Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power

America, for better or for worse, is the focus of global attention. More than any other country, America’s multiethnic democracy has been and is the object of fascination, envy, and even occasional hostility on the part of the politically conscious global masses. That fundamental reality gives rise to some critical questions: Is the American system still an example worthy of worldwide emulation? Do the politically awakened masses see America as the hopeful portent of their own future? Do they view America as a positive influence in world affairs? Given that America’s capacity to influence international events constructively depends on how the world perceives its social system and its global role, it follows that America’s standing in the world will inevitably decline if negative domestic realities and internationally resented foreign initiatives delegitimize America’s historical role. Therefore, the United States, with all its inherent and historically unique strengths, must overcome its staggering domestic challenges and reorient its drifting foreign policy in order to recapture the admiration of the world and revive its systemic primacy.

1: THE SHARED AMERICAN DREAM

Over the decades, the “American dream” has captivated millions and drawn them to America’s shores. It is not an accident that America continues to attract the most motivated, not only among the already highly educated or those seeking a higher education but also among those determined to break out of the enslaving cycle of poverty in their own less-privileged societies. Many foreign scientists, doctors, and entrepreneurs still see more rewarding professional opportunities for themselves in America than at home. Their younger counterparts seek access to American graduate schools because an advanced degree from the United States enhances their career opportunities both at home and abroad. Many of the almost 1 million students who study here each year remain, seduced by America’s opportunities. Similarly, the impoverished Central Americans who in some cases risk their lives to gain access to America’s low-skill job market make an individual choice that sets them apart from those who do not dare embark on such a risky journey. For such motivated individuals, America still stands out as the world’s most attractive shortcut to a much-improved life. And America has been the ultimate beneficiary of their driving personal dreams.

The key to America’s prolonged historical appeal has been its combination of idealism and materialism, both of which are powerful sources of motivation for the human psyche. Idealism expresses the best in human instincts for it sanctifies the prioritizing of others over oneself and requires social and political respect for the intrinsic sacredness of all humans. The framers of America’s Constitution encapsulated that idealism by seeking to structure a political system that protected shared fundamental assumptions regarding the “inalienable rights” of the human being (though shamefully not outlawing slavery). Political idealism became thus institutionalized. At the same time, the very reality of America’s open spaces and absence of a feudal tradition made the material opportunities of the newly emergent country, with its unlimited frontiers, appealing to those who desired not only personal emancipation but also self-enrichment. On both scores, citizenship and entrepreneurship, America offered what Europe and the rest of the world then lacked.

The twin appeals of idealism and materialism defined America from the very start. It also attracted from across the Atlantic people who desired for their own homelands the promise inherent in the American Revolution. Whether it was Lafayette of France or Kosciuszko of Poland during the American war of independence, or Kossuth of Hungary in the mid-nineteenth century, their personal commitment to America popularized in Europe the image of a new type of society worthy of emulation. European admiration was further stirred by de Tocqueville’s trenchant dissection of the workings of the new American democracy and by Mark Twain’s captivating glimpses of the unfettered uniqueness of America’s frontier life.

But none of that would have been as uniquely attractive to the immigrant masses flocking early on to America were it not for the young nation’s abundant material opportunities. Free land and the absence of feudal masters beckoned. Economic expansion, fueled by the cheap labor of immigrants, created unprecedented business opportunities. Letters from immigrants to relatives back home spread a tempting vision, often a highly exaggerated one, of their personal success in the pursuit of the American dream. Alas, some would have to endure the painful discovery that America’s streets were not in fact “paved with gold.”

The absence of evident major external threats and the sense of secure remoteness (in contrast to the prevailing realities across the ocean), the new awareness of personal and religious freedom, and the temptation of material opportunities on the open frontier made the idealization of this new way of life synonymous with the reality. It also helped to obscure, and even justify, what otherwise should have been profoundly troubling: the progressive eviction and then extinction of the Indians (with the Indian Removal Act, passed by Congress in 1830, representing the first formalized case of ethnic cleansing), and the persistence of slavery followed by prolonged social repression and segregation of black Americans. But the broadly idealized version of American reality propagated by Americans themselves was not only a gratifying self-image; it was also widely shared abroad, especially in Europe.

As a consequence, a less-varnished image of the United States, entertained by America’s immediate neighbor to the south, was largely ignored until some decades into the twentieth century. For Mexico, the new America was something very different: an expansionist and territorially greedy power, ruthless in its pursuit of material interests, imperialist in its international ambitions, and hypocritical in its democratic affectations. And while Mexican history itself is not above reproach, much of its national grievance against America was grounded in historical fact. America expanded at Mexico’s expense, with an imperial momentum and territorial avarice not quite in keeping with the young American republic’s attractive international image. Soon thereafter, the momentum of that expansion resulted in the planting of the American flag in the Hawaiian kingdom and some decades later even across the Pacific, in the Philippines (from which the United States withdrew only after World War II). Cuba and parts of Central America also had encounters with US power that were reminiscent of Mexico’s experience.

Elsewhere, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century attitudes toward America were more mixed. Parts of South America were initially captivated by America’s rejection of European domination, and some also imitated America’s constitutional innovation. But the Monroe Doctrine, which barred European intervention in the Western Hemisphere, was viewed ambivalently, with some South American suspicions that its real motivation was self-serving. Political and cultural antagonism gradually surfaced, especially among the politically active parts of the middle-class intelligentsia. Two South American countries with regional ambitions, Peron’s Argentina and Vargas’ Brazil, explicitly challenged American regional domination during the twentieth century. The countries of Asia, geographically more remote and with their own political awakening delayed, were also vaguely attracted by America’s remarkable material development but they lacked Europe’s intellectual excitement and ideological affinity.

