The decline of once great powers, real and perceived, is a major theme of the early 21st century that is likely to become more pronounced as the century progresses and the balance of power, propelled by the shifting balance of energy and influence, shifts from West to East.
On the eve of World War II, the great Western powers were Great Britain, France, Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Three quarters of a century later, the British are painfully aware of their diminished status in the world: the loss of empire, their vastly reduced army and almost nonexistent navy, their loss of political and economic influence on the Continent, their disappearance from most of the rest of the world, and the effective end of the Anglo-American alliance on which they relied for more than a century. The French (the French people, that is) are dismayed by the loss of gloire and of empire, their subjugation by the European Union, the Americanization of French culture, mass immigration from the Third World, and the Islamization of France. The Russians, while pretending to accept Vladimir Putin’s pretense of the resurrection of the czarist empire, probably understand that their country is in fact headed for economic, cultural, and demographic disaster. The Germans, as everyone (especially the Germans) expected, have regained in an astonishingly short time their pre-war status as the powerhouse of Europe, but they have yet to recover their moral and cultural self-confidence, though they are working on that, too. And the United States faces an election campaign over the next 18 months that is likely to focus on America’s shortened global reach, her alleged reluctance to “lead” the world and her retreat from her international responsibilities, and the subsequent loss of international respect, even more than on her sluggish economy and economic inequality.
To anyone—not just in the United States but everywhere in the world—who grew up in the 1950’s and since, the reality of American global supremacy is taken for granted almost as a fact of nature, like heliocentrism. The Cold War, it is true, has been viewed since the collapse of the Soviet Union as the last bipolar era in history, when two colossi managed the balance of international power between them. But while the Soviet Union, postwar, was a military superpower capable of inspiring fear and awe internationally, still the 20th century was indeed the American Century. Though tyrants, mature and budding, admired the Kremlin, their people did not, and no one aspired to the Soviet Way of Life. Rather, all the world wished to be America, to paraphrase Locke, and America strove to be the world, realized in her own image. So superior did America—and Americans—appear that even those who resented and resisted her power acknowledged the superiority of the standard she represented, though they sought to attain it by different economic, political, and social means. Thus, the American Empire and imperial supremacy, to the astonishment of no one, became fixed in the world’s eye as immutable, however unpleasant the prospect might seem at times.
This had not been the case with the modern empires that preceded it. The British Empire, which had reached its apogee by 1914, was the biggest thing of its kind the world had ever seen: a vast span of scarlet on the global map, arcing north through Persia from its southwest anchor in South Africa to its southeastern one in the British East Indies. To build and support this arc, Britain willingly fought many wars on land and on the high seas, around the world and across four centuries. But Britain was never a Continental power in the sense that France, Spain, Germany, and Austria were. For her, Continental allies and enemies were a means to securing and defending her non-European interests, in the Americas, in India, in Southeast Asia, in Africa. As for her imperial rivals in Europe, the scope of their empires—even France’s and Spain’s—was narrower, in respect of the late colonial comers Germany and Italy especially. Even so British hegemony in 1914 fell far short of what the United States knew in 1945, to say nothing of what she has enjoyed since 1991. The collapse of the British Empire after 1945 was imaginable at the time to almost everyone but Winston Churchill. Today, though the decline of the American Empire as it has extended itself over the past two decades is virtually unimaginable to everyone—except of course to the tiny minority that is plotting to blow it up—it is unpleasantly plausible to nervous American imperialists with a stake in expanding it still further. And they—the politicians, the bureaucracy, the global capitalists, the military, the international charitable enterprises—are entirely right to fear.
A present cause for their alarm is Beijing’s scheme for an Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and its enthusiastic acceptance by 57 founding members, including, to Washington’s huge consternation, Britain, France, Germany, Australia, and Russia. The American enemies of the AIIB rightly see the project as a threat to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund—both created at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, both based in Washington, D.C., and both traditionally headed by an American president—and hence to America’s control of the global economy at a time when the future of the dollar as the world’s dominant reserve currency is increasingly uncertain. In 1944, with the United States looming through the smoke of unfinished war as the coming world power, effectively giving Washington control of the global peacetime economy was sensible enough. Seventy-one years later it makes a great deal less sense, if indeed any sense at all, but liberal international politics resembles domestic liberal politics in a fundamental way.
