Staying Power and the American Future: Problems of Primacy, Policy, and Grand Strategy

Abstract

Many scholars, strategists and pundits contend that the US is in decline. They argue that America's national capabilities are significantly eroding, and that with the rise of important regional powers, its primacy in world affairs is rapidly diminishing as well. Yet America continues to possess significant advantages in critical sectors such as economic size, technology, competitiveness, demography, force size, power projection, military technology, and in the societal capacity to innovate and adapt. This article argues that the nature of material problems has been overstated, and that the US should be able to withstand modest erosion in its relative strength for some time to come without losing its predominant status. Instead, where limits to American primacy do exist, they are as or more likely to be ideational as they are material. The problem inheres as much or more in elite and societal beliefs, policy choices, and political will, as in economic, technological or manpower limitations at home, or the rise of peer competitors abroad.

Key Words:

• Primacy
• Decline
• Grand Strategy

Acknowledgements

For comments about this article, I wish to thank Michael Mandelbaum, Christopher Layne, Robert Jervis, Zachery Selden, Dan Hopkins, Keir Lieber, Edward Friedman, Benjamin J. Cohen, and panelists at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. In addition, I have benefitted from the suggestions of an anonymous referee for this journal, and I acknowledge with thanks the excellent research assistance of Matthew Giebler. Research for this work was supported by the Smith Richardson Foundation and by Georgetown University.

Notes

¹An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington DC, 4 September 2010. The arguments here are also foreshadowed in my article, ‘Persistent Primacy and the Future of the American Era’, International Politics (London) 46/2–3 (March 2009), 119–39.

²For a compelling statement of this point, see Michael Mandelbaum, The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World's Government in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Public Affairs 2006).

³Robert J. Lieber, The American Era: Power and Strategy for the 21st Century (New York: Cambridge UP 2005 and 2007).

⁴Michael Howard, ‘The Forgotten Dimensions of Strategy’, Foreign Affairs, Summer 1979, 977.

⁵Martin Wolf, ‘How the noughties were a hinge of history’, Financial Times, 23 Dec. 2009.

⁶Fareed Zakaria, ‘The Rise of the Rest’, Newsweek, 3 May 2008; The Post American World (New York: Norton 2008), 48, 217; and ‘Enfeebled superpower: how America lost its grip’, Sunday Times (London), 22 June 2008.

⁷Paul Kennedy, ‘American power is on the wane’, Wall Street Journal, 14 Jan. 2009, p.A13. Also see Francis Fukuyama, ‘The Fall of America, Inc’., Newsweek, 13 Oct. 2008.

⁸Paul Kennedy, ‘Back to Normalcy’, The New Republic, 21 Dec. 2010.

⁹Christopher Layne, ‘Graceful Decline: The End of Pax Americana’, The American Conservative, 6 April 2010.

¹⁰National Intelligence Council, Global Trends2025: A Transformed World (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office Nov. 2008).

¹¹Leslie H. Gelb, ‘Necessity, Choice, and Common Sense’, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2009, 56.

¹²E.g., Christopher Layne, ‘The Unipolar Illusion Revisited’, International Security 31/2 (Fall 2006); T.V. Paul, ‘Soft Balancing in the Age of US Primacy’, International Security 30/1 (Summer 2005), 46–71; Robert Pape, ‘Soft Balancing against the United States’, International Security 30/1 (Summer 2005), 7–45; Stephen M. Walt, Taming American Power (New York: Norton 2005).

¹³Paul Kennedy, ‘The eagle has landed’, Financial Times (London), 1 Feb. 2002.

¹⁴Quoted in Neil MacFarquhar, ‘Can't live with; can't live without’, New York Times, 16 Jan. 2005.

¹⁵Quoted in, ‘To Paris, US looks like a “hyperpower”’ New York Times, 5 Feb. 1999.

¹⁶Pew Research Center, Global Attitudes Project, ‘Obama More Popular Abroad Than at Home, Global Image of US Continues to Benefit’, 17 June 2010, <http://pewglobal.org/files/pdf/Pew-Global-Attitudes-Spring-2010-Report.pdf>; and Pew Research Center, Global Attitudes Project, ‘Confidence in Obama Lifts US Image Around the World’, 23 July 2009, <http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=264>. Also see Transatlantic Trends, Key Findings 2009, German Marshall Fund of the US, June 2009, <www.transatlantictrends.org/trends>.

¹⁷Results from the 2010 Pew Research Center poll, ‘US Favorability Rating’, question Q7a; also Q34a, Muslim Views of Obama’. Interviews conducted 7 April, 7–8 May 2010.

¹⁸For example, in 1970, a book by Andrew Hacker announced The End of the American Era (New York: Atheneum 1970). A generation later Charles Kupchan borrowed the same book title to deliver his own warning in The End of the American Era (New York: Knopf 2002).