During the twentieth century, America’s global standing twice reached soaring heights. Its first occurrence was in the immediate aftermath of World War I, and its second was at the end of the Cold War. America’s then new international status was symbolized by President Wilson’s idealistic Fourteen Points, which contrasted sharply with Europe’s imperial and colonial legacies. To the practitioners of international power, it was evident that America’s militarily significant intervention in World War I and, even more, its preeminent role in defining new principles of national self-determination for the intra-European rearrangements of power marked the entry on the world scene of a mighty state endowed with unique ideological and material appeal. That appeal was not diminished even by the fact that for the first time the idealized America was closing its gates to foreign immigration. More important, so it briefly seemed, was that America’s new global engagement had began to reshape the basic patterns of international affairs.

However, the Great Depression a mere decade later was a warning signal of the American system’s internal vulnerability and a jolt to America’s global appeal. The sudden economic crisis, with its massive unemployment and social hardships, highlighted both the basic weaknesses and the iniquities of the American capitalist system as well as the related absence of an effective social safety net (with which Europe was just beginning to experiment). The myth of America as the land of opportunity persisted nonetheless, largely because the rise of Nazi Germany posed such a direct challenge to the values that Europe and America professed to share. Moreover, soon thereafter America became Europe’s last hope once World War II broke out. The Atlantic Charter codified those shared but threatened values and acknowledged, in effect, that their survival was ultimately dependent on America’s power. America also became the central point of refuge for European immigrants fleeing the rise of Nazism, evading the scourges of war, and increasingly fearing the spread of Communism. Unlike earlier times, a much higher percentage of the new arrivals were well educated, thus tangibly benefiting America’s social development and international standing.

Shortly after the end of World War II, America faced a new challenge: that of systemic rivalry with the Soviet Union. The new rival was not only a serious competitor for global power, but it also offered an ambitious alternative of its own in response to humanity’s quest for a better future. The combination of the Great Depression in the West and the emergence of the Soviet Union as World War II’s major geopolitical victor—with Moscow by the late 1940s dominating much of Eurasia, including at the time even China—further enhanced the appeal of Soviet Communism. Its crude and more ideologically contrived combination of idealism and materialism thus contended on a global scale with the promise of the American dream.

From its revolutionary beginnings, the new Soviet state asserted that it was in the process of creating the world’s first perfectly just society. Confident in the unique historical insights of Marxism, the USSR ushered in a new age of deliberately planned social innovation, allegedly based on egalitarian principles institutionalized coercively by an enlightened leadership. Coercive idealism in the service of rational materialism became the contagious utopian formula.

Though driven by mass terror, forced labor, large-scale deportations, and state-sponsored murder, the Soviet formula struck a chord with many in the politically awakened humanity shaken by two successive and enormously bloody wars. It was attractive to the poorer strata of the more advanced West, whose confidence in industrial progress was undermined by the Great Depression, to the increasingly anticolonial masses of Asia and Africa, and especially to radical intellectuals in search of historical certainty during a century of upheaval. Even shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, when the experiment was barely under way in the midst of social deprivation and civil war, it drew affirmations of fealty from visiting foreign intellectuals reminiscent of America’s early impact. “I have been over into the future, and it works,” famously proclaimed a starry-eyed leftist American political writer, Lincoln Steffens, after a brief visit to Russia in 1919.

In the decades to follow, that conviction provided the framework for the widespread glorification of the Soviet experiment and for the indifference toward, and even the justification of, the unprecedented scale of its mass killings. Whether it was Jean-Paul Sartre or Kim Philby, Anglican clerics or Quaker preachers, anticolonial political activists from Asia or Africa, or even a former Vice President of the United States visiting a Soviet concentration camp that was presented to him as a social rehabilitation center, the notion that the Soviet Union’s deliberately “rational” construction of the future was an improvement on America’s largely spontaneous development became widely appealing in an age when for the first time social engineering seemed feasible.

The deceptive lure of the Soviet system was buttressed by claims that in the Soviet Union social equality, full employment, and universal access to medical care were actually becoming reality. In addition, by the mid-1960s, Soviet successes in the initial phase of the space competition with the United States, not to mention the buildup of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, seemingly foreshadowed an inevitable Soviet triumph in the broader idealistic/materialistic rivalry with America. Indeed such an outcome was even officially predicted by Soviet leaders, who publicly asserted that by the 1980s the Soviet economy would outstrip America’s.

This first overt systemic challenge to America came to an abrupt end a quarter of a century later, more or less at the time when the Kremlin expected the Soviet Union to achieve global systemic preeminence. For a variety of reasons—with some rooted in Soviet foreign policy errors and some in domestic ideological sterility, bureaucratic degeneration and socioeconomic stagnation, not to mention the mounting political unrest in Eastern Europe and hostility from China—the Soviet Union imploded. Its implosion revealed an ironic truth: Soviet claims to systemic superiority, so echoed by external admirers, were exposed as a sham in almost every social dimension. This grand failure had been obscured by the intellectually appealing pretense to “scientific” social management claimed by a ruling elite that cynically hid its privileges while exercising totalitarian control. Once that control cracked, the disintegrating Soviet political system unveiled a society of relative retardation and deprivation. In reality, the Soviet Union had been a rival to America in only one dimension: military power. And so, for the second time in the twentieth century, America stood peerless.

It seemed for a while after 1991 that America’s triumph might last for a long time, with no rival in sight, imitation worldwide, and history seemingly halted. With systemic rivalry thus considered to be over, American leaders, in a somewhat ironic imitation of their fallen Soviet rivals, began to speak confidently of the twenty-first century as another American century. President Bill Clinton set the tone in his second inaugural address of January 20, 1997: “At this last presidential inauguration of the 20th century, let us lift our eyes toward the challenges that await us in the next century. . . . At the dawn of the 21^st century . . . America stands alone as the world’s indispensable nation.” He was echoed, much more grandly, by his successor, President George W. Bush: “Our nation is chosen by God and commissioned by history to be a model for the world” (August 28, 2000).

