The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (106 page)

It is hard to imagine that the decline in American industrial capacity could be so severe: its manufacturing base is simply that much broader than Edwardian Britain’s was; and—an important point—the “defense-related industries” have not only been sustained by repeated Pentagon orders, but have paralleled the shift from materials-intensive into knowledge-intensive (high-technology) manufacturing, which over the longer term will also reduce the West’s reliance upon critical raw materials. Even so, the very high proportion of, say, semiconductors which are assembled in foreign countries and then shipped to the United States,
²⁴⁶
or—to think of a product as far removed from semiconductors as possible—the erosion of the American shipping and shipbuilding industry, or the closing down of so many American mines and oilfields—such trends cannot but be damaging in the event of another long-lasting, Great Power, coalition war. If, moreover, historical precedents are of any validity at all, the most critical constraint upon any “surge” in wartime production has usually been in the area of skilled craftsmen
²⁴⁷
—which, once again, causes one to wonder about the massive long-term decline in American blue-collar (i.e., usually skilled-craftsmen) employment.

A quite different problem, but one equally important for the sustaining
of a proper grand strategy, concerns the impact of slow economic growth upon the American social/political consensus. To a degree which amazes most Europeans, the United States in the twentieth century has managed to avoid ostensible “class” politics. This is due, one imagines, to the facts that so many of its immigrants were fleeing from socially rigid circumstances elsewhere; that the sheer size of the country allowed those who were disillusioned with their economic position to “escape” to the West, and simultaneously made the organization of labor much more difficult than in, say, France or Britain; and that those same geographical dimensions, and the entrepreneurial opportunities within them, encouraged the development of a largely unreconstructed form of laissez-faire capitalism which has dominated the political culture of the nation (despite occasional counterattacks from the left). In consequence, the “earnings gap” between rich and poor in the United States is significantly larger than in any other advanced industrial society; and, by the same token, state expenditures upon social services form a lower share of GNP than in comparable countries (except Japan, which appears to have a much stronger family-based form of support for the poor and the aged).

This lack of “class” politics despite the obvious socioeconomic disparities has obviously been helped by the fact that the United States’ overall growth since the 1930s offered the prospect of individual betterment to a majority of the population; and by the more disturbing fact that the poorest
one-third
of American society has not been “mobilized” to become regular voters. But given the differentiated birthrate between the white ethnic groups on the one hand and the black and Hispanic groups on the other—not to mention the changing flow of immigrants into the United States, and given also the economic metamorphosis which is leading to the loss of millions of relatively high-earning jobs in manufacturing, and the creation of millions of poorly paid jobs in services, it may be unwise to assume that the prevailing norms of the American political economy (low government expenditures, low taxes on the rich) would be maintained if the nation entered a period of sustained economic difficulty caused by a plunging dollar and slow growth. What this also suggests is that an American polity which responds to external challenges by increasing defense expenditures, and reacts to the budgetary crisis by slashing the existing social expenditures, may run the risk of provoking an eventual political backlash. As with all of the other Powers surveyed in this chapter, there are no easy answers in dealing with the constant three-way tension between defense, consumption, and investment in settling national priorities.

This brings us, inevitably, to the delicate relationship between slow economic growth and high defense spending. The debate upon “the economics of defense spending” is a highly controversial one, and—
bearing in mind the size and variety of the American economy, the stimulus which can come from large government contracts, and the technical spin-offs from weapons research—the evidence does not point simply in one direction.
²⁴⁸
But what is significant for our purposes is the comparative dimension. Even if (as is often pointed out) defense expenditures formed 10 percent of GNP under Eisenhower and 9 percent under Kennedy, the United States’ relative share of global production and wealth was at that time around
twice
what it is today; and, more particularly, the American economy was not then facing the challenges to either its traditional or its high-technology manufactures. Moreover, if the United States at present continues to devote 7 percent or more of its GNP to defense spending while its major economic rivals, especially Japan, allocate a far smaller proportion, then
ipso facto
the latter have potentially more funds “free” for civilian investment; if the United States continues to invest a massive amount of its R&D activities into military-related production while the Japanese and West Germans concentrate upon commercial R&D; and if the Pentagon’s spending drains off the majority of the country’s scientists and engineers from the design and production of goods for the world market while similar personnel in other countries are primarily engaged in bringing out better products for the civilian consumer, then it seems inevitable that the American share of world manufacturing will steadily decline, and also likely that its economic growth rates will be slower than in those countries dedicated to the marketplace and less eager to channel resources into defense.
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It is almost superfluous to say that these tendencies place the United States on the horns of a most acute dilemma over the longer term. Simply because it is
the
global superpower, with far more extensive military commitments than a regional Power like Japan or West Germany, it requires much larger defense forces—in just the same way as imperial Spain felt it needed a far larger army than its contemporaries and Victorian Britain insisted upon a much bigger navy than any other country. Furthermore, since the USSR is seen to be the major military threat to American interests across the globe and is clearly devoting a far greater proportion of
its
GNP to defense, American decision-makers are inevitably worried about “losing” the arms race with Russia. Yet the more sensible among these decision-makers can also perceive that the burden of armaments is debilitating the Soviet economy; and that if the two superpowers continue to allocate ever-larger shares of their national wealth into the unproductive field of armaments, the critical question might soon be: “Whose economy will decline
fastest
, relative to such expanding states as Japan, China, etc.?” A low investment in armaments may, for a globally overstretched Power like the United States, leave it feeling vulnerable everywhere; but a very heavy investment in armaments, while bringing greater security in the short
term, may so erode the commercial competitiveness of the American economy that the nation will be
less
secure in the long term.
²⁵⁰

