1: THE POST-AMERICA SCRAMBLE
In the absence of a recognized leader, the resulting uncertainty is likely to increase tensions among competitors and inspire self-serving behavior. Thus, international cooperation is more likely to decline, with some powers seeking to promote exclusive regional arrangements as alternative frameworks of stability for the enhancement of their own interests. Historical contenders may vie more overtly, even with the use of force, for regional preeminence. Some weaker states may find themselves in serious jeopardy, as new power realignments emerge in response to major geopolitical shifts in the global distribution of power. The promotion of democracy might yield to the quest for enhanced national security based on varying fusions of authoritarianism, nationalism, and religion. The “global commons” could suffer from passive indifference or exploitation produced by a defensive concentration on narrower and more immediate national concerns.
Some key international institutions, such as the World Bank or the IMF, are already under increasing pressure from the rising, poorer, but highly populated states—with China and India in the forefront—for a general rearrangement of the existing distribution of voting rights, which is currently weighted toward the West. That distribution has already been challenged by some states in the G-20 as unfair. The obvious demand is that it should be based to a much greater degree on the actual populations of member states and less on their actual financial contributions. Such a demand, arising in the context of greater disorder and percolating unrest among the world’s newly politically awakened peoples, could gain popularity among many as a step toward international (even though not domestic) democratization. And before long, the heretofore untouchable and almost seventy-year-old UN Security Council system of only five permanent members with exclusive veto rights may become widely viewed as illegitimate.
Even if a downward drift by America unfolds in a vague and contradictory fashion, it is likely that the leaders of the world’s second-rank powers, among them Japan, India, Russia, and some EU members, are already assessing the potential impact of America’s demise on their respective national interests. Indeed, the prospects of a post-America scramble may already be discreetly shaping the planning agenda of the chancelleries of the major foreign powers even if not yet dictating their actual policies. The Japanese, fearful of an assertive China dominating the Asian mainland, may be thinking of closer links with Europe. Leaders in India and Japan may well be considering closer political and even military cooperation as a hedge in case America falters and China rises. Russia, while perhaps engaging in wishful thinking (or even in schadenfreude) about America’s uncertain prospects, may well have its eye on the independent states of the former Soviet Union as initial targets of its enhanced geopolitical influence. Europe, not yet cohesive, would likely be pulled in several directions: Germany and Italy toward Russia because of commercial interests, France and insecure Central Europe in favor of a politically tighter EU, and Great Britain seeking to manipulate a balance within the EU while continuing to preserve a special relationship with a declining United States. Others still may move more rapidly to carve out their own regional spheres: Turkey in the area of the old Ottoman Empire, Brazil in the Southern Hemisphere, and so forth.
None of the foregoing, however, have or are likely to have the requisite combination of economic, financial, technological, and military power to even consider inheriting America’s leading role. Japan is dependent on the United States for military protection and would have to make the painful choice of accommodating China or perhaps of allying with India in joint opposition to it. Russia is still unable to come to terms with its loss of empire, is fearful of China’s meteoric modernization, and is unclear as to whether it sees its future with Europe or in Eurasia. India’s aspirations for major power status still tend to be measured by its rivalry with China. And Europe has yet to define itself politically while remaining conveniently dependent on American power. A genuinely cooperative effort by all of them to accept joint sacrifices for the sake of collective stability if America’s power were to fade is not likely.
States, like individuals, are driven by inherited propensities—their traditional geopolitical inclinations and their sense of history—and they differ in their ability to discriminate between patient ambition and imprudent self- delusion. In reflecting on the possible consequences of a change in the global hierarchy of power in the first half of the twenty-first century, it may be useful therefore to remind oneself that in the twentieth century two extreme examples of impatient self-delusion resulted in national calamities. The most obvious was provided by Hitler’s imprudent megalomania, which not only vastly overestimated Germany’s global capacity for leadership but also prompted two personal strategic decisions that deprived him of any chance of retaining control even of continental Europe. The first, when already having conquered Europe but still at war with Great Britain, was to attack the Soviet Union; and the second was to declare war on the United States while still engaged in a mortal struggle with both the Soviet Union and Great Britain.
The second case was less dramatic but the stake was also global power. In the early 1960s the Soviet leadership proclaimed officially that it expected to surpass the United States during the decade of the 1980s in economic power and in technological capability (the ambitious Soviet claim was dramatized by its Sputnik success). Vastly overestimating its economic capabilities, by the late 1970s the USSR was pursuing an active arms race with the United States in which its technological capacity for innovation was central to the outcome, but in which its GNP limited the practical scope of its global political as well as military outreach. On both scores, the Soviet Union overreached disastrously. It then compounded the consequences of its miscalculation with the calamitous decision to invade Afghanistan in 1979. A decade later the exhausted Soviet Union ceased to exist and the Soviet bloc fragmented.
Today there is no equivalent to either Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. No other major power in the current global pecking order manifests the failed self-delusion of the notorious twentieth-century aspirants to global power, and none as yet are politically, economically, or militarily ready to claim the mantle of global leadership—nor are any endowed with the vague but important quality of legitimacy that was still associated with America not so long ago. None proclaim to embody a doctrine of allegedly universal validity reinforced by claims of historical (in Hitler’s case, one is even tempted to say “hysterical”) determinism.
Most important, China, the state invariably mentioned as America’s prospective successor, has an impressive imperial lineage and a strategic tradition of carefully calibrated patience, which have been critical to its overwhelmingly successful several-thousand-year-long history. China thus prudently accepts the existing international system, even if not viewing as permanent the prevailing hierarchy within it. It recognizes that its own success depends on the system not collapsing dramatically but instead evolving toward a gradual redistribution of power. It seeks more influence, craves international respect, and still resents its “century of humiliation,” but increasingly feels self-confident about the future. Unlike the failed twentieth-century aspirants to world power, China’s international posture is at this stage neither revolutionary nor messianic nor Manichean.
Moreover, the basic reality is that China is not yet—nor will it be for several more decades—ready to assume in full scope America’s role in the world. Even China’s leaders have repeatedly emphasized that in every important measure of development, wealth, and power—even several decades from now—China will still be a modernizing and developing state, significantly behind not only the United States but also Europe and Japan in the major per capita indexes of modernity and national power (see Figure 3.1).
China thus seems to understand—and its investments in America’s well-being speak louder than words because they are based on self-interest—that a rapid decline of America’s global primacy would produce a global crisis that could devastate China’s own well-being and damage its long-range prospects. Prudence and patience are part of China’s imperial DNA. But China is also ambitious, proud, and conscious that its unique history is but a prologue to its destiny. No wonder then that in a burst of candor an astute Chinese public figure, who obviously had concluded that America’s decline and China’s rise were both inevitable, not long ago soberly noted to a visiting American: “But, please, let America not decline too quickly. . . . ”
FIGURE 3.1 POPULATION-AGING-GDP COMPARED
SOURCES: UN projections, assuming medium fertility variant (EU is EU 27)
SOURCES: 5) CIA World Factbook; 1–4) UN projections, assuming medium fertility variant (EU is EU 27)