But before long, the combination of China’s impressive leap into the top ranks of the global hierarchy—resurrecting national anxiety dormant since Japan’s spectacular economic rise during the 1980s—and America’s growing indebtedness in the 2000s generated rising uncertainty regarding the longer-term durability of America’s economic vitality. After 9/11, the vaguely defined “war on terror” and its expansion in 2003 into a unilateral war of choice against Iraq precipitated a widespread delegitimation of US foreign policy even among its friends. The financial crisis of 2008–2009 then shook global confidence in the United States’ capacity to sustain its economic leadership over the long haul while simultaneously posing basic questions about the social justice and business ethics of the American system.

Yet even the financial crisis and the accompanying recession of 2007–2009—accompanied by shocking revelations of recklessly greedy speculation by Wall Street incompatible with basic notions of a socially responsible and productive capitalism—could not erase entirely the deeply ingrained image abroad of America’s distinctive success in blending political idealism with economic materialism. It was striking how soon after that crisis the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, fervently proclaimed in a speech to the US Congress (November 3, 2009) her “passionate” commitment to “the American dream.” She defined it as “the opportunity for everyone to be successful, to make it in life through their own personal effort,” adding with great conviction that “there is still nothing that inspires me more, nothing that spurs me on more, nothing that fills me more with positive feelings than the power of freedom” inherent in the American system.

Merkel’s message, however, carried with it an implicit warning of what it might mean for the West if the special image of the American way were to fade. And it did begin to fade, even before the crisis of 2008. America’s image was most compelling at a time when it was viewed from a distance, as it was until the second half of the twentieth century, or when it was seen as the defender of the democratic West in two world wars, or as the necessary counterweight to Soviet totalitarianism, and especially so when it emerged as the clear victor of the Cold War.

But in the historically new setting of an America astride the world, America’s domestic shortcomings were no longer shielded from close and critical scrutiny. Broad idealization of America gave way to more searching assessments. Thus, the world became more aware that America—despite being the hope of many who have the personal drive and ambition to become part of the “American dream”—is beset by serious operational challenges: a massive and growing national debt, widening social inequality, a cornucopian culture that worships materialism, a financial system given to greedy speculation, and a polarized political system.

2: BEYOND SELF-DELUSION

Americans must understand that our strength abroad will depend increasingly on our ability to confront problems at home. Deliberate national decisions regarding necessary systemic improvements are now the essential precondition to any reasonable assessment of America’s global prospects. This calls for clear-headed awareness on the part of Americans regarding their country’s defining vulnerabilities as well as its residual global strengths. A coolheaded appraisal is the necessary point of departure for the reforms that are essential if America is to retain its position of global leadership while protecting the fundamental values of its domestic order.

Six critical dimensions stand out as America’s major, and increasingly threatening, liabilities:

First is America’s mounting and eventually unsustainable national debt. According to the Congressional Budget Office’s August 2010 “Budget and Economic Outlook,” American public debt as a percentage of GDP stood at around 60%—a troubling number, but not one that puts the United States in league with the worst global offenders (Japan’s national debt, for example, stands at around 115% of GDP according to OECD net debt figures, though most of it is owned by the Japanese themselves; Greece and Italy each are at about 100%). But structural budgetary deficits driven by the imminent retirement of the baby boomer generation portend a significant long-term challenge. According to an April 2010 Brookings Institution study projecting the US debt under varied assumptions, the Obama administration’s existing budget would have the US national debt surpass the post–World War II high of 108.6% of GDP by 2025. Given that paying for this spending trajectory would require a substantial tax increase for which as of now there is no national will, the inescapable reality is that growing national indebtedness will increase US vulnerability to the machinations of major creditor nations such as China, threaten the status of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, undermine America’s role as the world’s preeminent economic model and, in turn, its leadership in such organizations as the G-20, World Bank, and IMF, and limit its ability to improve itself domestically and, at some point even, to raise the capital required to fight necessary wars.

America’s grim prospects have recently been pithily summed up by two experienced public policy advocates, R. C. Altman and R. N. Haass, in their 2010 Foreign Affairs article “American Profligacy and American Power,” in these grim words: “The post 2020 fiscal outlook is downright apocalyptic.... The United States is fast approaching a historic turning point: either it will act to get its fiscal house in order, thereby restoring the prerequisites of its primacy in the world, or it will fail to do so and suffer both the domestic and international consequences.” If America continues to put off instituting a serious reform plan that simultaneously reduces spending and increases revenue, the United States will likely face a fate similar to the previous fiscally crippled great powers, whether ancient Rome or twentieth-century Great Britain.

Second, America’s flawed financial system is a major liability. It presents twin vulnerabilities: First, it is a systemic time bomb that threatens not only the American but also the global economy because of its risky and self-aggrandizing behavior. And second, it has produced a moral hazard that causes outrage at home and undermines America’s appeal abroad by intensifying America’s social dilemmas. The excess, imbalance, and recklessness of America’s investment banks and trading houses—abetted by congressional irresponsibility regarding deregulation and the financing of home ownership, and driven by greedy Wall Street speculators—precipitated the financial crisis of 2008 and subsequent recession, inflicting economic hardship on millions.^{2}

Making matters worse, financial speculators both in banks and in hedge funds, effectively immune to shareholder control, reaped enormous personal profits without the redeeming benefits of economic innovation or job creation. The 2008 crisis also revealed the striking disconnect already noted between the lives of those at the top of the financial system and the rest of the country, not to mention the developing world. In fact, according to a 2009 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, the ratio of financial sector wages to those in the rest of the private economy exceeded 1.7 just prior to the 2008 financial crisis—levels not seen since before World War II. A reformation of the financial system through the implementation of simple but effective regulation, which increases transparency and accountability while promoting overall economic growth, is necessary to ensure that the United States remains economically competitive.

