REPORT OF THE DECLINE OF THE UNITED STATES IS PREMATURE!

REPORT OF THE DECLINE OF THE UNITED STATES IS PREMATURE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 23, 2009

REFERENCE:

A regular blog visitor to www.peripatetic philosopher.com sent me an article by Conrad Black titled “Much ado about China,” which deals with the false decline of the United States (US). Mr. Black was reacting to Maclean’s magazine banners across the top of its cover, “When China Rules the World.” He took umbrage at this assessment and wrote a narrow perspective of changing global climate vis-à-vis the US and China. A more cogent perspective is offered in Josef Joffe’s “The Default Power: The False Prophecy of America’s Decline” in Foreign Affairs (September/October 2009).

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Mr. Black is right. We have been there before. Japan wrote the US off as it soared economically in the 1980s and 1990s. In “Work Without Managers” (1990), I recorded author Akio Morita’s remark from his book, “The Japan That Can Say, No!”(1989): “Americans look ahead 10 minutes, while Japanese look ahead 10 years.” By 1999, Japan was looking ahead to a crippling recession. So much for prophesy of gloom and doom.

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Joseph Joffe, co-editor of “Die Zeit," is a senior fellow at Stanford University. He captures the panic that is endemic to the American mindset through the decades as the economy fluctuates like a heartbeat but its hegemony remains a constant. Linearity is not a good predictor of a country any better than it is of an individual’s changing status.

That said Americans find it easier to register indices of decline than indices of expansion. We have never been comfortable having so much with the rest of the world having so little. It is almost as if we deserve to be beaten up, by others as well as ourselves, to tolerate our own good fortune.

Joffe notes our pessimism in the 1950s with Sputnik shock, the “missile gap” trumpeted by JFK in the 1960 presidential campaign, Nixon and Kissinger signaling world polarity in the 1970s, followed by the Jimmy Carter complaint of cultural “malaise” and a “crisis in confidence,” and then a decade later historian Paul Kennedy, among others, predicting the ruin of the USA, and so it goes until today.

The fact remains, as Joffe shows, “The United States remains first on any scale of power that matters, whether it is economic, military, diplomatic, or cultural.” (p. 22)

GLEE AND GLOOM

Joffe sees America as a construct from its first thirteen colonies until the present as an endless projection of the world’s fondest dreams and fiercest nightmares. It is as if the US is not a real place but a consoling or disturbing mirage of the imagination:

“The canvas is painted in two colors: glee and gloom. Glee is celebrated mainly abroad. The gloom is mainly Made in the USA.” (p. 24)

“Latter-day prophets use the language of decay to pursue a domestic agenda,” he insists, “whether it is a libertarian vision of isolationism and low taxes or a liberal one of more welfare and less militarism.” Then he quotes John Quincy Adams who did not want the US to turn into “the dictatress of the world.” If she did, “she would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit,” as expansionism equals the loss of America’s soul

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The American spirit and the freedom to express that spirit are our greatest treasury. I’ve benefited from this greatly, often expressing controversial things because they were in my heart to express without worrying about censure or punishment.

America is an idea, and that idea releases the human spirit to fill its potential in some creative way, or not. Freedom and expression are universal needs and America will remain strong and great, and yes powerful as well as long as it is sanctuary for the expression of such needs. John Quincy Adams understood the American conscience.

JUST THE FACTS

The US economy is worth $14.3 trillion, three times as much as the world’s second-biggest economy, Japans, and only slightly less than Japan, China, Germany and France combined. (p 25)

The US military budget is in a league of its own. In 2008, the US spent $607 billion, representing almost half of the world total military spending. China, India, Japan and Russia spend together a total of $219 billion. In 2005, Robert Work, a defense analyst and now under secretary of the US Navy, has shown, the US Navy commanded a naval tonnage exceeding the world’s next 17 fleets combined. (p. 25)

FALSE IDOLS

Efforts are made to show China’s rise in breathtaking linear terms. “Life is not linear,” Joffe insists, as we all know it is not. Statistics don’t lie but liars like to fudge statistics with false syllogisms.

