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The Eagle Has Crash Landed , By: Wallerstein, Immanuel,
Foreign Policy, 00157228, Jul/Aug2002, Issue 131
Pax Americana is over. Challenges from Vietnam and the Balkans to
the Middle East and September 11 have revealed the limits of
American supremacy. Will the United States learn to fade
quietly, or will U.S. conservatives resist
and thereby transform a gradual decline into a rapid and dangerous fall?
The United
States in decline? Few people today would believe this assertion. The only
ones who do are the U.S. hawks, who argue
vociferously for policies to reverse the decline. This belief that the end of
U.S. hegemony has already
begun does not follow from the vulnerability that became apparent to all on September 11, 2001. In fact, 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. To understand why the so-called
Pax Americana is on the wane requires examining the
geopolitics of the 20th century, particularly of the century's final three
decades. This exercise uncovers a simple and inescapable conclusion: The
economic, political, and military factors that contributed to U.S. hegemony are the same
factors that will inexorably produce the coming U.S. decline.
The rise of
the United States to global hegemony
was a long process that began in earnest with the world recession of 1873. At
that time, the United States and Germany began to acquire an
increasing share of global markets, mainly at the expense of the steadily
receding British economy. Both nations had recently acquired a stable
political base-the United States by successfully
terminating the Civil War and Germany by achieving
unification and defeating France in the
Franco-Prussian War. From 1873 to 1914, the United States and Germany became the principal
producers in certain leading sectors: steel and later automobiles for the United States and industrial
chemicals for Germany.
The history
books record that World War I broke out in 1914 and ended in 1918 and that
World War II lasted from 1939 to 1945. However, it makes more sense to
consider the two as a single, continuous "30 years' war" between
the United States and Germany, with truces and
local conflicts scattered in between. The competition for hegemonic
succession took an ideological turn in 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany and began their quest
to transcend the global system altogether, seeking not hegemony within the
current system but rather a form of global empire. Recall the Nazi slogan ein tausendjähriges Reich (a
thousand-year empire). In turn, the United States assumed the role of
advocate of centrist world liberalism-recall former U.S. President Franklin
D. Roosevelt's "four freedoms" (freedom of speech, of worship, from
want, and from fear)-and entered into a strategic alliance with the Soviet Union, making possible the
defeat of Germany and its allies.
World War II
resulted in enormous destruction of infrastructure and populations throughout
Eurasia, from the Atlantic to the Pacific
oceans, with almost no country left unscathed. The only major industrial
power in the world to emerge intact-and even greatly strengthened from an
economic perspective-was the United States, which moved swiftly
to consolidate its position.
But the
aspiring hegemon faced some practical political
obstacles. During the war, the Allied powers had agreed on the establishment
of the United Nations, composed primarily of countries that had been in the
coalition against the Axis powers. The organization's critical feature was
the Security Council, the only structure that could authorize the use of
force. Since the U.N. Charter gave the right of veto to five powers-including
the United States and the Soviet Union-the council was
rendered largely toothless in practice. So it was not the founding of the
United Nations in April 1945 that determined the geopolitical constraints of
the second half of the 20th century but rather the Yalta meeting between
Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet leader Joseph
Stalin two months earlier.
The formal
accords at Yalta were less important
than the informal, unspoken agreements, which one can only assess by
observing the behavior of the United States and the Soviet Union in the years that
followed. When the war ended in Europe on May 8, 1945, Soviet and Western (that is, U.S., British, and French)
troops were located in particular places-essentially, along a line in the
center of Europe that came to be called the Oder-Neisse Line. Aside from a few minor adjustments,
they stayed there. In hindsight, Yalta signified the
agreement of both sides that they could stay there and that neither side
would use force to push the other out. This tacit accord applied to Asia as well, as evinced
by U.S. occupation of Japan and the division of Korea. Politically,
therefore, Yalta was an agreement on
the status quo in which the Soviet Union controlled about one
third of the world and the United States the rest.
Washington also faced more
serious military challenges. The Soviet Union had the world's
largest land forces, while the U.S. government was under
domestic pressure to downsize its army, particularly by ending the draft. The
United States therefore decided to
assert its military strength not via land forces but through a monopoly of
nuclear weapons (plus an air force capable of deploying them). This monopoly
soon disappeared: By 1949, the Soviet Union had developed nuclear
weapons as well. Ever since, the United States has been reduced to
trying to prevent the acquisition of nuclear weapons (and chemical and
biological weapons) by additional powers, an effort that, in the 21st
century, does not seem terribly successful.
