Empire in Question: On Status of United States

The world will keep being American in the 21st century. The question is whether America will keep being its centerpiece, in spite of gloomy forecasts. Some thoughts on July 4th.

“Look around,” called Fareed Zakaria in his bestseller “The Post-American World,” a book particularly interesting to read this morning, July 4th, the birthday of the United States of America. Here’s what you’re going to see through Zakaria’s eyes: “The tallest building in the world is now in Taipei, and it will soon be overtaken by one being built in Dubai. The world’s richest man is Mexican, and its largest publicly traded corporation is Chinese. The world’s biggest plane is built in Russia and Ukraine, its leading refinery is under construction in India, and its largest factories are all in China … Its number one casino is not in Las Vegas but in Macao … The biggest movie industry… is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Even shopping, America’s greatest sporting activity, has gone global. Of the top ten malls in the world, only one is in the United States; the world’s biggest is in Beijing.”

The assumption is clear, and so is the argument, of which Zakaria is only one proponent: the American empire is waning and other superpowers are about to level the scores and maybe even surpass it. China and India – even, perhaps, Brazil – are the future. The U.S. of the early 21st century is Britain of the early 20th century or Spain of the 17th century.

The historian Niall Ferguson warned a year ago of a “sudden collapse” characteristic of empires and brought up the Roman Empire and the Soviet Union one: “The tipping point is often when the cost of servicing an empire’s debt is larger than the cost of its defense budget.” And, according to his estimate, “It will be the case in the next five years.” At the same event, the 2010 Aspen Ideas Festival, columnist Tom Friedman also asserted that “We’re in the worst decline of all and that’s a slow decline.” A title picked for Friedman’s new book forthcoming in America in some two months is: “That Used to be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back.”

Monopoly Broken?

Declinism doomsayers’ predictions make a perfect combination with the American mood during the third year of the gravest economic crisis since the second and third decades of the previous century. They are skillfully woven into the office of the one who has already been labeled “the first post-American president,” Barack Obama. There are, of course, those who admire him for his ability to fathom the new global reality and those who condemn him for not trying to change it with a due determination.

Gideon Rachman, who wrote about the “American Decline” for the magazine Foreign Policy, made a distinction between “formal speeches” where U.S. leaders explicitly welcome China’s rise on the premise that globalization “is not a zero-sum game” (meaning that all can mutually benefit and one party’s ascent does not require another’s downfall) and the fact that “America’s leaders are clearly beginning to have their doubts”. Rachman has also postulated that “America will never again experience the global dominance it enjoyed in the 17 years between the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 and the financial crisis of 2008.”

And, of course, it’s not necessary to accept these claims or reconcile with them as with a divine predestination. “This fashionable chatter could not be more wrong,” said Walter Russel Mead, who is one of the most fascinating political philosophers in American discourse, last week. He reasoned that focusing exclusively on China means missing India, and the competition between those two would prevent rise of one dominant power in Asia. “[When it comes to the world of ideas,] the American agenda will also be the global agenda in the 21st century,” he stated. Because in today’s world, the young people want America: “liberal capitalist democracy remains the wave of the future”.

Anyway, let every reader side with whichever projection he wishes to believe: prophesying a more American world where America itself is not at its center anymore? Or one that establishes a more American world where recovering America is playing a decisive role?