“History sounded a warning against straight-line projections in 1989,” Joffe writes, “the year of the crackdown in Tiananmen Square, when growth plummeted (for China) to four percent, compared with 11.3 percent the previous year. Karl Marx asserted that economics drives everything else – such turmoil suggests that politics is mightier still.” (p. 27)

LAST MAN STANDING

Power is not simply a matter of growth rates. “A large population, a large economy, and a large military are necessary but not sufficient conditions to exact power.” (p. 29). What puts the US in a league of its own is this: “the world’s most sophisticated military panoply fed by a defense budge that dwarfs all comers and gives the US the means to intervene anywhere on the planet.” (pp. 29-30)

It doesn’t stop there. It is the unmatched intellectual drive toward excellence of the research and higher education establishment. Projections of China surpassing the US in the first half of the twenty-first century leave out these unspectacular but critical sources of power. Nothing on earth touches the constant creating, innovating, restructuring, reinventing and reconstituting every phase of human society as this in the face of Nature’s entropy. This is what sets the US apart, the dynamic of the US university system.

“Of the world’s top 20 universities, all but three are American; of the tope 50 universities, all but 11 of them are located in the US. By contrast, India’s two best universities are tucked away in the world’s 300-to-400 tier. China does a bit better, its top three are in the 200-to-300 group of the world’s best 500.

“China’s public spending on education has been in the range of 2.0 – 2.5 percent of GDP over the last quarter century – this for a population four times as large as the US and an economy four times as small. The US spends close to 6 percent of its GDP on education, higher than that of India, Japan, Russian and the European Union combined.” (p. 39)

While the world often delights in a picture of the US as soft, fat, complacent and oblivious to a threatening reality, Joffe points out “national power is a warrior culture,” and the US still has one, as does the United Kingdom, but Europe doesn’t. “Europe does not think like a global power, nor can it move with the speed or the decisiveness of a real state.”(p. 30)

Joffe sees the US taking all these body blows of criticism feeling obliged to point out: “While acting on its own interests, it twice saved Europe from itself, and then served it a third time, during the Cold War, from the Soviet Union.” (p. 31)

It is from this growing spike in pessimism in the face of substantive performance that he concludes the US is a default power. “The US is the default power, the country that occupies center stage because there is nobody else with the requisite power and purpose.” (p. 31). For so great a power to be so benign in its enabling has caused him to observe: “The British Empire’s rule over India was more benign than Belgium’s over the Congo under the rapacious reign of King Leopold, and it was also more pleasant than is China’s in Tibet or Russia’s in its former Soviet empire.” (p. 32) What could be more poignant to confirm this? “China’s rebellious students put up a replica of the Statue of Liberty in Tiananmen Square, and not one of Lenin’s mausoleum.” (p. 32)

A PRINCE AND HIS KINGDOM

Joffe demonstrates an implicit understanding of Barack Obama’s soaring world popularity while at home it has been eroding: he is telling the world what it wants to hear but at the expense of American capital. Popularity waxes and wanes, but a consistency of another type has legs: “To capture a wider swath of the political imagination, it takes a country that is not just rich but also democratic and free.” (p. 33)

We have seen evidence of this democracy and freedom on display at town hall meetings across the US in recent days on Obama’s healthcare reform. Far from being bad for the country, it was a window to the world how democracy works when people are allowed to express their will without recrimination.

He cautions: “the default power is still an uberpower,” a term he uses to negate decline while promoting a balance of power akin to what Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft have advocated (p. 33). Joffe senses “China lacks the legitimacy that transforms muscle into leadership,” noting that “a default power always gains stature when the demand for its services soar. It does what others cannot or will not do. Only the default power has the power to harness a coalition against Iran, the new pretender to the Middle East," or to step in when a perturbation flares up somewhere else (p. 34).

Joffe concludes: “The facts and figures and the story of the resistible rise of previous contenders should give pause to those who either cheer or fear the US’ abdication. Linearity is not a good predictor. As the twenty-first century unfolds, the US will be younger and more dynamic than its competitors. Who would actually want to live in a world dominated by China, India, Japan, Russia, or even Europe? Not even those who have been trading in glee and gloom decade after decade would prefer any of them to take over as housekeeper of the world” (p. 35)

Josef Joffe believes the US will resist the imperial temptation of uberpower and will triumph in its own unique way as long as it heeds the words of John Quincy Adams and the American idea of freedom, and so do I.

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