The Decline of the United States

It is a commonplace to say that the U.S. is a decadent superpower, which will soon be eclipsed by China. Someone has written that the attack on the Twin Towers was the “fall of the Berlin Wall” for the U.S.

This is possible, but no one can be certain. When looking backward, we can see uncontrollable tendencies in history, and we may be overconfident in projecting them into the future.

One of the most brilliant theses known to social science was that of Malthus from the end of the eighteenth century. He postulated that while population increases geometrically, agricultural production grows arithmetically and therefore famines are unavoidable. This impeccable theory explained the previous 10,000 years, but around 1800 it lost its relevance, with the Industrial Revolution.

In 1972, the Club of Rome stunned the world with its cybernetic version of Malthus’s thesis, “The Limits of Growth,” warning that the world economy would collapse in the middle of the 21st century. But it didn’t consider technological advancements, either.

The prominent historian of civilizations, Arthur Toynbee, predicted that our civilization was headed for annihilation. A man of immense erudition, what weighed most heavily in his conclusions is that he wrote immediately after the two world wars and at the dawning of the balance of terror between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. But another world war never came.

Looking backwards, one sees a U.S. that is much less powerful than it was during the second half of the 20th century, and one may project this into the future.

There are alternate explanations. During the Cold War, countries fearing Soviet invasion or communist subversion closed ranks, with Washington as their leader. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, this was no longer necessary, and the old allies grew distant. Washington, in turn, withdrew from the business of securing every square on the geopolitical chessboard for its side, which had high costs in foreign aid and military deployments.

A unipolar political system is unstable. It is natural that other superpowers would arise to fill, in part, the vacuum left by the Soviet Union.

China has enjoyed extraordinary growth ever since Deng abandoned central planning and embraced the market. If we project this growth into the future, there will no doubt come a time when China will have the highest gross domestic product per capita in the world.

But we thought the same thing about Japan at the start of the 1990s.

The U.S. must still play the role of the enforcer of international order, incurring onerous and unproductive military spending. But in its favor, it will continue to be the magnet for innovators from around the world, and it exhibits a much healthier demographic structure than China, Europe, Russia and Japan.

Will it remain as the foremost global superpower at the end of the current century? Flip a coin.