The Decline of the American Empire

Fred Kaplan has an intriguing article in this weeks NY Times Week in Review, in which he discusses signs of an imminent American decline in world power.

Yet the signposts, at the end of this year, are ominous. As an economic power, the United States no longer sets the rules, much less rule the game. As a military power, it vastly outguns the rest of the world, but has a harder time translating armed might into influence.

Kaplan specifically discusses the decline of the dollar, the mounting debt and how it's being held overseas, our inability to prevent the EU and China from dictating economic terms to us, and the costs of our occupation of Iraq, and how it's stretched the most powerful military in the world to it's limit, and in it he sees possibility of an American decline.

Kaplan doesn't hypothesize that global power will shift to another center, but rather perhaps that the days of the hegemony of one or two powers may be coming to an end.

Meanwhile, power is not transferring so much as dispersing. It may turn out, if trends continue, that no country or bloc of countries possesses the combination of economic and military power needed to reward the good, deter or punish the bad and impose international rules, order and security.

History teaches us that never before has one power dominated the globe as thoroughly as the United States has since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It's entirely possible that the United States period of dominance and exceptionalism is not only unprecedented, but unsustainable. Consequently it would be unfair to blame one political party for the decline. However, I think it's fair to say that Republican and Bush administration policies, which include racking up the deficit in favor of tax cuts, an economic policy that is supported by massive debt held by foreign banks, and engaging in wars and occupations that we apparantly can ill afford and are ill equipped to win, are certainly speeding the process along. Democrats continue to suffer from the myth that they "lost" China, but someday we may look back upon this period and wonder whether this current incarnation of the Republican party lost America.