Third, widening income inequality coupled with stagnating social mobility is a long-term danger to social consensus and democratic stability, two conditions necessary for sustaining an effective US foreign policy. According to the US Census Bureau, since 1980 America has been experiencing a significant increase in income inequality: in 1980, the top 5% of households pocketed 16.5% of total national income, while the bottom 40% of households received 14.4%; by 2008, those disparities widened to 21.5% and 12%, respectively. The distribution not of annual income but of owned wealth by families was even more skewed: according to the Federal Reserve, in 2007 the richest 1% of US families possessed a staggering share of 33.8% of total net US national wealth, while the bottom 50% of American families accounted for only 2.5%.

This trend has launched the United States to the top of global indexes of both income and wealth inequality, making America the most unequal major developed country in the world (see Figures 2.1 and 2.2). Such income inequality might be more palatable if accompanied by social mobility, in keeping with notions of the American dream. But US social mobility has been essentially stagnant over the past few decades while at the same time income inequality has been rising. In fact, recent data for the Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality cited in Figure 2.1, indicates that the United States ranks worst among the major economies, roughly on a par with China and Russia, with only Brazil among the major developing countries posting higher levels of inequality.

Moreover, recent studies comparing US intergenerational earnings mobility to those of various European countries show that overall economic mobility is actually lower in “the land of opportunity” than in the rest of the developed world. Worse still, America now lags behind some European countries in the rate of upward income mobility. One of the principal causes has been America’s deficient public education system. According to the OECD, America spends one of the highest amounts per pupil on its primary and secondary education, yet has some of the lowest test scores in the industrialized world. That condition saps America’s economic prospects by leaving swaths of human capital untapped while degrading the global appeal of the American system.

FIGURE 2.1 INCOME INEQUALITY

(From most unequal to least)

SOURCE: CIA World Factbook

FIGURE 2.2 SHARE OF TOTAL NATIONAL WEALTH

SOURCE: UN University, 2/2008 report

America’s fourth liability is its decaying national infrastructure. While China is building new airports and highways, and Europe, Japan, and now China possess advanced high-speed rail, America’s equivalents are sliding back into the twentieth century. China alone has bullet trains on almost 5,000 kilometers of rails, while the United States has none. Beijing and Shanghai airports are decades ahead in efficiency as well as elegance of their equivalents in Washington and in New York, both of which increasingly smack embarrassingly of the third world. On a symbolic level, the fact that China—in rural and small-town respects still a premodern society—is now moving ahead of the United States in such highly visible examples of twenty-first-century structural innovation speaks volumes.

The American Society of Civil Engineers, in its 2009 report card of America’s infrastructure, put America’s overall grade at an abysmal D; this included a D in aviation, a C–in rail, a D–in roads, and a D+ in energy. Urban renewal has been slow, with slums and deteriorating public housing in numerous cities—including even the nation’s capital—a testimonial to social neglect. A mere train ride from New York City to Washington, DC (on the slow-moving and shaking Acela, America’s “high-speed” train) offers from its railcar windows a depressing spectacle of America’s infrastructural stagnation, in contrast to the societal innovation that characterized America during much of the twentieth century.

Reliable infrastructure is essential to economic efficiency and economic growth and simultaneously symbolic of a nation’s overall dynamism. Historically, the systemic success of leading nations has been judged, in part, on the condition and ingenuity of national infrastructure—from the roads and aqueducts of the Romans to the railroads of the British. The state of American infrastructure, as indicated above, is now more representative of a deteriorating power than of the world’s most innovative economy. And, as America’s infrastructure continues to decay it will inevitably impact its economic output, probably at a time of even greater competition with emerging powers. In a world where systemic rivalry between the United States and China is likely to intensify, decaying infrastructure will be both symbolic and symptomatic of the American malaise.

America’s fifth major vulnerability is a public that is highly ignorant about the world. The uncomfortable truth is that the United States’ public has an alarmingly limited knowledge of basic global geography, current events, and even pivotal moments in world history—a reality certainly derived in part from its deficient public education system. A 2002 National Geographic survey found that a higher percentage of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds in Canada, France, Japan, Mexico, and Sweden could identify the United States on a map than their American counterparts. A 2006 survey of young American adults found that 63% could not point out Iraq on a map of the Middle East, 75% could not find Iran, and 88% could not locate Afghanistan—at a time of America’s costly military involvement in the region. Regarding history, recent polls have shown that less than half of college seniors knew that NATO was formed to resist Soviet expansion and over 30% of American adults could not name two countries that America fought in World War II. Moreover, the United States lags behind other developed countries in these categories of public awareness. A 2002 National Geographic survey comparing current events and geography knowledge of young adults in Sweden, Germany, Italy, France, Japan, the UK, Canada, the United States, and Mexico found that the United States ranked second to last—barely beating out its less-developed neighbor, Mexico.

That level of ignorance is compounded by the absence of informative international reporting readily accessible to the public. With the exception of perhaps five major newspapers, local press and American TV provides very limited news coverage about world affairs, except for ad hoc coverage of sensational or catastrophic events. What passes for news tends to be trivia or human-interest stories. The cumulative effect of such widespread ignorance makes the public more susceptible to demagogically stimulated fear, especially when aroused by a terrorist attack. That, in turn, increases the probability of self-destructive foreign policy initiatives. In general, public ignorance creates an American political environment more hospitable to extremist simplifications—abetted by interested lobbies—than to nuanced views of the inherently more complex global realities of the post–Cold War era.