Here, too, the historical precedents are not encouraging. For it has been a common dilemma facing previous “number-one” countries that even as their relative economic strength is ebbing, the growing foreign challenges to their position have compelled them to allocate more and more of their resources into the military sector, which in turn squeezes out productive investment and, over time, leads to the downward spiral of slower growth, heavier taxes, deepening domestic splits over spending priorities, and a weakening capacity to bear the burdens of defense.
²⁵¹
If this, indeed, is the pattern of history, one is tempted to paraphrase Shaw’s deadly serious quip and say: “Rome fell; Babylon fell; Scarsdale’s turn will come.”
²⁵²

In the largest sense of all, therefore, the only answer to the question increasingly debated by the public of whether the United States can preserve its existing position is “no”—for it simply has not been given to any one society to remain
permanently
ahead of all the others, because that would imply a freezing of the differentiated pattern of growth rates, technological advance, and military developments which has existed since time immemorial. On the other hand, this reference to historical precedents does
not
imply that the United States is destined to shrink to the relative obscurity of former leading Powers such as Spain or the Netherlands, or to disintegrate like the Roman and Austro-Hungarian empires; it is simply too large to do the former, and presumably too homogeneous to do the latter. Even the British analogy, much favored in the current political-science literature, is not a good one if it ignores the differences in
scale
. This can be put another way: the geographical size, population, and natural resources of the British Isles would suggest that it ought to possess roughly 3 or 4 percent of the world’s wealth and power,
all other things being equal;
but it is precisely because all other things are
never
equal that a peculiar set of historical and technological circumstances permitted the British Isles to expand to possess, say, 25 percent of the world’s wealth and power in its prime; and since those favorable circumstances have disappeared, all that it has been doing is returning down to its more “natural” size. In the same way, it may be argued that the geographical extent, population, and natural resources of the United States suggest that it ought to possess perhaps 16 or 18 percent of the world’s wealth and power, but because of historical and technical circumstances favorable to it, that share rose to 40 percent or more by 1945; and what we are witnessing at the moment is the early decades of the ebbing away from that extraordinarily high figure to a more “natural” share. That decline is being masked by the country’s enormous military capabilities at present, and also by its success in “internationalizing” American capitalism and culture.
²⁵³
Yet even when it declines to ocits
“natural” share of the world’s wealth and power, a long time into the future, the United States will still be a very significant Power in a multipolar world, simply because of its size.

The task facing American statesmen over the next decades, therefore, is to recognize that broad trends are under way, and that there is a need to “manage” affairs so that the
relative
erosion of the United States’ position takes place slowly and smoothly, and is not accelerated by policies which bring merely short-term advantage but longer-term disadvantage. This involves, from the president’s office downward, an appreciation that technological and therefore socioeconomic change is occurring in the world faster than ever before; that the international community is much more politically and culturally diverse than has been assumed, and is defiant of simplistic remedies offered either by Washington or Moscow to its problems; that the economic and productive power balances are no longer as favorably tilted in the United States’ direction as in 1945; and that, even in the military realm, there are signs of a certain redistribution of the balances, away from a bipolar to more of a multipolar system, in which the conglomeration of American economic-cum-military strength is likely to remain larger than that possessed by any one of the others individually, but will not be as disproportionate as in the decades which immediately followed the Second World War. This, in itself, is not a bad thing if one recalls Kissinger’s observations about the disadvantages of carrying out policies in what is always seen to be a bipolar world (see pp. 407–8); and it may seem still less of a bad thing when it is recognized how much more Russia may be affected by the changing dynamics of world power. In all of the discussions about the erosion of American leadership, it needs to be repeated again and again that the decline referred to is relative not absolute, and is therefore perfectly natural; and that the only serious threat to the real interests of the United States can come from a failure to adjust sensibly to the newer world order.

Given the considerable array of strengths still possessed by the United States, it ought not
in theory
to be beyond the talents of successive administrations to arrange the diplomacy and strategy of this readjustment so that it can, in Walter Lippmann’s classic phrase, bring “into balance … the nation’s commitments and the nation’s power.”
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Although there is no obvious, single “successor state” which can take over America’s global burdens in the way that the United States assumed Britain’s role in the 1940s, it is nonetheless also true that the country has fewer problems than an imperial Spain besieged by enemies on all fronts, or a Netherlands being squeezed between France and England, or a British Empire facing a bevy of challengers. The tests before the United States as it heads toward the twenty-first century are certainly daunting, perhaps especially in the economic sphere; but the nation’s resources remain considerable, // they can be properly
organized, and
if
there is a judicious recognition of both the limitations and the opportunities of American power.

Viewed from one perspective, it can hardly be said that the dilemmas facing the United States are unique. Which country in the world, one it tempted to ask, is
not
encountering problems in evolving a viable military policy, or in choosing between guns and butter and investment? From another perspective, however, the American position is a very special one. For all its economic and perhaps military decline, it remains, in Pierre Hassner’s words, “the decisive actor in every type of balance and issue.”
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Because it has so much power for good or evil, because it is the linchpin of the western alliance system and the center of the existing global economy, what it does,
or does not do
, is so much more important than what any of the other Powers decides to do.