Just as liberal government understands liberal institutions as being established in perpetuity and beyond any chance of repeal, so it imagines the international status quo it has achieved as unchallengeable and immutable—in saecula saeculorum—even while it hectors the governed to accept the fact that life itself is mutable and to “embrace change.” Liberal government readily understands the proposition that a private citizen may possess too much money, power, and influence. It cannot fathom how the state, supposing it to be at least ostensibly democratic, could have enough of all three. For government it is entirely natural, as well as eminently desirable, that the fortunes of individuals and families should fluctuate dramatically, Fate being the great equalizer across the decades, with a helping hand from the Internal Revenue Service. People must go down as well as up. Nations and governments, on the other hand, must only go up and up and up, no matter whether their power and wealth are fairly shared by the people on whose behalf they claim to exist. For an American of the elite sort, America’s right to preeminence in the world is ordained by the universe, the secular equivalent of the Divine Right of Kings. He has spent his entire life in that universe, and he cannot imagine life in any other. Failure to keep on going up would mean national decline and fall.
In fact, every serious student of history understands that America’s status—political, military, and economic—in the world since 1945 is an historical anomaly, unnatural, unsustainable, and undesirable for everyone, and that Washington’s insistence on increasing it further is more likely to result in Armageddon than in the world transcendence Washington so confidently expects (or used to).
Great Britain destroyed her empire, and came close to destroying herself, in her obsession—raised by Churchill to a species of madness—with holding on to India, for whose sake she sacrificed a rational and responsible foreign policy and, finally, a sustainable economic policy. Franklin Roosevelt recognized this folly, and worked to take advantage of it. His successors in the White House from 1945 down to the present pursued variant forms of his strategy to convert British imperial power to American hegemony, while trying to avoid the fatal risks and responsibilities of formal and direct empire. But responsibilities and burdens are inevitably involved in indirect imperial power, too; also its unfathomable complexities, implacable contradictions, and sheer impossibilities. In Britain’s ascendancy, Edmund Burke saw some of them and urged his country to realize her limitations and to act realistically in India and—especially—North America. Parliament, Burke insisted, could not bring the 13 colonies to heel, regulate their economies, and take a profit from them, and it shouldn’t try. Instead it should recognize the facts for what they were and back away graciously, hoping to retain the colonists’ good will and respect, and to engage in lucrative trade with them in the future. But Parliament, save only for Burke’s Rockingham faction, would have none of it, and the consequences were what Burke had predicted they would be. More importantly still, he perceived a connection between, on one hand, corruption in India and hubris in North America, and, on the other, political corruption and unconstitutional government at home, the land of Magna Carta and the Mother of Parliaments, as King George III and his shadow cabinet encroached on the rights of Parliament and provoked a popular reaction Burke feared would lead to political confusion and anarchy. (Owing partly to the Continental Army’s victory over the British forces and the subsequent example of revolution, anarchy, and tyranny in France, this did not happen.)
Contrary to Marxist historians, American supremacy in 1945 was not won by an evil alliance of capitalists, militarists, and imperialists. It was a good thing for the world (if not for the United States) in the long run. In that year, and for a decade and a half afterward, American power and influence were actually providential, though the French refused to see the situation that way, and the British resented, while taking necessary advantage of, it. From 1945 until about 1960, American hegemony was a healthy phenomenon because it was a natural one. President Eisenhower knew this. He also sensed that hegemony was approaching its natural and proper limits, as his warning against the “military-industrial complex” suggested. Even so, the presidential campaign of 1960, conducted mainly in terms of the missile gap, the arms race, dominos, and “losing” countries to the enemy, suggested the unwillingness of the American political and managerial classes to countenance a return to a more natural distribution of international power and influence, in what was then called the Free World. It was at the tail end of Eisenhower’s second administration that Washington began to set its sights on Vietnam. During the Kennedy administration it learned to keep them fixed there, and Johnson’s White House pulled the trigger. The escalation of the Vietnam War marks the point at which American hegemony succumbed to American hubris—hegemony unsupported by power, logic, or common sense—while America’s eventual withdrawal from the country represents the tactical retreat of the hegemonists that failed to conceal the underlying resentful grudge. Never mind the cliché that the United States had “learned a lesson.” Washington had learned nothing, merely backed off from its aggressive global ambitions to restore its treasury and its credibility, and wait to fight another day.