Until 1991,
the United States and the Soviet Union coexisted in the
"balance of terror" of the Cold War. This status quo was tested
seriously only three times: the Berlin blockade of 1948-49,
the Korean War in 1950-53, and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. The result
in each case was restoration of the status quo. Moreover, note how each time
the Soviet Union faced a political crisis among its satellite
regimes-East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Poland in 1981-the United States engaged in little
more than propaganda exercises, allowing the Soviet Union to proceed largely as
it deemed fit.
Of course,
this passivity did not extend to the economic arena. The United States capitalized on the
Cold War ambiance to launch massive economic reconstruction efforts, first in
Western
Europe and then in Japan (as well as in South Korea and Taiwan). The rationale was
obvious: What was the point of having such overwhelming productive
superiority if the rest of the world could not muster effective demand?
Furthermore, economic reconstruction helped create clientelistic
obligations on the part of the nations receiving U.S. aid; this sense of
obligation fostered willingness to enter into military alliances and, even
more important, into political subservience.
Finally, one
should not underestimate the ideological and cultural component of U.S. hegemony. The
immediate post-1945 period may have been the historical high point for the popularity of
communist ideology. We easily forget today the large votes for Communist
parties in free elections in countries such as Belgium, France, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Finland, not to mention the
support Communist parties gathered in Asia-in Vietnam, India, and Japan-and throughout Latin America. And that still
leaves out areas such as China, Greece, and Iran, where free elections
remained absent or constrained but where Communist parties enjoyed widespread
appeal. In response, the United States sustained a massive
anticommunist ideological offensive. In retrospect, this initiative appears
largely successful: Washington brandished its role
as the leader of the "free world" at least as effectively as the Soviet Union brandished its
position as the leader of the "progressive" and
"anti-imperialist" camp.
The United States' success as a
hegemonic power in the postwar period created the conditions of the nation's
hegemonic demise. This process is captured in four symbols: the war in Vietnam, the revolutions of
1968, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the terrorist attacks of
September 2001. Each symbol built upon the prior one, culminating in the
situation in which the United States currently finds
itself-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.
What was the
Vietnam War? First and foremost, it was the effort of the Vietnamese people
to end colonial rule and establish their own state. The Vietnamese fought the
French, the Japanese, and the Americans, and in the end the Vietnamese
won-quite an achievement, actually. Geopolitically, however, the war
represented a rejection of the Yalta status quo by
populations then labeled as Third World. Vietnam became such a
powerful symbol because Washington was foolish enough to
invest its full military might in the struggle, but the United States still lost. True, the
United States didn't deploy nuclear
weapons (a decision certain myopic groups on the right have long reproached),
but such use would have shattered the Yalta accords and might
have produced a nuclear holocaust-an outcome the United States simply could not
risk.
But Vietnam was not merely a
military defeat or a blight on U.S. prestige. The war
dealt a major blow to the United States' ability to remain
the world's dominant economic power. The conflict was extremely expensive and
more or less used up the U.S. gold reserves that
had been so plentiful since 1945. Moreover, the United States incurred these costs
just as Western Europe and Japan experienced major
economic upswings. These conditions ended U.S. preeminence in the
global economy. Since the late 1960s, members of this triad have been nearly
economic equals, each doing better than the others for certain periods but
none moving far ahead.
When the
revolutions of 1968 broke out around the world, support for the Vietnamese
became a major rhetorical component. "One, two, many Vietnams" and "Ho,
Ho, Ho Chi Minh" were chanted in many a
street, not least in the United States. But the 1968ers did
not merely condemn U.S. hegemony. They
condemned Soviet collusion with the United States, they condemned Yalta, and they used or
adapted the language of the Chinese cultural revolutionaries who divided the
world into two camps-the two superpowers and the rest of the world.
The
denunciation of Soviet collusion led logically to the denunciation of those
national forces closely allied with the Soviet Union, which meant in most
cases the traditional Communist parties. But the 1968 revolutionaries also
lashed out against other components of the Old Left-national liberation
movements in the Third World, social-democratic movements in Western Europe, and New Deal
Democrats in the United States-accusing them, too, of collusion with what the
revolutionaries generically termed "U.S. imperialism."
