need to have a reasonable baseline from
which to measure. To compare American influence today with a mythical past of
overwhelming dominance can only mislead us.

Today the United States lacks the ability to have its way on many issues, but this
has not prevented it from enjoying just as much success, and suffering just as
much failure, as in the past. For all the controversy, the United States has been
more successful in Iraq than it was in Vietnam. It has been just as incapable of
containing Iranian nuclear ambitions as it was in the 1990s, but it has, through the
efforts of two administrations, established a more effective global
counter-proliferation network. Its efforts to root out and destroy Al Qaeda have
been remarkably successful, especially when compared with the failures to
destroy terrorist networks and stop terrorist attacks in the 1990s—failures that
culminated in the attacks of September 11. The ability to employ drones is an
advance over the types of weaponry—cruise missiles and air strikes—that were
used to target terrorists and facilities in previous decades. Meanwhile America’s
alliances in Europe remain healthy; it is certainly not America’s fault that Europe
itself seems weaker than it once was. American alliances in Asia have arguably
grown stronger over the past few years, and the United States has been able to
strengthen relations with India that had previously been strained.

So the record is mixed, but it has always been mixed. There have been moments
when the United States was more influential than today and moments when it was
less influential. The exertion of influence has always been a struggle, which may
explain why, in every single decade since the end of World War II, Americans
have worried about their declining influence and looked nervously as other
powers seemed to be rising at their expense. The difficulties in shaping the
international environment in any era are immense. Few powers even attempt it,
and even the strongest rarely achieve all or even most of their goals. Foreign
policy is like hitting a baseball: if you fail 70 percent of the time, you go to the Hall
of Fame.


III.

The challenges today are great, and the rise of China is the most obvious of them.
But they are not greater than the challenges the United States faced during the
Cold War. Only in retrospect can the Cold War seem easy. Americans at the end
of World War II faced a major strategic crisis. The Soviet Union, if only by virtue
of its size and location, seemed to threaten vital strategic centers in Europe, the
Middle East, and East Asia. In all these regions, it confronted nations devastated
and prostrate from the war. To meet this challenge, the United States had to
project its own power, which was great but limited, into each of those regions. It
had to form alliances with local powers, some of them former enemies, and
provide them with economic, political, and military assistance to help them stand
on their own feet and resist Soviet pressure. In the Cold War, the Soviets wielded
influence and put pressure on American interests merely by standing still, while the
United States had to scramble. It is worth recalling that this strategy of
“containment,” now hallowed by its apparent success, struck some influential
observers at the time as entirely unworkable. Walter Lippmann attacked it as
“misconceived,” based on “hope,” conceding the “strategic initiative” to the
Soviets while the United States exhausted its resources trying to establish “satellite
states, puppet governments” that were weak, ineffective, and unreliable.

Today, in the case of China, the situation is reversed. Although China is and will
be much richer, and will wield greater economic influence in the world than the
Soviet Union ever did, its geostrategic position is more difficult. World War II left
China in a comparatively weak position from which it has been working hard to
recover ever since. Several of its neighbors are strong nations with close ties to
the United States. It will have a hard time becoming a regional hegemon so long
as Taiwan remains independent and strategically tied to the United States, and so
long as strong regional powers such as Japan, Korea, and Australia continue to
host American troops and bases. China would need at least a few allies to have
any chance of pushing the United States out of its strongholds in the western
Pacific, but right now it is the United States that has the allies. It is the United
States that has its troops deployed in forward bases. It is the United States that
currently enjoys naval predominance in the key waters and waterways through
which China must trade. Altogether, China’s task as a rising great power, which is
to push the United States out of its present position, is much harder than
America’s task, which is only to hold on to what it has.

Can the United States do that? In their pessimistic mood today, some Americans
doubt that it can. Indeed, they doubt whether the United States can afford to
continue playing in any part of the world the predominant role that it has played in
the past. Some argue that while Paul Kennedy’s warning of imperial overstretch
may not have been correct in 1987, it accurately describes America’s current
predicament. The fiscal crisis, the deadlocked political system, the various
maladies of American society (including wage stagnation and income inequality),
the weaknesses of the educational system, the deteriorating infrastructure—all of
these are cited these days as reasons why the United States needs to retrench
internationally, to pull back from some overseas commitments, to focus on “nation
building at home” rather than try to keep shaping the world as it has in the past.

