twentieth century, a progressive delegitimation of America’s presidential and hence also national credibility, and a significant reduction in the self-identification of America’s allies with America’s security. The vast majority of US allies saw the 2003 war in Iraq as a unilateral, dubious, and expedient American overreaction to 9/11. Even in Afghanistan, where America’s allies came to join America in a shared cause focused on Al Qaeda, their support wavered and gradually receded. Earlier than the Americans, NATO allies engaged in Afghanistan came to realize that Bush’s conflating the campaign against Al Qaeda with the task of creating a modern and democratic Afghanistan was a contradiction in terms and in goals.
The fact is that modernizing reforms hastily introduced under foreign duress and in conflict with centuries of tradition rooted in deep religious convictions are not likely to endure without a protracted and assertive foreign presence. And the latter is likely to stimulate new spasms of resistance, not to mention the fact that the presence of about 14 million Pashtuns in Afghanistan (approximately 40% of its population) and about 28 million Pashtuns in Pakistan (about 15% of its population) makes more likely the eventual spread of the conflict from the former to the latter, thus resulting in an unmanageable territorial and demographic escalation.
The ominous lessons implicit in the foregoing are pertinent for America’s near-term future. In addition to the unfinished business of Afghanistan, and even still of Iraq, America continues to confront in the vast, unstable, heavily populated region east of Suez and west of Xinjiang three potentially larger geopolitical dilemmas: the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in nuclear-armed Pakistan, the possibility of a direct conflict with Iran, and the probability that a US failure to promote an equitable Israeli-Palestinian peace accord will generate more intense popular hostility against America in the politically awakening Middle East.
In the meantime, America’s basic strategic solitude persists, despite some cosmetic pronouncements by America’s friends and some gestures of support from nominal regional partners. Not only are America’s allies quietly disengaging from Afghanistan, but Afghanistan’s three neighboring regional powers, themselves potentially threatened by a spreading Islamic extremism, are prudently passive. They maintain a formally cooperative posture of sympathy for America’s concerns: in Russia’s case, by providing some logistical assistance to US military efforts; in China’s case, by reserved approval for sanctions against Iran; and in India’s case, by modest economic assistance to Afghanistan. At the same time, their leading strategists are doubtless aware that America’s continued embroilment in the region is diminishing America’s global status even as it diverts potential threats to their countries’ security. That, in a broad strategic calculus, is doubly beneficial to the still-resentful Russia, to the prudently rising China, and to the regionally anxious India. Both on regional as well as global scales, their geopolitical weight increases as America’s global stature gradually diminishes.
Therefore, it is important that the American public and the US Congress fully digest the ominous reality that in addition to a political gridlock at home perpetuating America’s domestic decay, a foreign policy not shaped by a realistic calculus of the national interest is a prescription for an America gravely at risk within the next twenty years. A larger war that spreads from Afghanistan to Pakistan, or a military collision with Iran, or even renewed hostilities between the Israelis and the Palestinians would draw America into regional conflicts with no clear-cut end in sight, with anti-American hostility spreading to the world of Islam as a whole, which accounts for about 25% of the world’s total population. That would end any prospects of America exercising the hopeful world role that beckoned so uniquely a mere two decades ago.
As argued earlier, the United States retains the potential for genuine national renewal, but only if there is a mobilization of national will. The United States should also be able to undo the self-isolation and loss of influence produced by recent US foreign policies. Given the wide gap between US political and military power and that of any likely rival, a timely combination of determined national self-improvement and of broadly redefined strategic vision could still preserve America’s global preeminence for a significant period.
But, it would be blithe escapism to dismiss entirely a much less positive vision of America’s future. Three basic scenarios of how and when America’s possible decline might occur come to mind. The extreme negative might involve a severe financial crisis suddenly plunging America and much of the world into a devastating depression. The close call that America experienced in 2007 is a reminder that such a dire scenario is not totally hypothetical. Coupled with the destructive consequences of an escalated US military engagement abroad, such a catastrophe could precipitate—in just several years—the end of America’s global supremacy. It would be small comfort that the foregoing in all probability would be transpiring in the context of a generalized global upheaval, involving financial collapses, the explosive spread of global unemployment, political crises, the breakup of some ethnically vulnerable states, and rising violence on the part of the world’s politically awakened and socially frustrated masses.
Though such a very rapid and historically drastic collapse by America may be less likely than a correction of US domestic and foreign policies (in part because 2007 was a valuable though painful warning signal), two other “intermediate” but alternative scenarios of continued decline might give rise to a much less gratifying future. The basic reality is this: America is simultaneously threatened by a slide backward into systemic obsolescence resulting from the lack of any forward progress on social, economic, and political reform and by the consequences of a misguided foreign policy that in recent years has been ominously out of touch with the postimperial age. Meanwhile, America’s potential rivals (especially in some parts of Asia) attain, step by determined step, a mastery of twenty- first-century modernity. Before too long, some combination of the foregoing could prove fatal to America’s domestic ideals as well as to its foreign interests.
Hence one “intermediate” and perhaps more likely outcome could involve a period of inconclusive domestic drift, combining spreading decay in America’s quality of life, national infrastructure, economic competitiveness, and social well-being, though with some belated adjustments in US foreign policy somewhat reducing the high costs and painful risks of America’s lately practiced propensity for lonely interventionism. Nonetheless, a deepening domestic stagnation would further damage America’s global standing, undercut the credibility of US international commitments, and prompt other powers to undertake an increasingly urgent—but potentially futile—search for new arrangements to safeguard their financial stability and national security.
Conversely, America could recover at home and still fail abroad. Hence the other intermediate but still negative outcome could entail some moderate progress on the domestic front, but with the potential international benefits of the foregoing unfortunately vitiated by the cumulatively destructive consequences of continued and maybe even somewhat expanded solitary foreign adventures (e.g. in Pakistan or Iran). Success at home cannot compensate for a foreign policy that does not enlist and generate cooperation from others but instead engages the United States in lonely and draining campaigns against an increasing number of (at times self-generated) enemies. No success at home can be truly comprehensive if resources are wasted on debilitating foreign misadventures.
In either case, a steady and eventually even terminal decline in America’s continued capacity to play a major world role would be the result. A lingering domestic or a protracted foreign malaise would sap America’s vitality, progressively demoralize American society, reduce America’s social appeal and global legitimacy, and produce perhaps by 2025 in an unsettled global setting a de facto end to America’s hubris-tically once-proclaimed ownership of the twenty-first century. But who could then seek to claim it?
- PART 3 -
THE WORLD AFTER AMERICA: BY 2025, NOT CHINESE BUT CHAOTIC
If america falters, the world is unlikely to be dominated by a single preeminent successor, such as China. While a sudden and massive crisis of the American system would produce a fast-moving chain reaction leading to global political and economic chaos, a steady drift by America into increasingly pervasive decay and/or into endlessly widening warfare with Islam would be unlikely to produce, even by 2025, the “coronation” of an effective global successor. No single power will be ready by then to exercise the role that the world, upon the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, expected the United States to play. More probable would be a protracted phase of rather inconclusive and somewhat chaotic realignments of both global and regional power, with no grand winners and many more losers, in a setting of international uncertainty and even of potentially fatal risks to global well-being. What follows analyzes the implications of that historically ominous—though certainly not predetermined—“if.”