The attack on
Soviet collusion with Washington plus the attack on
the Old Left further weakened the legitimacy of the Yalta arrangements on which
the United States had fashioned the
world order. It also undermined the position of centrist liberalism as the
lone, legitimate global ideology. The direct political consequences of the
world revolutions of 1968 were minimal, but the geopolitical and intellectual
repercussions were enormous and irrevocable. Centrist liberalism tumbled from
the throne it had occupied since the European revolutions of 1848 and that
had enabled it to co-opt conservatives and radicals alike. These ideologies
returned and once again represented a real gamut of choices. Conservatives
would again become conservatives, and radicals, radicals. The centrist
liberals did not disappear, but they were cut down to size. And in the
process, the official U.S. ideological
position-antifascist, anticommunist, anticolonialist-seemed
thin and unconvincing to a growing portion of the world's populations.
The onset of
international economic stagnation in the 1970s had two important consequences
for U.S. power. First,
stagnation resulted in the collapse of "developmentalism"-the
notion that every nation could catch up economically if the state took
appropriate action-which was the principal ideological claim of the Old Left
movements then in power. One after another, these regimes faced internal
disorder, declining standards of living, increasing debt dependency on
international financial institutions, and eroding credibility. What had
seemed in the 1960s to be the successful navigation of Third World
decolonization by the United States-minimizing disruption and maximizing the
smooth transfer of power to regimes that were developmentalist
but scarcely revolutionary-gave way to disintegrating order, simmering
discontents, and unchanneled radical temperaments.
When the United States tried to intervene,
it failed. In 1983, U.S. President Ronald Reagan sent troops to Lebanon to restore order. The
troops were in effect forced out. He compensated by invading Grenada, a country without
troops. President George H.W. Bush invaded Panama, another country
without troops. But after he intervened in Somalia to restore order, the
United States was in effect forced
out, somewhat ignominiously. Since there was little the U.S. government could
actually do to reverse the trend of declining hegemony, it chose simply to
ignore this trend-a policy that prevailed from the withdrawal from Vietnam
until September 11, 2001.
Meanwhile,
true conservatives began to assume control of key states and interstate
institutions. The neoliberal offensive of the 1980s
was marked by the Thatcher and Reagan regimes and the emergence of the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a key actor on the world scene. Where
once (for more than a century) conservative forces had attempted to portray
themselves as wiser liberals, now centrist liberals were compelled to argue
that they were more effective conservatives. The conservative programs were clear.
Domestically, conservatives tried to enact policies that would reduce the
cost of labor, minimize environmental constraints on producers, and cut back
on state welfare benefits. Actual successes were modest, so conservatives
then moved vigorously into the international arena. The gatherings of the
World Economic Forum in Davos provided a meeting
ground for elites and the media. The IMF provided a club for finance
ministers and central bankers. And the United States pushed for the
creation of the World Trade Organization to enforce free commercial flows
across the world's frontiers.
While the United States wasn't watching, the Soviet Union was collapsing. Yes,
Ronald Reagan had dubbed the Soviet Union an "evil
empire" and had used the rhetorical bombast of calling for the
destruction of the Berlin Wall, but the United States didn't really mean it
and certainly was not responsible for the Soviet Union's downfall. In truth,
the Soviet Union and its East European imperial zone collapsed
because of popular disillusionment with the Old Left in combination with
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's efforts to save his regime by liquidating Yalta and instituting
internal liberalization (perestroika plus glasnost). Gorbachev succeeded in
liquidating Yalta but not in saving the
Soviet
Union (although he almost did, be it said).
The United States was stunned and
puzzled by the sudden collapse, uncertain how to handle the consequences. The
collapse of communism in effect signified the collapse of liberalism,
removing the only ideological justification behind U.S. hegemony, a
justification tacitly supported by liberalism's ostensible ideological
opponent. This loss of legitimacy led directly to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, which Iraqi leader
Saddam Hussein would never have dared had the Yalta arrangements remained
in place. In retrospect, U.S. efforts in the Gulf
War accomplished a truce at basically the same line of departure. But can a
hegemonic power be satisfied with a tie in a war with a middling regional
power? Saddam demonstrated that one could pick a fight with the United States and get away with it.
Even more than the defeat in Vietnam, Saddam's brash
challenge has eaten at the innards of the U.S. right, in particular
those known as the hawks, which explains the fervor of their current desire
to invade Iraq and destroy its
regime.