Again, these common assumptions require some examination. For one thing, how
“overstretched” is the United States? The answer, in historical terms, is not nearly
as much as people imagine. Consider the straightforward matter of the number of
troops that the United States deploys overseas. To listen to the debate today, one
might imagine there were more American troops committed abroad than ever
before. But that is not remotely the case. In 1953, the United States had almost
one million troops deployed overseas—325,000 in combat in Korea and more
than 600,000 stationed in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. In 1968, it had over one
million troops on foreign soil—537,000 in Vietnam and another half million
stationed elsewhere. By contrast, in the summer of 2011, at the height of
America’s deployments in its two wars, there were about 200,000 troops
deployed in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan combined, and another roughly
160,000 troops stationed in Europe and East Asia. Altogether, and including
other forces stationed around the world, there were about 500,000 troops
deployed overseas. This was lower even than the peacetime deployments of the
Cold War. In 1957, for instance, there were over 750,000 troops deployed
overseas. Only in the decade between the breakup of the Soviet empire and the
attacks of September 11 was the number of deployed forces overseas lower than
it is today. The comparison is even more striking if one takes into account the
growth of the American population. When the United States had one million
troops deployed overseas in 1953, the total American population was only 160
million. Today, when there are half a million troops deployed overseas, the
American population is 313 million. The country is twice as large, with half as
many troops deployed as fifty years ago.

What about the financial expense? Many seem to believe that the cost of these
deployments, and of the armed forces generally, is a major contributor to the
soaring fiscal deficits that threaten the solvency of the national economy. But this is
not the case, either. As the former budget czar Alice Rivlin has observed, the
scary projections of future deficits are not “caused by rising defense spending,”
much less by spending on foreign assistance. The runaway deficits projected for
the coming years are mostly the result of ballooning entitlement spending. Even the
most draconian cuts in the defense budget would produce annual savings of only
$50 billion to $100 billion, a small fraction—between 4 and 8 percent—of the
$1.5 trillion in annual deficits the United States is facing.

In 2002, when Paul Kennedy was marveling at America’s ability to remain “the
world’s single superpower on the cheap,” the United States was spending about
3.4 percent of GDP on defense. Today it is spending a little under 4 percent, and
in years to come, that is likely to head lower again—still “cheap” by historical
standards. The cost of remaining the world’s predominant power is not
prohibitive.

If we are serious about this exercise in accounting, moreover, the costs of
maintaining this position cannot be measured without considering the costs of
losing it. Some of the costs of reducing the American role in the world are, of
course, unquantifiable. What is it worth to Americans to live in a world dominated
by democracies rather than by autocracies? But some of the potential costs could
be measured, if anyone cared to try. If the decline of American military power
produced an unraveling of the international economic order that American power
has helped sustain; if trade routes and waterways ceased to be as secure, because
the U.S. Navy was no longer able to defend them; if regional wars broke out
among great powers because they were no longer constrained by the American
superpower; if American allies were attacked because the United States
appeared unable to come to their defense; if the generally free and open nature of
the international system became less so—if all this came to pass, there would be
measurable costs. And it is not too far-fetched to imagine that these costs would
be far greater than the savings gained by cutting the defense and foreign aid
budgets by $100 billion a year. You can save money by buying a used car without
a warranty and without certain safety features, but what happens when you get
into an accident? American military strength reduces the risk of accidents by
deterring conflict, and lowers the price of the accidents that occur by reducing the
chance of losing. These savings need to be part of the calculation, too. As a
simple matter of dollars and cents, it may be a lot cheaper to preserve the current
level of American involvement in the world than to reduce it.

Perhaps the greatest concern underlying the declinist mood at large in the country
today is not really whether the United States can afford to continue playing its role
in the world. It is whether the Americans are capable of solving any of their most
pressing economic and social problems. As many statesmen and commentators
have asked, can Americans do what needs to be done to compete effectively in
the twenty-first-century world?

