The Decline of America

According to the National Intelligence Council, America is facing a decline of influence that will occur in as little as 15 years. Fred Kaplan writes about it in this article at Slate.

In this new world, a mere 15 years away, the United States will remain "an important shaper of the international order"—probably the single most powerful country—but its "relative power position" will have "eroded." The new "arriviste powers"—not only China and India, but also Brazil, Indonesia, and perhaps others—will accelerate this erosion by pursuing "strategies designed to exclude or isolate the United States" in order to "force or cajole" us into playing by their rules.

This conclusion that they reach is not a "worst-case" scenario. The NIC believes this transformation will occur by 2020, which means most of us will be around to see it. What's worse is we're only helping this process along.

America's current foreign policy is encouraging this trend, the NIC concluded. "U.S. preoccupation with the war on terrorism is largely irrelevant to the security concerns of most Asians," the report states. The authors don't dismiss the importance of the terror war—far from it. But they do write that a "key question" for the future of America's power and influence is whether U.S. policy-makers "can offer Asian states an appealing vision of regional security and order that will rival and perhaps exceed that offered by China." If not, "U.S. disengagement from what matters to U.S. Asian allies would increase the likelihood that they will climb on Beijing's bandwagon and allow China to create its own regional security that excludes the United States."

Could it be worse? Yeah.

This shift to a multipolar world "will not be painless," the report goes on, "and will hit the middle classes of the developed world in particular" with further outsourcing of jobs and outflow of capital investment. In short, the NIC's forecast involves not merely a recalibration in the balance of world power, but also—as these things do—a loss of wealth, income, and, in every sense of the word, security.

That means that not only is it going to hit us in our foreign policy, an area that most Americans only think distantly about, but this decline will hit us in our wallets too.

Truth be told, most historians and honest commentators have always known that the deline of American power was inevitable. History teaches us quite clearly that all great powers eventually suffered a decline that relegated them to secondary status, or lower, among the nations. Even during the 90's, the period that will probably be looked upon as our peak, there was a recognition that the period that followed the end of the Cold War was a historical anamoly, and that there would be a re-balancing of world power after the decline of the Soviet Union that would see a countering or checking of American power. Nonetheless, I would guess that most of us imagined that such a rebalancing would take place over a period of decades, and that American would nonetheless remain the pre-dominant power for a century or more. Even if the NIC's report is pessimistic, the primary factors that are bringing about this decline are undeniable and worse, out of our control. However, as Kaplan points out, we are speeding up this process with more then just our foreign policy.

The trends should already be apparent to anyone who reads a newspaper. Not a day goes by without another story about how we're mortgaging our future to the central banks of China and Japan. The U.S. budget deficit, approaching a half-trillion dollars, is financed by their purchase of Treasury notes. The U.S. trade deficit—much of it amassed by the purchase of Chinese-made goods—now exceeds $3 trillion. Meanwhile, China is displacing the United States all across Asia—in trade, investment, education, culture, and tourism. It's also cutting into the trade markets of Latin America. (China is now Chile's No. 1 export market and Brazil's No. 2 trade partner.) Asian engineering students who might once have gone to MIT or Cal Tech are now going to universities in Beijing.

Liberals such as myself have been arguing since before the war in Iraq began that the worst consequence of the war would be a weakening of our military and political influence in the world. That this is happening is hard to argue with. Even at the nadir of the Veitnam War, America was still able to maintain it's forces in Europe and exercise political influence in remote corners of the world. However, now we find ourselves with an army bogged down in Iraq and incapable of fighting another campaign elsewhere, our political influence checked by worldwide rejection of our policies, and an ever increasing debt which threatens to make us vulnerable economically to the influence of nations with their own agendas.

The future is, of course, difficult to predict. The NIC may be overly pessimistic, and there may be other factors that even the most intelligent observers are not yet aware of. But there is no denying that the general trends are beyond worrisome. Historians may look back on this time period as the beginning of the decline of America, overseen by a President elected for his "strength."