The sixth liability, related to the fifth, is America’s increasingly gridlocked and highly partisan political system. Political compromise has become more elusive, in part because the media, especially TV, talk radio, and political blogs, are increasingly dominated by vitriolic partisan discourse while the relatively uninformed public is vulnerable to Manichean demagogy. As a result, political paralysis often precludes the adoption of needed remedies, as in the case of deficit reduction. This, in turn, fuels the global impression of American impotence in the face of pressing social needs. Furthermore, America’s existing political system—highly dependent on financial contributions to political campaigns—is increasingly vulnerable to the power of well-endowed but narrowly motivated domestic and foreign lobbies that are able to exploit the existing political structure in order to advance their agendas at the expense of the national interest. Worst of all, according to a careful RAND Corporation study, “a process with roots as large and as deep as political polarization is unlikely to be reversed easily, if at all.... Our nation is in for an extended period of political warfare between the left and the right.”[4]

The foregoing six conditions currently provide ammunition for those already convinced of America’s inevitable decline. They also prompt negative comparisons with the cradle-to-the-grave paternalism of the relatively prosperous Europe. The European model—endowed in recent decades with higher international standing thanks to the combined financial-trading might of the European Union—has in recent years come to be seen by many as socially more just than the American model. However, on closer scrutiny, it has become more apparent that the European system writ large shares some of the above-mentioned negatives of its American counterpart, with potentially serious vulnerabilities for its long-term vitality. In particular, the Greek and later the Irish debt crises of 2010 and their contagion effects suggested that the paternalism and social generosity of the European economic system are potentially unsustainable and could eventually threaten Europe’s financial solvency, a realization taken recently to heart by the conservative leadership in the UK, leading to austerity measures forcing dramatic cuts in social welfare programs.

At the same time, as mentioned earlier, it is a fact that Europe has higher rates of social equality and mobility than America, despite America’s traditional reputation as “the land of opportunity.” Its infrastructure, especially in environmentally prudent public transport such as high-speed rail, is superior to America’s dilapidated airports, train stations, roads, and bridges. It also has a more geographically literate and internationally informed population that is less vulnerable to fear-mongering (despite the existence of fringe nationalist/racist parties on the right) and thus also to international manipulation.

Alternatively, China is often considered the wave of the future. However, given its social retardation and political authoritarianism, it is not America’s competitor as a model for the relatively more prosperous, more modern, and more democratically governed states. But, if China continues on its current trajectory and averts a major economic or social disruption, it could become America’s principal competitor in global political influence, and even eventually in economic and military might. The nonegalitarian and materialistically motivated dynamism of Chinese modernization already offers an appealing model to those parts of the world in which underdevelopment, demographics, ethnic tension, and in some cases negative colonial legacy have conspired to perpetuate social backwardness and poverty. For that portion of humanity, democracy vs. authoritarianism tends to be a secondary issue. Conceivably, a democratic and developing India could be China’s more relevant rival—but in overcoming such key social liabilities as illiteracy, malnutrition, poverty, and infrastructural decay, India is not yet competitive with China.

AMERICA’S BALANCE SHEET

3: AMERICA’S RESIDUAL STRENGTHS

The table above summarizing America’s liabilities and assets points to a critical proposition regarding the American system’s capacity to compete globally: the foreseeable future (i.e., the next two decades) is still largely America’s to shape. The United States has the capacity to correct its evident shortcomings—if it takes full advantage of its considerable strengths in the following six key areas: overall economic strength, innovative potential, demographic dynamics, reactive mobilization, geographic base, and democratic appeal. The basic fact, which the currently fashionable deconstruction of the American system tends to slight, is that America’s decline is not foreordained.

The first crucial asset is America’s overall economic strength. America is still the world’s largest national economy by a good margin. Only the economically united European region slightly surpasses the United States, but even so the Western European model exhibits higher structural unemployment and lower rates of growth. More significant for future trends is the fact that the United States, despite Asia’s rapid economic growth, has maintained for several decades its major share of the world’s GDP (see Figure 2.3). Its 2010 GDP of over $14 trillion accounted for just around 25% of global output, while its closest competitor, China, made up over 9% of global output with a close to $6 trillion GDP. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace estimates that the United States will go from having a $1.48 trillion smaller GDP than the EU in 2010 to a $12.03 trillion larger GDP than the EU in 2050; and in terms of per capita GDP, the United States will increase its lead over the EU from $12,723 in 2010 to $32,266 in 2050.

FIGURE 2.3 PERCENTAGE SHARE OF GLOBAL GDP

It is true that according to current forecasts, China, largely due to its overwhelming population base, will surpass the United States in total economic size sometime in the twenty-first century; the Carnegie Endowment puts that date around 2030. For similar reasons, although not at the same speed, India should climb up the global GDP ranks over the next forty years as well. But neither China nor India will come even close to US levels in per capita GDP (see Figure 2.4). Thus, neither China, nor India, nor Europe can match the United States in its potent economic mix of overall size and high per capita GDP. This economic advantage—assuming America also exploits its other assets—can preserve America’s global economic clout and systemic appeal, as well as its suction effect on global talent.

FIGURE 2.4 PROJECTED GDP AND GDP PER CAPITA

SOURCE: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s The World Order in 2010

FIGURE 2.5 QUALITATIVE ASSESSMENT OF THE UNITED STATES AND THE EMERGING POWERS^{3}

Partially driving America’s economic success is its second major asset: technological and innovative prowess derived from an entrepreneurial culture and superiority in institutions of higher education. The United States is ranked by the World Economic Forum as having the fourth most competitive economy in the world behind Switzerland, Sweden, and Singapore, and a Boston Consulting Group ranking of the world’s most innovative economies placed the United States above every large economy with the exception of South Korea.

