Is this the end for America?
Yes, if you believe the assessment of the United States’ own National Intelligence Council (NIC), the body that oversees the nation’s motley collection of intelligence agencies. As long ago as 2008, in the global trends report it publishes every four years, the NIC shifted its core prediction from “continued US dominance” (the future it envisaged in 2004) to “a world in which… the US is seen as one among many global actors”. The NIC report and others like it plus a crop of influential books published in the last few years (such as Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World and Andrew Bacevich’s The Limits of Power) have all contributed to a new “declinist” school of thought that is close to becoming conventional wisdom.
What’s the general thesis?
First, that the rise of China and India mean that America will soon lose its position as the world’s biggest economy – perhaps by the end of this decade. Second, that the global financial crisis has shown that the US is living beyond its means and that its sclerotic political system can’t devise a solution. As the dollar loses its status as the global reserve currency, US economic dominance will crumble. Third, that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have shown that military superiority doesn’t guarantee political dominance; they also proved a grievous national distraction from the real threat, the rise of China. The excesses of the “war on terror” compromised America’s moral authority. As Bacevich (a conservative military historian) puts it: “American power is inadequate to the ambitions to which hubris and sanctimony have given rise”, and its days as global top dog are running out.
Is declinist thinking something new?
No. Predictions of the demise of America’s power have been a frequent theme in US public debate for at least half a century. In the late 1950s, the Sputnik shock and “missile gap” John F Kennedy played on at the 1960 election were seen as disturbing signs that the Soviet model was threatening to overtake America’s. In the early 1970s, Nixon and Kissinger predicted a multi-polar world of five global powers rather than two. At the end of the decade, dominated by Vietnam and economic woe, Carter’s famous “malaise” speech raised the spectre of a crisis that “struck at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will”.
And more recently?
By the late 1980s, the Yale historian Paul Kennedy famously cast America (in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers) as a latter-day Rome, doomed by imperial overstretch and profligacy at home. Gore Vidal pinpointed 16 September 1985 as the date of the fall of the American Empire; the day on which the Department of Commerce announced the US had become a debtor nation.
Yet anti-declinists would argue that Kennedy bought into the declinist fad at the top of the market, as evidenced by America’s bounce back in the 1990s. For example, Joseph Nye, Harvard professor and doyen of US foreign policy analysts, argued recently in an article titled The Decline and Fall of America’s Decline and Fall that today’s fretting about China is broadly similar to the assumption widely held in the 1980s that Japan would soon be toppling America off its perch. Instead, he and others suggest, there are grounds for believing US power will not diminish for many decades at least.
What grounds might these be?
First, all America’s admittedly serious problems (public debt, weak secondary education, political gridlock) are solveable. Second, for all its challenges, the US economy remains world-beatingly productive. America remains first for total research and development expenditure, first in university rankings, and first on indices of entrepreneurship. It continues to reap huge benefits from immigration and remains the destination of choice for talented young people from all over the world. Three-quarters of PhDs in American universities go to foreign students, a fact sometimes even cited as evidence for America’s decline. Crucially, however, two-thirds of them stay for at least five years – including an astonishing 90% of Chinese doctoral students.
As for China, even if that country overcomes its vast social, political and demographic tensions and surpasses America in terms of GDP, it will remain a vastly poorer country in terms of per-capita income and is destined to get old before it gets rich. America, meanwhile, will remain a “benign hegemon” – welcomed by Asian allies as a balance against Chinese domination. Yes, the “rise of the rest” means that America will become relatively less dominant, but will it be replaced as the global superpower in the foreseeable future? No.
The American phoenix
The “American phoenix” is already rising again, reckons Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Daily Telegraph. Within five years or so, the US will be well on its way to self-sufficiency in fuel and energy – boosted by the shale gas revolution (as well as the adaptation of fracking technology to the extraction of shale oil). Manufacturing will have closed the labour gap with China in a clutch of key industries. “A surprising amount of work that rushed to China over the past decade could soon start to come back”, according to a Boston Consulting Group report, which suggests a “tipping point” is near in computers, electrical equipment, machinery, autos and motor parts, plastics and rubber, fabricated metals, and even furniture. So don’t write off the US economy just yet.