Foreign Policy published a Jan. 3 article boldly titled "Think Again: American Decline" by Gideon Rachman. The last time I checked the website, 2,380 people "liked" it.
I don't. Very little about "American decline" is real or new. Similar predictions of U.S. decline have surfaced every decade or so since Washington rebuilt the international system after World War II, from the aftermath of Sputnik in the 1960s to the economic distress of the 1980s. Foreign Policy is also hardly the only peddler of the latest declinism fetish. Everyone from Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria to former Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani to American intelligence agencies themselves has parroted a version of it.
But every myth has a grain of truth. In this case it's the fact that — God forbid — other powers are rising. Goldman Sachs says China will overtake the U.S. economy by 2027 and that the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China) will emerge as major world players. But so what? Other powers have been rising for decades. Yet, to take one statistic, the American economy in 2004 was the same size relative to the world's total GDP as it was in 1975 — 20 percent.
The real and more useful questions about decline are therefore not who is growing and by how much, but whether emerging powers can dent American power sufficiently and whether the United States will lose the key advantages that have sustained it as the world's sole superpower.
For all the fretting, the United States, as Mr. Rachman himself admits, remains the leader across the board. U.S. military power is still unmatched and vastly technologically superior to any other nation. Military spending is almost as much as the rest of the world combined. The American economy dominates futuristic industries like biotechnology and nanotechnology with a potent combination of technological prowess and entrepreneurial flair. According to China's own Jiao Tong University's rankings, 17 of the world's top 20 universities are American. Millions still flock here to pursue the American Dream, while America's melting pot of cultures bodes well for its exceptional innovative capacity.
Provided the United States continues to encourage immigration and starts controlling its debt, there is little reason to believe that such a resilient colossus will see its vast advantages perish.
There are also few signs of a "global multipolar system" emerging anytime soon. Despite doomsday realist predictions, no country has attempted to balance Washington's hegemony since 1991. And while the future rise of Asian powers may boost the case for eventual American decline, the truth is that each of the United States' potential balancers also faces significant challenges going forward.
For China, it is the growing disparity between its coastal and inland areas, its physical isolation and the risk that it will get old before it gets rich. For India and the European Union, the challenge will be to painfully negotiate the divergent interests of states in a noisy democratic system. As for Iran, Russia and Venezuela, they are flexing their muscles as proud spoilers, not global powers. It is also quite unlikely that these states will soon form a coalition to confront the United States, given their own divergent interests. Even China and Russia compete ferociously in Central Asia today.
Don't get me wrong. I don't believe we've reached Francis Fukuyama's "end of history," particularly with the slowing of democracy's progress during the last decade. Nor do I think the United States will be able to dominate and dictate terms to others all the time in the future. Still, I just don't see the irreversible decline in U.S. power and the rise of a new world order that many seem to reflexively accept.
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