That day came in December 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Since then Washington has ceaselessly committed itself to a series of hot wars (all of them undeclared and nearly all of them failures) fought to impose “democracy” on unwilling countries around the world, to an international propaganda campaign quieter, though perhaps more intensive, than that waged by Radio Free America and other federal agencies during the Cold War, and to a shameless ideological assault on Russia to humiliate and bully that country into transforming herself in the image of the American liberal regime. Washington has further arranged that military and political intervention have been accompanied by commercial self-interpolation and exploitation—that American trade should follow U.S. forces and American “nation builders,” social workers, and lawyers for an army of liberal NGOs—and that multinational free-trade agreements should be more or less mandated by American politicians to bundle all their efforts together in the name of the “indispensable,” the “exceptional,” nation. America in the 21st century recalls Chesterton’s rebuke of the duke of Devonshire, in his day the richest man in England. The duke with his vast holdings, Chesterton said, was like a man whose wealth allows him to maintain a household of 50,000 wives, 49,999 of whom would otherwise belong to as many other men—an arrangement as unnatural as it would be morally wrong.
The decline of the United States from the status of sole superpower and indispensable nation, Lord of the World, is as natural and desirable as her temporary preeminence following World War II was. In this context the rise of Russia, the self-reassertion of Western Europe, the ambitions of the countries of East Asia, including China, and the emerging reestablishment of Japan as a military power should be welcome as proof that the balance of economic and military power and political influence in the world is returning, after 70 years, to something more normal. Similarly Britain’s, France’s, and even Russia’s desire to regain their historic standing on the Continent is laudable and justifiable. These countries are not proposing to rule Europe, much less dominate the world. Their assertions of significant influence within limited geographical spheres are based on reason and history, and their governments have a duty as well as a right to insist that they should be recognized as discrete members of an ancient civilization independent equally of the European Union and the United States of America.
This return to balance promises as much for America—meaning Americans themselves—as it does for the rest of the world. The hegemon by Acton’s definition is corrupt, and republican government and corruption do not comport well. The more power our “leaders” exert over the world, the more power they claim over us, and the more high-handedly and carelessly they wield it. The more incompetently, too. American government in the 21st century finds almost everything it sets its hand to beyond its powers of accomplishment, while wreaking massive damage in the process: the inevitable result of trying to play God in the world and at home. All previous empires weakened and fell from overextension and from decadence, as the British Empire after them did. Ours is absolutely certain to do the same. Stalin corrected an emissary of Hitler’s after he remarked that people don’t know when to stop. “I do,” Stalin told him. He didn’t really, but we shall see whether the successors to Barack Obama are as wise as Stalin thought he was.
Washington is currently divided over the fate of yet another fast-track trade agreement demanded by the President, many or most Republican congressmen, and the business lobbies to prevent Congress from amending future trade legislation and concessions favored by the Chief Executive and the biggest contributors to his campaign chest. The arguments proffered by the bill’s supporters include the need to keep American business from being cut out of Asian markets, to prevent trade barriers from blocking foreign access to American products and services, to disallow members of the European Union from marketing generic products like wine and food as specific ones, and to reduce or eliminate distortive foreign investment, while preventing foreigners investing in the United States from being extended protections denied to American investors. This is very much a Washington debate, and so these relatively straightforward but misguided aims are being needlessly complicated by the liberal insistence that all signatories to the pact must agree to enact and enforce environmental, child-labor, and other progressively minded provisions reflecting the American Empire’s vision of the world as it should be.
The sun never set on the British Empire, and the nanny never sleeps in Franklin Roosevelt’s. Suns, however, do die, Nanny’s charges grow up eventually, and the old girl herself is relieved of her responsibilities and dismissed from service. Which is how life goes, and as it should go.
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