Moreover, comparative assessments of other “softer” aspects of social vitality suggest that the United States still ranks relatively high in some key qualitative categories used to measure systemic performance in other major countries (see Figure 2.5). It is worrisome that America is not at the top, but more important for the near-term future is the fact that the major aspirants to the global elite perform markedly worse in most categories. That reinforces the point developed later regarding the absence in the near future of any effective substitute for America with the capacity to wield both the soft and the hard dimensions of international power.

Highly important in this regard is America’s dominance in higher learning: according to a Shanghai Jiao Tong University ranking of top global universities, eight out of the top ten universities in the world are American, as are seventeen out of the top twenty. These institutions not only provide America the means and technical know-how to maintain an economic—and even military—edge in pioneering the products and industries of the future. They also add to the domestic accumulation of human capital, as top researchers, engineers, and entrepreneurs around the world immigrate to the United States in order to reach their full educational and economic potential. This fact should remind Americans of how critical their higher educational dominance is to their country’s domestic vitality, international prestige, and global influence.

The third advantage is America’s relatively strong demographic base, especially when compared to those of Europe, Japan, and Russia. America’s large population of 318 million is an inherent source of global clout. Moreover, the United States does not suffer from nearly the same level of population aging, or even population decline, projected elsewhere. According to the UN, by 2050 the United States will have a population of 403 million, 21.6% of it above the age of sixty-five. During that time period, the EU will go from a population of 497 to 493 million, with 28.7% over the age of sixty-five in 2050. The numbers for Japan are even more striking: it will go from a population of 127 million in 2010 to 101 million in 2050, and will have a public that is 37.8% over sixty-five by midcentury (see Figure 2.6).

One of the reasons for this felicitous discrepancy is America’s ability to attract and assimilate immigrants—despite recent domestic unrest about this subject. America currently has a net migration rate of 4.25 per thousand population; Germany attracts 2.19, the UK 2.15, France 1.47, Russia 0.28, and China–0.34. This ability to attract and assimilate foreigners both shores up America’s demographic base and augments its long-term economic outlook and international appeal. If America yields to anti-immigrant and xenophobic tendencies, it could jeopardize the beacon effect that has proved so beneficial to America’s dynamism, prosperity, and prospects.

The fourth asset is America’s capacity for reactive mobilization. The pattern of its democratic politics is for delayed reactions, followed by social mobilization in the face of a danger that prompts national unity in action. That happened in warfare, with “Remember Pearl Harbor” becoming a slogan that helped to mobilize a national effort to turn America into a war-making arsenal. The race to the moon, once it gripped public imagination, had the effect of spurring massive technological innovation. America’s current dilemmas beg for a similar effort, and some of America’s liabilities provide ready-made foci for social mobilization on behalf of socially constructive goals. An attack on America’s frayed and antiquated infrastructure is one obvious target. A green America, in response to global warming, could be another. With effective presidential summoning of popular support, America’s material assets as well as entrepreneurial talents could be harnessed to undertake the needed domestic renewal.

FIGURE 2.6 PROJECTED TOTAL POPULATION AND AGING

SOURCES: UN projections, assuming medium fertility variant (EU is EU 27 )

SOURCES: (1-4) UN projections, assuming medium fertility variant, EU is EU 27; (5) CIA World Factbook.

Fifth, unlike some major powers, America has the advantage of a uniquely secure, natural resource–rich, strategically favorable, and very large geographic base for a population that is nationally cohesive and not beset by any significant ethnic separatism. America also is not threatened by the territorial ambitions of any neighbor. Its northern neighbor is a friend, and—truth be said—socially a more successful version of a shared way of life. Canada in its great geographic depth also enhances America’s security. America’s landmass is rich in natural resources, ranging from minerals to agriculture and increasingly also to energy, still much of which—especially in Alaska—is untapped. America’s location on the edge of the world’s two most important oceans—the Atlantic and the Pacific—offers a security barrier while America’s shores provide a springboard for maritime commerce and, if necessary, for transoceanic power projection. In brief, no other major country enjoys all of these advantages as a permanent condition as well as a beneficial opportunity.

America’s sixth asset is its association with a set of values—human rights, individual liberty, political democracy, economic opportunity—that are generally endorsed by its population and that over the years have enhanced the country’s global standing. America has long benefited from this ideological advantage, exploiting it in recent years to prevail successfully in the Cold War. Subsequently, however, some of that appeal has waned, largely because of widespread international disapproval of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and its associated excesses. The latter notwithstanding, the broad view of America as fundamentally a democracy still retains its residual appeal. For example, according to the 2010 Pew Global Attitudes Survey, in 2007 US favorability ratings were at a ten-year low, as nations like Indonesia held only a 29% favorable view of the United States and even allies like Germany held only a 30% favorable view. However, those numbers rebounded in 2010 with, for example, Indonesia holding a 59% favorable view and Germany holding a 63% favorable view.

Hence the invigoration of America’s positive international identification with its democratic traditions is both possible and desirable. Such values have been, and again could be, an asset to America, especially in comparison with the authoritarian regimes in China and Russia. The fact that these two countries are unable to boast of a universally appealing political ideology, though the former Soviet Union made a futile effort to do so during its systemic rivalry with the United States, is to America’s long-term advantage. While much of the world may resent the United States for its unilateral foreign policy actions, there is also a concerned awareness among many that a rapid US decline and isolationist retreat would set back prospects for stable international spread both of global economic development and of democracy.

The above six basic assets thus provide a powerful springboard for the historic renewal that America so badly needs. But the more difficult part of that renewal of relevance remains the urgent need to redress its already noted and potentially very serious systemic vulnerabilities. Remedies for coping with each major risk or deficiency do exist, and they are already the subject of lively national debates. It is not some mysterious historical determinants, but rather the continuing dearth of political will and national consensus to tackle the challenges that threaten America’s long-term prospects.

