Is the American empire already over?
By DOUG SAUNDERS
Saturday, October 5, 2002 – Print Edition, Page F3
All we seem to do these days is argue about the United States. And the arguments are awfully sparse, aren't they? Either our neighbour is the most powerful nation on Earth, a menacing imperialist intruder that we must resist, or it's the most powerful nation on Earth, a beneficial force of democracy and peace that we must join and support.
Let me offer you a new way of thinking about America:
Over.
Under this school of thought, the United States stopped being the world's dominant nation years ago, and has quietly collapsed into being Just Another Country. We haven't really noticed this, the theory goes, because most other countries still act as if the United States has its old military and financial power, an assumption that could be stripped of its invisible clothes in the event of a protracted Iraq war.
This is not a fringe theory. It comes from within the United States, from respected political scientists on the Ivy League campuses. Why does it get such little play? Both the left and the right have their entire houses built on the notion of a fixed and immutable American hegemony, pro- or anti-. Somewhere between these poles is this small community of thinkers, declaring that the end has already occurred.
"The United States has been fading as a global power since the 1970s, and the U.S. response to the terrorist attacks has merely accelerated this decline." So says Immanuel Wallerstein, the Yale University political scientist who is by far the most outspoken member of this camp. A gravelly old contrarian with little time for the orthodoxies of the left or the right, he may have gained his remove by teaching at McGill University in the 1970s.
In a forthcoming book, to be titled Decline of American Power,he describes his country as "a lone superpower that lacks true power, a world leader nobody follows and few respect, and a nation drifting dangerously amidst a global chaos it cannot control."
In his view, America gave up the ghost in 1974, when it admitted defeat in Vietnam and discovered that the conflict had more or less exhausted the gold reserves, crippling its ability to remain a major economic power. It has remained the focus of the world's attention partly for lack of any serious challenger to the greenback for the world's savings, and because it has kept attracting foreign investments at a rate of $1.2-billion (U.S.) per day.
But if it comes to a crunch, the United States can no longer prevail either economically or -- here is the most controversial statement -- militarily. In Mr. Wallerstein's calculus, of the three major wars the United States has fought since the Second World War, one was a defeat and two (Korea and the Gulf War) were draws.
Iraq, he told me recently, would be an end game. "The policy of the U.S. government, which all administrations have been following since the seventies, has been to slow down the decline by pushing on all fronts. The hawks currently in power have to work very, very hard twisting arms very, very tightly to get the minimal legal justification for Iraq that they want now. This kind of thing, they used to get with a snap of the fingers."
You don't have to agree with Mr. Wallerstein's hyperbolic view to be a member of the Over camp -- and many do disagree: When he first brought it up in the journal Foreign Policy this summer, half a dozen editorial writers in the United States attacked him. But more moderate thinkers have joined the club, including Charles Kupchan at Georgetown University, whose forthcoming book The End of the American Era makes a similar point in more subtle terms.
Joseph Nye at Harvard, a friend of Henry Kissinger's, argues in his new book The Paradox of American Power that "world politics is changing in a way that means Americans cannot achieve all their international goals acting alone" -- a tacit acknowledgment of Mr. Wallerstein's thesis.
This is how great powers end: Not by suddenly collapsing, but by quietly becoming Just Another Country. This happened to England around 1873, but it wasn't until 1945 that anyone there noticed.
Outsiders do notice. Spend some time talking to a currency trader or a foreign financier, and you'll glimpse the end of the almighty dollar: Right now, about 70 per cent of the world's savings are in greenbacks, while America contributes about 30 per cent of the world's production -- an imbalance that has been maintained for the past 30 years only because Japan collapsed and Europe took too long to get its house together.
A Japanese CEO told me this in blunt terms the other day: "It was Clinton's sole great success that he kept the world economy in dollars for 10 years longer than anyone thought he would. But nobody's staying in dollars any more."
There are other signs: The middling liberals, who in the 1960s would have sided with the left in opposing U.S. imperialism, are today begging for an empire. Michael Ignatieff, the liberal scholar, argued at length recently that the United States ought to become an imperial force -- on humanitarian grounds. Would this argument be necessary if the United States actually dominated the world?
I'm not sure whether to fully believe the refreshing arguments of Mr. Wallerstein and his friends, but they do have history on their side. In their times, Portugal, Holland, Spain, France and England all woke up to discover, far after the fact, that they were no longer the big global powers, but Just Another Country.
Like the bewildered Englishmen in Robert Altman's Gosford Park, they struggled to maintain their dignity while wondering just what those strange visitors from abroad were talking about.
dsaunders@globeandmail.ca
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