Between the
Gulf War and September 11, 2001, the two major arenas
of world conflict were the Balkans and the Middle East. The United States has played a major
diplomatic role in both regions. Looking back, how different would the
results have been had the United States assumed a completely
isolationist position? In the Balkans, an economically successful
multinational state (Yugoslavia) broke down,
essentially into its component parts. Over 10 years, most of the resulting
states have engaged in a process of ethnification,
experiencing fairly brutal violence, widespread human rights violations, and
outright wars. Outside intervention-in which the United States figured most
prominently-brought about a truce and ended the most egregious violence, but
this intervention in no way reversed the ethnification,
which is now consolidated and somewhat legitimated. Would these conflicts
have ended differently without U.S. involvement? The
violence might have continued longer, but the basic results would probably
not have been too different. The picture is even grimmer in the Middle East, where, if anything, U.S. engagement has been
deeper and its failures more spectacular. In the Balkans and the Middle East alike, the United States has failed to exert
its hegemonic clout effectively, not for want of will or effort but for want
of real power.
Then came
September 11-the shock and the reaction. Under fire from U.S. legislators, the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) now claims it had warned the Bush
administration of possible threats. But despite the CIA's focus on al Qaeda and the agency's intelligence expertise, it could
not foresee (and therefore, prevent) the execution of the terrorist strikes.
Or so would argue CIA Director George Tenet. This testimony can hardly
comfort the U.S. government or the
American people. Whatever else historians may decide, the attacks of September 11, 2001, posed a major
challenge to U.S. power. The persons
responsible did not represent a major military power. They were members of a nonstate force, with a high degree of determination, some
money, a band of dedicated followers, and a strong base in one weak state. In
short, militarily, they were nothing. Yet they succeeded in a bold attack on U.S. soil.
George W.
Bush came to power very critical of the Clinton administration's
handling of world affairs. Bush and his advisors did not admit-but were
undoubtedly aware-that Clinton's path had been the
path of every U.S. president since
Gerald Ford, including that of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. It had
even been the path of the current Bush administration before September 11.
One only needs to look at how Bush handled the downing of the U.S. plane off China in April 2001 to see
that prudence had been the name of the game.
Following the
terrorist attacks, Bush changed course, declaring war on terrorism, assuring
the American people that "the outcome is certain" and informing the
world that "you are either with us or against us." Long frustrated
by even the most conservative U.S. administrations, the
hawks finally came to dominate American policy. Their position is clear: The
United States wields overwhelming military power, and even though countless
foreign leaders consider it unwise for Washington to flex its military
muscles, these same leaders cannot and will not do anything if the United States simply imposes its
will on the rest. The hawks believe the United States should act as an
imperial power for two reasons: First, the United States can get away with it.
And second, if Washington doesn't exert its
force, the United States will become
increasingly marginalized.
Today, this
hawkish position has three expressions: the military assault in Afghanistan, the de facto support
for the Israeli attempt to liquidate the Palestinian Authority, and the
invasion of Iraq, which is reportedly
in the military preparation stage. Less than one year after the September
2001 terrorist attacks, it is perhaps too early to assess what such
strategies will accomplish. Thus far, these schemes have led to the overthrow
of the Taliban in Afghanistan (without the complete dismantling of al Qaeda or the capture of its top leadership); enormous
destruction in Palestine (without rendering Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat "irrelevant," as Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon said he is); and heavy opposition from U.S. allies in
Europe and the Middle East to plans for an invasion of Iraq.
The hawks'
reading of recent events emphasizes that opposition to U.S. actions, while
serious, has remained largely verbal. Neither Western Europe nor Russia nor China nor Saudi Arabia has seemed ready to
break ties in serious ways with the United States. In other words,
hawks believe, Washington has indeed gotten
away with it. The hawks assume a similar outcome will occur when the U.S. military actually
invades Iraq and after that, when
the United States exercises its
authority elsewhere in the world, be it in Iran, North Korea, Colombia, or perhaps Indonesia. Ironically, the hawk
reading has largely become the reading of the international left, which has
been screaming about U.S. policies-mainly
because they fear that the chances of U.S. success are high.
But hawk
interpretations are wrong and will only contribute to the United States' decline,
transforming a gradual descent into a much more rapid and turbulent fall.
Specifically, hawk approaches will fail for military, economic, and
ideological reasons.
Undoubtedly,
the military remains the United States' strongest card; in
fact, it is the only card. Today, the United States wields the most
formidable military apparatus in the world. And if claims of new, unmatched
military technologies are to be believed, the U.S. military edge over
the rest of the world is considerably greater today than it was just a decade
ago. But does that mean, then, that the United States can invade Iraq, conquer it rapidly,
and install a friendly and stable regime? Unlikely. Bear in mind that of the
three serious wars the U.S. military has fought
since 1945 (Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf War),
one ended in defeat and two in draws-not exactly a glorious record.