Americans now widely recognize the importance of critical domestic reforms, such as broad financial overhaul and long-term fiscal balancing, to America’s future domestic prosperity and constructive international role. Effectively addressing the deficiencies of America’s secondary educational system would also go a long way toward shoring up America’s long-term economic outlook because its qualitative improvement would redress many of the shortcomings mentioned earlier (notably inequality, social immobility, and public ignorance). Balancing the budget, financial reform, and addressing iniquitous income inequality all will require uncomfortable social tradeoffs in incentives, taxes, and regulations. Only a sense of shared social sacrifice in the pursuit of national renewal will generate the necessary solidarity at all societal levels.

Ultimately, America’s long-term success in self-renewal may require a fundamental change of focus in America’s social culture: how Americans define their personal aspirations and the ethical content of their national “dream.” Is the acquisition of material possessions way beyond the requirements of convenience, comfort, and self-gratification the ultimate definition of the good life? Could patiently and persistently pursued domestic reforms turn America into an example of an intelligent society in which a productive, energetic, and innovative economy serves as the basis for shaping a society that is culturally, intellectually, and spiritually more gratifying? Unfortunately, such a far-reaching reevaluation of the meaning of a good life might occur only after the American public has been shocked into a painful understanding that America itself will be in jeopardy if it continues on a course that leads from the pursuit of domestic cornucopia to a plunge into international bankruptcy.

The next several years should provide a partial insight into the future. If political gridlock and partisanship continue to paralyze public policy, if they preclude a socially fair sharing of the costs of national renewal, if they disregard the dangerous social tendency that magnify income disparities, if they ignore the fact that America’s standing in the global pecking order may be in jeopardy, the anxious prognosis of America’s decline could become its historical diagnosis. But that is not inevitable. It does not need to be the case, given the residual strengths of contemporary America and its demonstrated capacity for a nationally focused response to a challenge. That was the case after the Great Depression and during World War II, in the 1960s during the Cold War, and it can be so again.

4: AMERICA’S LONG IMPERIAL WAR

If the crash of 2007 provided an imperative lesson regarding the need to undertake a major reassessment of some of America’s basic systemic features, domestic values, and social policies, the date 9/11 similarly should encourage America to rethink seriously whether it has intelligently exploited the extraordinary opportunity of the peaceful yet geopolitically successful end of the Cold War.

It is now easy to forget how threatening the Cold War really was during its long four and a half decades. A hot war could have broken out suddenly at any moment with a decapitating strike that in minutes could have eliminated the US leadership, and in hours incinerated much of the United States and Soviet Union. The “Cold” War was stable only in the sense that its fragile mutual restraint depended on the rationality of a few fallible human beings.

Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States reigned supreme. Its political values and its socioeconomic system basked in global admiration and were the object of eager imitation. Its international position faced no challenges. The transatlantic relationship with Europe was no longer primarily based on a shared fear but instead on a common faith in a larger Atlantic community in which Europe was expected to move expeditiously toward its own more genuine political unity. In the Far East, Japan—America’s closest Asian ally—gradually ascended to international eminence. Fears that the Japanese “superstate” would take over America’s assets quietly waned. Relations with China had continued to improve following diplomatic recognition back in 1978 and China even became America’s partner in opposing the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in 1980. America’s attitude toward China thus had become more positive and, if anything, America was unreasonably complacent in its self-deceiving view that China’s domestic backwardness would for long prevent it from becoming America’s viable competitor.

America was thus widely seen as the world’s economic engine, political example, social beacon, and unchallengeable paramount power. Exploiting that advantage, it led, almost simultaneously, a successful global coalition evicting Iraq from its recently seized Kuwait—and did so with Russian support, Chinese compliance, and Syrian participation, not to mention the cooperation of America’s traditional allies. But America failed in the years that followed to seize the moment and address the conundrum of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since the war in 1967, the Middle Eastern problem had come to be—so to speak—owned by the United States as a result of its preeminent position in the region. However, except for President Carter’s significantly successful promotion of an Israeli-Egyptian peace accord, the United States played a largely passive role, even during its globally dominant status throughout the 1990s. After the assassination in 1995 of Israel’s realistic Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by an Israeli opponent of the peace process, a belated but futile effort by the United States to revive Israeli-Palestinian negotiations was attempted—but rather passively—only in the last six months of the eight-year Clinton presidency.

Soon thereafter came September 11, 2001—the culmination of increasingly violent Al Qaeda attacks on American targets throughout the 1990s. This tragic event provoked three major US reactions. First, President George W. Bush committed the United States to a military undertaking in Afghanistan not only to crush Al Qaeda and to overthrow the Taliban regime that had sheltered it, but also to shape in Afghanistan a modern democracy. Then, in early 2002 he endorsed the military operation undertaken by Prime Minister Sharon (whom he described as “a man of peace”) to crush the PLO in the Palestinian West Bank. Third, in early spring of 2003 he invaded Iraq because of unsubstantiated accusations of an Iraqi connection with Al Qaeda and of its alleged possession of “weapons of mass destruction.” Cumulatively, these actions heightened public animus toward the United States in the Middle East, enhanced Iran’s regional standing, and engaged America in two interminable wars.

