The U.S. Is Not Exempt

No small number of individuals, including U.S. Comptroller General David Walker (see my earlier post, "It All Sounds So Familiar"), have noted the parallels between the U.S. and ancient Rome.

They speak of military overstretch, fiscal irresponsibility, declining moral values, and an arrogant exceptionalism, and intimate that unless things change, today's global superpower will suffer the same ignominious fate as its ancient predecessor.

But others argue that America's fate is already sealed. In a Los Angeles Times Op-Ed column, "Fading Superpower?" author David Rieff outlines his reasons why.

Like all empires before it, the U.S. will slip from the top of the heap. Let's start getting ready.

In Washington these days, people talk a lot about the collapse of the bipartisan foreign policy consensus that existed during the Cold War. But however bitter today's disputes are about Iraq or the prosecution of the so-called global war on terrorism, there is one bedrock assumption about foreign policy that remains truly bipartisan: The United States will remain the sole superpower, and the guarantor of international security and global trade, for the foreseeable future. In other words, whatever else may change in the decades to come, the 21st century will be every bit as much of an American century as the 20th.

This assumption rests, in turn, on two interrelated beliefs.

The first is that because no country or alliance of states has shown any great desire to challenge U.S. preeminence -- or demonstrated the means of doing so -- no country is going to. China's interests are regional at most, the argument goes, and the European Union is too divided, too unwilling or too weak to rebuild its once-formidable military machine. As for Russia, believers in the durability of a world order anchored in Washington insist that its declining population and excessive reliance on its energy wealth will in the long run preclude it from playing a central role in global affairs.

The second is that the world needs the U.S. and appreciates the role it plays. (In some versions of this argument, the world needs the U.S. far more than the U.S. needs the world.) If there have been no serious challenges to American hegemony to date, it is asserted, it is because the U.S. provides what are referred to by foreign policy analysts as "global goods": It maintains political and economic stability around the world, it guarantees a democratic capitalist world order and, by virtue of its unparalleled military strength, it acts as a world policeman of last resort.

Whatever the merits of this case, surely it is significant that it is most often made by U.S. policy analysts and government officials (as well as, to a lesser extent, by British officials). From Pax Romana through Pax Britannica to the current Pax Americana, empires have justified their own power by insisting that they were not simply serving their own interests but rather the common good. Looking back at the British imperial high-water mark of 1900, H.G. Wells wrote that "the sprawling British Empire still maintained a tradition of free trade, equal treatment and open-handedness to all comers round and about the planet."

Such confidence in Britain's fundamental benignity as an empire is matched today by figures across the American political spectrum, from Barack Obama to Rudy Giuliani, from the conservative policy analyst Robert Kagan to the liberal academic Michael Mandelbaum. Whatever their other, substantial differences, all seem convinced that the world works best with the United States at the helm, and that without American leadership, the world would soon become more dangerous and anarchic and less prosperous.

Indeed, if they are to be believed, the only serious threat to U.S. hegemony visible anywhere on the horizon is the American people's potential unwillingness to support their country as it plays this role.

But what if the Americans who hold these beliefs are not, in fact, clear-eyed observers of the world scene stripped of its anti-imperial mystifications? Instead, what if they are people who have fallen for the same self-delusion that the British ruling class entertained before World War I, which was that their empire was so essential to world stability and, at least when compared with the alternatives and with empires past, so just that its hegemony could and would weather all challenges?

It is hardly farfetched to scan the historical record and conclude that self-love and imperialism go together, whether it was the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes insisting that British colonialism in Africa had been "philanthropy plus 5%" or President Bush insisting that it was America's special mission to spread democracy throughout the world. But what the historical record also shows is that imperial moments are, in fact, fleeting, and that hegemony has a shorter and shorter shelf life. The Roman Empire lasted more than 700 years (more than a millennium if you count the Byzantines); the British Empire lasted a little more than 300 years in India and less than a century in much of Africa. The economic challenges facing the U.S. at least suggest that America's time as sole superpower could be shorter still.