The only honest answer is, who knows? If American history is any guide,
however, there is at least some reason to be hopeful. Americans have
experienced this unease before, and many previous generations have also felt this
sense of lost vigor and lost virtue: as long ago as 1788, Patrick Henry lamented
the nation’s fall from past glory, “when the American spirit was in its youth.”
There have been many times over the past two centuries when the political system
was dysfunctional, hopelessly gridlocked, and seemingly unable to find solutions
to crushing national problems—from slavery and then Reconstruction, to the
dislocations of industrialization at the end of the nineteenth century and the crisis of
social welfare during the Great Depression, to the confusions and paranoia of the
early Cold War years. Anyone who honestly recalls the 1970s, with Watergate,
Vietnam, stagflation, and the energy crisis, cannot really believe that our present
difficulties are unrivaled.

Success in the past does not guarantee success in the future. But one thing does
seem clear from the historical evidence: the American system, for all its often
stultifying qualities, has also shown a greater capacity to adapt and recover from
difficulties than many other nations, including its geopolitical competitors. This
undoubtedly has something to do with the relative freedom of American society,
which rewards innovators, often outside the existing power structure, for
producing new ways of doing things; and with the relatively open political system
of America, which allows movements to gain steam and to influence the behavior
of the political establishment. The American system is slow and clunky in part
because the Founders designed it that way, with a federal structure, checks and
balances, and a written Constitution and Bill of Rights—but the system also
possesses a remarkable ability to undertake changes just when the steam kettle
looks about to blow its lid. There are occasional “critical elections” that allow
transformations to occur, providing new political solutions to old and apparently
insoluble problems. Of course, there are no guarantees: the political system could
not resolve the problem of slavery without war. But on many big issues throughout
their history, Americans have found a way of achieving and implementing a
national consensus.

When Paul Kennedy was marveling at the continuing success of the American
superpower back in 2002, he noted that one of the main reasons had been the
ability of Americans to overcome what had appeared to him in 1987 as an
insoluble long-term economic crisis. American businessmen and politicians
“reacted strongly to the debate about ‘decline’ by taking action: cutting costs,
making companies leaner and meaner, investing in newer technologies, promoting
a communications revolution, trimming government deficits, all of which helped to
produce significant year-on-year advances in productivity.” It is possible to
imagine that Americans may rise to this latest economic challenge as well.

It is also reasonable to expect that other nations will, as in the past, run into
difficulties of their own. None of the nations currently enjoying economic miracles
is without problems. Brazil, India, Turkey, and Russia all have bumpy histories
that suggest the route ahead will not be one of simple and smooth ascent. There is
a real question whether the autocratic model of China, which can be so effective
in making some strategic decisions about the economy in the short term, can over
the long run be flexible enough to permit adaptation to a changing international
economic, political, and strategic environment.

In sum: it may be more than good fortune that has allowed the United States in the
past to come through crises and emerge stronger and healthier than other nations
while its various competitors have faltered. And it may be more than just wishful
thinking to believe that it may do so again.

But there is a danger. It is that in the meantime, while the nation continues to
struggle, Americans may convince themselves that decline is indeed inevitable, or
that the United States can take a time-out from its global responsibilities while it
gets its own house in order. To many Americans, accepting decline may provide a
welcome escape from the moral and material burdens that have weighed on them
since World War II. Many may unconsciously yearn to return to the way things
were in 1900, when the United States was rich, powerful, and not responsible for
world order.

The underlying assumption of such a course is that the present world order will
more or less persist without American power, or at least with much less of it; or
that others can pick up the slack; or simply that the benefits of the world order are
permanent and require no special exertion by anyone. Unfortunately, the present
world order—with its widespread freedoms, its general prosperity, and its
absence of great power conflict—is as fragile as it is unique. Preserving it has
been a struggle in every decade, and will remain a struggle in the decades to
come. Preserving the present world order requires constant American leadership
and constant American commitment.

In the end, the decision is in the hands of Americans. Decline, as Charles
Krauthammer has observed, is a choice. It is not an inevitable fate—at least not
yet. Empires and great powers rise and fall, and the only question is when. But the
when does matter. Whether the United States begins to decline over the next two
decades or not for another two centuries will matter a great deal, both to
Americans and to the nature of the world they live in.