By 2010, the Afghan and Iraqi wars were among the longest in America’s history. The first of these, undertaken within weeks of the terrorists’ attack on New York City, which had produced the largest number of civilian casualties ever inflicted by an enemy on American society, precipitated a publically endorsed military reaction designed to destroy the Al Qaeda network responsible for the attack, and to remove from power the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which had provided safe haven to the perpetrators. The second of these long wars was the early 2003 US military invasion of Iraq, supported from abroad only by a politically pliant British Prime Minister and by Israel, but otherwise opposed or viewed with skepticism by most of America’s other allies. It was publicly justified by the US President on the basis of dubious charges of Iraqi possession of WMDs, which evaporated altogether within a few months, with no supporting evidence ever found in US-OCCUPIED Iraq. Since this war commanded President Bush’s enthusiasm, the war in Afghanistan was relegated to almost seven years of relative neglect.

DURATION OF MAJOR US WARS

(As of March 2011, in number of months, * denotes an active war)

Afghanistan* 112

Vietnam 102

Independence 100

Iraq* 96

Civil War 48

World War II 45

Korea 37

Britain (1812) 32

Philippine insurrection 30

Mexico 21

World War I 20

Spain 3

Iraq (1991) 2

These two wars had one common trait: they were expeditionary military operations in hostile territories. In both cases, the Bush administration showed little regard for the complex cultural settings, deeply rooted ethnic rivalries generating conflicts within conflicts, dangerously unsettled regional neighborhoods (especially involving Pakistan and Iran), and the unresolved territorial disputes, all of which severely complicated US actions in Afghanistan and Iraq and ignited wider regional anti-American passions. Though America’s interventions were reminiscent of nineteenth-century punitive imperial expeditions against primitive and usually disunited tribes, in the new age of mass political awakening, warfare against aroused populism has become, as the United States has painfully discovered, more protracted and taxing. Last but by no means least, in the age of global transparency, a total victory, achieved ruthlessly by any means necessary has ceased to be a viable option; even the Russians, who did not hesitate to kill hundreds of thousands of Afghans and who drove several million of them into exile, did not go all out in seeking to prevail.

At the same time, however, both the Afghan and Iraqi conflicts—much like the West ’s expeditionary wars of the past—left the American homeland largely unaffected, except of course for soldiers and their families. Though both wars cost America billions of dollars and though their totals were higher than of all previous wars except for World War II, their cost as a percentage of America’s GDP was low because of the enormous expansion of the US economy. Moreover, the Bush administration refrained from increasing taxes in order to pay for the wars, financing them instead by more politically expedient borrowing, including from abroad. From a social perspective, the fact that the fighting and dying was being done by volunteers—unlike in the earlier Vietnamese and Korean wars—also reduced the societal scope of personal pain.

Insofar as the actual conduct of these wars is concerned, the several-years-long neglect of the War in Afghanistan in favor of the Iraq War was compounded by the Bush administration’s use of a deliberately sweeping definition of terrorism as a justification for prioritizing the campaign against Saddam Hussein, ignoring Iraq’s ideological hostility toward Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda’s reciprocal animus toward Saddam’s regime. By implicitly collating the two under the sweeping rubric of “Islamic jihad,” and by making the “war on terror” the justification for US military reactions, it became easier to mobilize American public outrage at 9/11 against not only the actual perpetrators but also against other Islamic entities. The “mushroom cloud,” said by Condoleezza Rice (then National Security Advisor) to be threatening America, thus became a convenient symbol for mobilizing public opinion against a newly designated and very sweeping target. It served to drive public fears to a high pitch, placing at a disadvantage those who dared to express reservations regarding the factual accuracy of the White House’s case for war against Iraq.

Demagogy fueled by fear can be a potent tool, effective in the short run but with significant long-term domestic and foreign costs. Its pernicious effects can be seen in some of the more notorious cases of abuse of Iraqi prisoners, including of some senior Iraqi officers. They were the byproducts of an atmosphere in which the enemy came to be seen as the personification of evil, and thus justifiably the object of personal cruelty. American mass media—including Hollywood movies and TV dramas—likewise contributed significantly to shaping a public mood in which fear and hatred were visually focused on actors with personally distinctive Arab features. Such demagogy inspired discriminatory acts against individual Muslim Americans, especially Arab Americans, ranging in scope from racial profiling to broad indictments against Arab American charities. Cumulatively, infusing into the “war on terror” a racial as well as religious dimension tarnished America’s democratic credentials, while the decision to go to war against Iraq a year and a half after 9/11 became a costly diversion.

It could have been—and should have been—otherwise. First of all, the Iraq War was unnecessary and should have been avoided. It soon acquired greater importance to President Bush than the earlier and justifiable US military reaction to the attack launched by Al Qaeda from Afghanistan. That made the conflict in Afghanistan more prolonged, bloody, and eventually more complex geopolitically because of its increasing suction effect on Pakistan. Second, even earlier, the United States should not have neglected Afghanistan after the Soviets withdrew. The country was literally shattered and in desperate need of economic assistance to regain some measure of stability. Both the Bush I and Clinton administrations were passively indifferent. The resulting void was filled in the 1990s by the Taliban, backed by Pakistan, which sought thereby to gain geostrategic depth against India. Before long, the Taliban offered hospitality to Al Qaeda and the rest is history. After 9/11, the United States had no choice but to respond forcefully.

But even then, the United States could have sought to fashion a comprehensive strategy for isolating Al Qaeda’s religiously extremist terrorists from the Muslim mainstream. That strategy, as this writer argued at the time on the op-ed pages of both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, should have combined an energetic campaign to disrupt existing terrorist networks (which the Bush administration, to its credit, did undertake) with a broader and longer-term political response designed to undercut support for terrorism by encouraging the moderates in the Muslim world to isolate Islamic extremism as an aberration, in a manner reminiscent of the successful political coalition against Saddam Hussein a decade earlier. But the pursuit of that strategic objective would have required also a serious US commitment to peace in the Middle East, and that proposition was anathema to Bush and his advisers.

The consequences were a dramatic decline in America’s global standing in contrast to the last decade of the 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?