Americans, who grow up believing in their country's exceptionalism (which in foreign policy terms often seems to mean not believing that the historical constraints that apply to other nations apply to the U.S.), are not predisposed to believe that American predominance could possibly be coming to an end. And yet it seems more like wishful thinking than rational analysis to believe that the United States -- which in the coming decades will certainly have to adapt to a multipolar world in geo-economic terms, as China and India reoccupy the central place in the global economy that they had 500 years ago -- can continue indefinitely to play a hegemonic role.

The truth is that whether it is imperial Rome, imperial Spain or imperial Britain, economic strength and political strength have always gone together. Because no one denies that the U.S. will decline in comparative terms economically (though it will almost certainly remain one center of the world economy), the only way one can believe that geopolitics will not also become multipolar is to believe that the U.S. is somehow exempt from what seems one of history's few ironclad laws. And that is not analysis; that is faith.

The war in Iraq has demonstrated the limits of even America's vaunted military strength -- the one arena in which the U.S. is likely to remain supreme for decades to come. In an era of asymmetric threats, conventional military power is rapidly becoming an anachronistic measure of a country's strength.

None of this is to say that the U.S. will not continue to be one of the most important powers -- only that its days of first dictating and then guaranteeing the rules are numbered in an era in which it has become a debtor nation. In any case, the post-World War II structures of international governance are crumbling -- as well they might after more than six decades. Everyone knows they need to be revised.

For the moment, the U.S. is the sole superpower. But instead of deluding ourselves that we will go on that way into the indeterminate future, an intelligently self-interested foreign policy would have us do everything in our power to shape, according to our most urgent priorities, the international rules that will govern relations between states after the American moment has passed -- as it inevitably will.

The alternative is to go the route of the British before 1914 and imagine that because a certain set of political arrangements seems best to us, they must also be best for the world -- and destined to endure indefinitely. The real choice that confronts us is not between a second American century and anarchy but between a multipolar world in which we will play an important role and an anti-American century.

Comments

[Terry]

What an excellent article! It takes tremendous effort to weaken this mighty power called United States that has vast (and unharvested) natural resources, effective industry, innovative college system, powerful military strength, soaking up most of the elites from the rest of the world (until recently), and a finantial system that transcends the Dutch and Great Britian's finantial markets in the past.

It took a skillful Hollywood actor eight years to change the course of this mighty empire. The policy of sociocapitalism was replaced by laissez-faire capitalism, the principle of democracy's "for the (majority of) people" is replaced by "for the elites," the fiscal discipline is replaced by "borrow and spend to maintain a Goldilocks market." The prosperity on the surface masked the decaying core of the empire and encouraged more governments to follow his footstep. In less than 27 years, despite a few years of reversing the trend by the opposing parties, this civilization has fallen into a state that only "Baghdad Bob" can continue to cheer about.

Japan is too small, China and India have too many baggages (excessively uneven wealth distribution, decayed ethics, confusing business laws) on its shoulder, Europe is too crowded. The world needs United States to be the showcase of democracy and regulated capitalism (sociocapitalism). It's prosperity benefits the whole world. If the United States lets itself crippled by a lone confused Hollywood actor, it will let the whole world down.

The only hope is through articles and books like yours that people wake up and kick U.S.' own "Baghdad Bob" out and rebuild this empire. History does not always repeats itself, that would be determinism. History is a series of struggles between determined wills. If U.S. citizens has the determination to overcome this little road bump, then it still can reverse to the course to continue to build the greatest civilization in the history of mankind.

[daveDave]

this is the tooth fairy syndrom America will never be allowed to control the world no country will be allowed to do so
as we see the scattered states none can confront America but should America start demanding too much and forcing its doctrines down the wrong throats then indeed such an aliance will emerge to think otherwise is to think like the Germans did circa 1938 and as we have seen in the past what happens when one country eyes the world do not forget that most O america's p[ower comes from the british commonwealth
if this was taken away and the majority of countries chose to become the opposition to Ameican agression indeed America the mere 5% of the population would fold like a house of cards
the assumption that russia and china could not formulate a serious group of nations that would confront America is false should America lose its place in the world and become a facsist regime bent on world domination I dare say you would find that your long time friends would be not friends at all
it is human nature to fight for freedom every where not just in America it isnt just an american ideal
I suspect America would have a cinsiderable part of it's own population that would rise up and demand a
stop to the insanity of any such plot by their govt.