Saddam
Hussein's army is not that of the Taliban, and his internal military control
is far more coherent. A U.S. invasion would
necessarily involve a serious land force, one that would have to fight its
way to Baghdad and would likely
suffer significant casualties. Such a force would also need staging grounds,
and Saudi Arabia has made clear that
it will not serve in this capacity. Would Kuwait or Turkey help out? Perhaps, if
Washington calls in all its
chips. Meanwhile, Saddam can be expected to deploy all weapons at his
disposal, and it is precisely the U.S. government that keeps
fretting over how nasty those weapons might be. The United States may twist the arms of
regimes in the region, but popular sentiment clearly views the whole affair
as reflecting a deep anti-Arab bias in the United States. Can such a conflict
be won? The British General Staff has apparently already informed Prime
Minister Tony Blair that it does not believe so.
And there is
always the matter of "second fronts." Following the Gulf War, U.S. armed forces sought
to prepare for the possibility of two simultaneous regional wars. After a
while, the Pentagon quietly abandoned the idea as impractical and costly. But
who can be sure that no potential U.S. enemies would strike
when the United States appears bogged down
in Iraq?
Consider,
too, the question of U.S. popular tolerance of nonvictories. Americans hover between a patriotic fervor
that lends support to all wartime presidents and a deep isolationist urge.
Since 1945, patriotism has hit a wall whenever the death toll has risen. Why
should today's reaction differ? And even if the hawks (who are almost all
civilians) feel impervious to public opinion, U.S. Army generals, burnt by Vietnam, do not.
And what
about the economic front? In the 1980s, countless American analysts became
hysterical over the Japanese economic miracle. They calmed down in the 1990s,
given Japan's well-publicized
financial difficulties. Yet after overstating how quickly Japan was moving forward, U.S. authorities now seem
to be complacent, confident that Japan lags far behind.
These days, Washington seems more inclined
to lecture Japanese policymakers about what they are doing wrong.
Such triumphalism hardly appears warranted. Consider the
following April 20, 2002, New York Times report: "A Japanese laboratory
has built the world's fastest computer, a machine so powerful that it matches
the raw processing power of the 20 fastest American computers combined and
far outstrips the previous leader, an I.B.M.-built machine. The achievement
... is evidence that a technology race that most American engineers thought
they were winning handily is far from over." The analysis goes on to
note that there are "contrasting scientific and technological
priorities" in the two countries. The Japanese machine is built to analyze
climatic change, but U.S. machines are designed
to simulate weapons. This contrast embodies the oldest story in the history
of hegemonic powers. The dominant power concentrates (to its detriment) on
the military; the candidate for successor concentrates on the economy. The
latter has always paid off, handsomely. It did for the United States. Why should it not
pay off for Japan as well, perhaps in
alliance with China?
Finally,
there is the ideological sphere. Right now, the U.S. economy seems
relatively weak, even more so considering the exorbitant military expenses
associated with hawk strategies. Moreover, Washington remains politically
isolated; virtually no one (save Israel) thinks the hawk
position makes sense or is worth encouraging. Other nations are afraid or
unwilling to stand up to Washington directly, but even
their foot-dragging is hurting the United States.
Yet the U.S. response amounts to
little more than arrogant arm-twisting. Arrogance has its own negatives.
Calling in chips means leaving fewer chips for next time, and surly
acquiescence breeds increasing resentment. Over the last 200 years, the United States acquired a
considerable amount of ideological credit. But these days, the United States is running through
this credit even faster than it ran through its gold surplus in the 1960s.
The United States faces two
possibilities during the next 10 years: It can follow the hawks' path, with
negative consequences for all but especially for itself. Or it can realize
that the negatives are too great. Simon Tisdall of
the Guardian recently argued that even disregarding international public
opinion, "the U.S. is not able to fight
a successful Iraqi war by itself without incurring immense damage, not least
in terms of its economic interests and its energy supply. Mr. Bush is reduced
to talking tough and looking ineffectual." And if the United States still invades Iraq and is then forced to
withdraw, it will look even more ineffectual.
President
Bush's options appear extremely limited, and there is little doubt that the United States will continue to
decline as a decisive force in world affairs over the next decade. The real
question is not whether U.S. hegemony is waning
but whether the United States can devise a way to
descend gracefully, with minimum damage to the world, and to itself.
By Immanuel Wallerstein
Immanuel Wallerstein is a senior research scholar at Yale University and author of, most
recently, The End of the World As We Know It: Social Science for the
Twenty-First Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
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