¹⁹Philippe Roger, The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism (Univ. of Chicago Press 2005), 46.

²⁰Roger, The American Enemy, 7–14.

²¹Ezra Vogel, Japan as Number One: Lessons for America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1979).

²²Michael Mandelbaum, The Frugal Superpower: America's Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era (New York: Public Affairs 2010); and ‘Overpowered: Assessing the Case for American Restraint’, Foreign Affairs 89/3 (May/June 2010).

²³See growth projections for 2040–50 in National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2025 (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office Nov. 2008), vi, 7, 21.

²⁴Azar Gat, ‘The Return of Authoritarian Great Powers’, Foreign Affairs 86/ 4 (July/Aug. 2007), 59–69.

²⁵John Lewis Gaddis makes this point in Surprise, Security and the American Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 2004).

²⁶On grand strategy and the need for broad education, knowledge and vision see Charles Hill, Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order (New Haven, CT: Yale UP 2010).

²⁷See, e.g., Patricia Cohen, ‘Great Caesar's ghost! Are traditional history courses vanishing?’, New York Times, 11 June 2009.

²⁸‘Opinions and Attitudes of Full-time Faculty Members, 2007–08, All 4-year Institutions’, The American College Teacher; National Norms, for the 2007–8 HERI Faculty Survey, UCLA Higher Education Research Institute, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 28 Aug. 2009, 18, 27.

²⁹See Lydia Sad, ‘In 2010, Conservatives Still Outnumber Moderates, Liberals’ (Princeton, NJ: Gallup 25 June 2010), <www.gallup.com/poll/141032/2010-Conservatives-Outnumber-Moderates-Liberals.aspx>.

³⁰Robert Jervis, in ‘APSA Presidents Reflect on Political Science: Who Knows What, When, and How,’ Perspectives on Politics 3/2 (2005), 309–34, at 316. And see Robert Lieber, ‘Sifting and Winnowing: The Uses and Abuses of Academic Freedom’, International Studies Perspectives 8/4 (Nov. 2007), 410–17.

³¹Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, ‘Revising Revisionism: A New Look at American Communism’, Academic Questions 22/4 (Fall 2009), 452–62 at 461. The period covered is from 1972 until June 2009.

³²Michael Kazin, ‘Howard Zinn's History Lessons,’ Dissent, Spring 2004, reviewing A People's History of the United States, 1492–Present (New York: Perennial Classics 2003). The book went through at least five editions and sold over a million copies.

³³United Nations Development Program, Arab Human Development Report 2002, sponsored by the Regional Bureau for Arab States (New York: UNDP 2002), <www.nakbaonline.org/download/UNDP/EnglishVersion/Ar-Human-Dev-2002.pdf>.

³⁴Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2006), and ‘Party Polarization: 1879–2009,’ <http://polarizedamerica.com/#POLITICALPOLARIZATION>.

³⁵Morris P. Fiorina, with Samuel J. Adams and Jeremy C. Pope, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, 3rd ed. (New York: Longman 2011), xiii.

³⁶Ibid., 8.

³⁷‘Americans Strongly Desire That Political Leaders Work Together’, Gallup.com, 19 Jan. 2011, <www.gallup.com/poll/145679/Americans-Strongly-Desire-Political-Leaders- Work-Together.aspx?version = print>.

³⁸President Obama's response to a reporter's question at the G-20 Summit, Strasbourg, France, 4 April 2009. Quoted in James Kirchick, ‘Squanderer in Chief’, Los Angeles Times, 28 April 2009.

³⁹ National Security Strategy (US GPO: Washington DC May 2010), 17; also available at <www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/national_security_strategy.pdf>.

⁴⁰ The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (New York: Norton 2004), 362.

⁴¹ National Security Strategy (2010), 13.

⁴²Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random 1987).

⁴³Joseph S. Nye, ‘Is the US Declining? Reply to Paul Kennedy’, New York Review of Books, 11 Oct. 1990, and Kennedy's rejoinder. Also see Joseph S. Nye, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books 1990).

⁴⁴Source: World Economic Outlook Database. International Monetary Fund. Oct. 2010, <www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2010/02/weodata/index.aspx>.

⁴⁵William C. Wohlforth has made a similar point, e.g. ‘Unipolarity, Status Competition, and Great Power War’, World Politics, 61/1 (Jan. 2009), 28–57.

⁴⁶ The Economist, ‘Is there life after debt?’ 24 June 2010.

⁴⁷Kenneth Oye and I emphasized the effects of the diffusion of power in Kenneth Oye, Donald Rothchild and Robert J. Lieber (eds), Eagle Entangled: US Foreign Policy in a Complex World (New York: Longman 1979); and Oye, Lieber and Rothchild (eds), Eagle Defiant: US Foreign Policy in the 1980s (Boston: Little, Brown 1983).