Tuesday, September 01, 2009
American Prominence pt. 1
Every 10 years, it is decline time in the United States. In the late 1950's, it was the Sputnik shock, followed by the "missile gap" trumpeted by John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential campaign. A decade later, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger sounded the dirge over bipolarity, predicting a world of five, rather than two global powers. At the end of the 1970's, Jimmy Carter's "malaise" speech invoked "a crisis of confidence" that struck "at the very heart and soul and spirit of national will."
A decade later, academics such as the Yale historian Paul Kennedy predicted the ruin of the United States, driven by over-extension abroad and profligacy at home. The United States was at risk of "imperial overstretch," Kennedy wrote in 1987, arguing that "the sum of the total of the United States' global interests and obligations is nowadays far larger than the country's power to defend them all simultaneously." But three years, Washington dispatched 600,000 soldiers to fight the first Iraq war- without reinstating the draft or raising taxes. The only price of "overstretch" turned out to be the mild recession of 1991.
Declinism took a break in the 1990's. The United States was enjoying a nice run after the suicide of the Soviet Union, and Japan, the economic power house of the 1980's, was stuck in its "lost decade" of stagnation and stirred U.S. paranoia with its takeover of national treasures such as Pebble Beach and Rockefeller Center. The United States had moved into the longest economic expansion in history, which, apart from the eight down months in 2001, continued until 2008. "Gloom is the dominant mood in Japan these days," one Asian commentator reported in 1997, whereas "American capitalism is resurgent, confident and brash." That year, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that "the defining feature of world affairs" was "globalization" and that if "you had to design a country best suited to compete in such a world, it would be today's America." He concluded on a triumphant note: "Globalization is us."
In those days, any declinist harrumph sounded quirky or simply generic. The indictment delivered in 1994 by the Oxford fellow John Gray could have come from any time: "The U.S. no longer possesses any recognizable common culture." It had degenerated into a melee of "warring cultural and ethnic groups," with ungovernability" just around the corner. For Gray, it all added up to a "spectacle of American decline."
But by the end of the Bush Administration in 2008, declinism had returned with a vengeance. This year, inspired by the global financial crisis, Paul Kennedy revisited the arguments he had laid out in his book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers over 20 years ago. "The biggest loser is understood to be Uncle Sam," he wrote. Chronic fiscal deficits and military overstretch- the twin scourge of his 1987 book- were finally doing in the United States, he argued, and the "global tectonic power shift, toward Asia and away from the West, seems hard to reverse."
Roger Altman, a former deputy secretary of the Treasury, has written in these pages that financial crash "has inflicted profound damage on...[the United States] standing in the world." The German finance minister, Peer Steinbruck, has crowed, "The United States will lose its superpower state in the world financial system," which "will become multipolar." And the historian Niall Ferguson has gone halfway, warning that although "the balance of global power is bound to shift," "commentators should always hesitate before they prophesy the decline and fall of the United States."
No such hesitation has befallen the new crop of declinists. Some of their lore is simply generic, divorced from time and circumstance, and this achinngly familiar to those who remember 50 years of similar boilerplate. Last year, Parag Khanna, a fellow at the New America Foundation, intoned that "America's standing in the world remains in steady decline." This has a familiar ring to it, as does Khanna's announcement that U.S. power is "competing- and losing- in a geopolitical marketplace alongside the world's other superpowers."
A decade later, academics such as the Yale historian Paul Kennedy predicted the ruin of the United States, driven by over-extension abroad and profligacy at home. The United States was at risk of "imperial overstretch," Kennedy wrote in 1987, arguing that "the sum of the total of the United States' global interests and obligations is nowadays far larger than the country's power to defend them all simultaneously." But three years, Washington dispatched 600,000 soldiers to fight the first Iraq war- without reinstating the draft or raising taxes. The only price of "overstretch" turned out to be the mild recession of 1991.
Declinism took a break in the 1990's. The United States was enjoying a nice run after the suicide of the Soviet Union, and Japan, the economic power house of the 1980's, was stuck in its "lost decade" of stagnation and stirred U.S. paranoia with its takeover of national treasures such as Pebble Beach and Rockefeller Center. The United States had moved into the longest economic expansion in history, which, apart from the eight down months in 2001, continued until 2008. "Gloom is the dominant mood in Japan these days," one Asian commentator reported in 1997, whereas "American capitalism is resurgent, confident and brash." That year, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that "the defining feature of world affairs" was "globalization" and that if "you had to design a country best suited to compete in such a world, it would be today's America." He concluded on a triumphant note: "Globalization is us."
In those days, any declinist harrumph sounded quirky or simply generic. The indictment delivered in 1994 by the Oxford fellow John Gray could have come from any time: "The U.S. no longer possesses any recognizable common culture." It had degenerated into a melee of "warring cultural and ethnic groups," with ungovernability" just around the corner. For Gray, it all added up to a "spectacle of American decline."
But by the end of the Bush Administration in 2008, declinism had returned with a vengeance. This year, inspired by the global financial crisis, Paul Kennedy revisited the arguments he had laid out in his book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers over 20 years ago. "The biggest loser is understood to be Uncle Sam," he wrote. Chronic fiscal deficits and military overstretch- the twin scourge of his 1987 book- were finally doing in the United States, he argued, and the "global tectonic power shift, toward Asia and away from the West, seems hard to reverse."
Roger Altman, a former deputy secretary of the Treasury, has written in these pages that financial crash "has inflicted profound damage on...[the United States] standing in the world." The German finance minister, Peer Steinbruck, has crowed, "The United States will lose its superpower state in the world financial system," which "will become multipolar." And the historian Niall Ferguson has gone halfway, warning that although "the balance of global power is bound to shift," "commentators should always hesitate before they prophesy the decline and fall of the United States."
No such hesitation has befallen the new crop of declinists. Some of their lore is simply generic, divorced from time and circumstance, and this achinngly familiar to those who remember 50 years of similar boilerplate. Last year, Parag Khanna, a fellow at the New America Foundation, intoned that "America's standing in the world remains in steady decline." This has a familiar ring to it, as does Khanna's announcement that U.S. power is "competing- and losing- in a geopolitical marketplace alongside the world's other superpowers."
