most powerful actor, [the country’s] relative strength—even in the military realm—will decline and U.S. leverage will become more constrained.”
Even though it was being finished amid the global meltdown of 2008, nothing in it would have kept you up at night, sleepless and fretting. More than fifteen years into the future, our IC could imagine no wheels falling off the American juggernaut, nothing that would make you wonder if this country could someday topple off the nearest cliff. Twists, unpleasant surprises, unhappy endings? Not for this empire, according to its corps of intelligence analysts.
And the future being what it is, if you read that document now, you’d find none of the more stunning events that have disrupted and radically altered our world since late 2008: no Arab lands boiling with revolt, no Hosni Mubarak under arrest with his sons in jail, no mass demonstrations in Syria, no economies of peripheral European countries imploding one by one, nor a cluster of nuclear plants in Japan melting down. You won’t find once subservient semi-client states thumbing their noses at Washington, not even in 2025.
You won’t, for example, find the Saudis in, say 2011, openly exploring deeper relations with Russia and China as a screw-you response to Washington’s belated decision that Egyptian autocrat Hosni Mubarak should leave office, or Pakistani demands that the CIA and American Special Operations forces start scaling back activities on their turf, or American officials practically pleading with an Iraqi government it once helped put in power (and now moving ever closer to Iran) to please, please let U.S. troops stay past an agreed-upon withdrawal deadline of December 31, 2011, or Afghan president Hamid Karzai publicly blaming the Americans for the near collapse of his country’s major bank in a cesspool of corruption (in which his own administration was, of course, deeply implicated).
Only two-plus years after
Nor should we be surprised that, like so many other Americans, they were in denial. After all, our leaders spent years organizing their version of the world around a Global War on Terror, when (despite the 9/11 attacks) terror was hardly America’s most obvious challenge. It proved largely a “war” against phantoms and fantasies, or against modest-sized ragtag bands of enemies.
The spasms of fear that coursed through our society in the near-decade after September 11, 2001, and the enemy, “Islamic terrorism,” to which those spasms were attached are likely to look far different to us in retrospect. Yes, many factors—including the terrifyingly apocalyptic look of 9/11 in New York City—contributed to what happened. There was fear’s usefulness in prosecuting wars in the Greater Middle East that President Bush and his top officials found appealing. There was the way it ensured soaring budgets for the Pentagon and the national security state. There was the way it helped the politicians, lobbyists, and corporations hooked into a developing homeland-security complex. There was the handy-dandy way it glued eyeballs to a one-event-fits-all version of the world that made the media happy, and there was the way it justified increasing powers for our national security managers and dwindling liberties for Americans.
But think of all that as only the icing on the cake. Looking back, those terror fears coursing through the body politic will undoubtedly seem like Rambo’s muscles: a deflection from the country’s deepest fears. They were, in that sense, consoling. They allowed us to go on with our lives, to visit Disney World, as George W. Bush urged in the wake of 9/11, in order to prove our all-American steadfastness.
Above all, even as our imperial wars in the oil heartlands of the planet went desperately wrong, they allowed us not to think about empire or, until the economy melted down in 2008, decline. They allowed us to focus our fears on “them,” not us. They ensured that, like the other great imperial power of the Cold War era, when things began to spiral out of control we would indeed sleepwalk right into the imperial darkness.
Now that we’re so obviously there, the confusion is greater than ever. Theoretically, none of this should necessarily be considered bad news, not if you don’t love empires and what they do. A post-imperial United States could, of course, be open to all sorts of possibilities for change that might be exciting indeed.
Right now, though, it doesn’t feel that way, does it? It makes me wonder: Could this be how it’s always felt inside a great imperial power on the downhill slide? Could this be what it’s like to watch, paralyzed, as a country on autopilot begins to come apart at the seams while still proclaiming itself “the greatest nation on Earth”?
I don’t know. But I do know one thing: this can’t end well.
China as Number One?
Tired of Afghanistan and all those messy, oil-ish wars in the Greater Middle East that just don’t seem to pan out? Count on one thing: part of the U.S. military feels just the way you do, especially a largely sidelined navy—and that’s undoubtedly one of the reasons why the specter of China as this country’s future enemy has once again reared its ugly head.
Back before 9/11, China was the favored future uber-enemy of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and all those neocons who signed onto the Project for the New American Century and later staffed George W. Bush’s administration. After all, if you wanted to build a military beyond compare to enforce a long-term
As everyone knows, however, that “blip” proved far too much for the Bush administration. Finding itself hopelessly bogged down in two ground wars with ragtag insurgency movements on either end of the Greater Middle Eastern “mainland,” it let China-as-Monster-Enemy slip beneath the waves. In the process, the navy and, to some extent, the air force became adjunct services to the army (and the marines). In Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance, U.S. Navy personnel far from any body of water found themselves driving trucks and staffing prisons.
It was the worst of times for the admirals, and probably not so great for the flyboys either, particularly after Secretary of Defense Robert Gates began pushing pilotless drones as the true force of the future. Naturally, a no- dogfight world in which the U.S. military eternally engages enemies without significant air forces is a problematic basis for proposing future air force budgets.
There’s no reason to be surprised then that, as the war in Iraq began to wind down in 2009–2010, the “Chinese naval threat” began to quietly reemerge. China was, after all, immensely economically successful and beginning to flex its muscles in local territorial waters. The alarms sounded by military types or pundits associated with them grew stronger in the early months of 2011 (as did news of weapons systems being developed to deal with future Chinese air and sea power).
“Beware America, time is running out!” warned retired air force lieutenant general and Fox News contributor Thomas G. McInerney while describing China’s first experimental stealth jet fighter. Others focused on China’s “string of pearls”: a potential set of military bases in the Indian Ocean that might someday (particularly if you have a vivid imagination) give that country control of the oil lanes. Meanwhile, Kaplan, whose book about rivalries in that ocean came out in 2010, was back in the saddle, warning: “Now the United States faces a new challenge and potential threat from a rising China which seeks eventually to push the U.S. military’s area of operations back to Hawaii and exercise hegemony over the world’s most rapidly growing economies.”
Behind the overheated warnings lay a deeper, if often unstated, calculation, shared by far more than budget-anxious military types and those who wrote about them: that the United States was heading toward the status of late, great superpower and that, one of these years not so far down the line, China would challenge us for the number one spot on the seas—and on the planet.
The Usefulness of a Major Enemy
