Friday, December 21, 2012

American Decline and the Promise of Pax Scandinaviana


Founders' Porch goes scholarly...

An American "Hyper-power" resists decline at the
 Olympic Qualifier in Antigua, Guatemala in May 2012.
Over a decade ago Kenneth Waltz noted that “American leaders seem to believe that America’s pre-eminent position will last indefinitely.” President Barack Obama has proved no exception: in his 2012 State of the Union address he argued, “Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about.” Robert Kagan concurs, noting that “great powers rarely decline suddenly,” that the recent economic meltdown is but a cyclical bust, that the US military “would defeat any competitor in a head-to-head battle,” and that competitors like China have far to go to match American military, economic, and cultural power. In fact, argues Tufts China expert Michael Beckley, far from decline, American power relative to China is even greater than it was at the beginning of the auspicious post-Cold War era.

Yet despite their rightful aversion to American decline, all three overlook an ominous reality upon which most international relations scholars and economists – from American primacy sympathizer Richard Haas to realist Richard Betts to globalist Joseph Stiglitz– find agreement: an America $16 trillion in debt, staggering back from costly “head-to-head battles” in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and bracing itself for the rise of nonpolar threats of a globalized world and the IMF-predicted 2016 Chinese economic eclipse, is surely in decline.

Still, Kagan and others are right to find American primacy – however illusive – desirable. The shift from British to American preeminence after World War II went smoothly due to the nations’ shared values. The shift from American preeminence to a nonpolar world, in contrast, will be tumultuous as power spreads to less sure bets. America’s enemies, for example, from al Qaeda to Iran, will be freer to pursue their terrorist agendas.  And America’s less overtly belligerent challengers, such as China, promise no less a challenge: as Huntington warned of the post bipolar world, “the great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural,” and indeed, China’s culture clashes much more sharply with America than Britain’s culture did in the 20th century.[1]

Faced with these dire prospects, how could any Westerner support American decline and the rise of non-liberal powers? Realists, from Betts to John Mearsheimer, believe that an America in which imperial overstretch is no longer feasible is a stronger America. Scholars like Rashid Khalidi and Ian Lustick, in turn, who reject the notion of American humanitarianism, have no qualms with what they see as the comeuppance of a self-interested aggressor. And globalists like Stiglitz, who believe the unipolar America of yore had rigged the deck against developing economies, see in American decline the chance for greater “global prosperity.”[2]

Yet these arguments crucially overlook the cultural stakes. American culture is not merely declining, it is being replaced. Unfortunately for the realists, America’s replacement will not be a “billiard ball,” but likely an elusive set of illiberal powers. Anti-imperialists, for their part, will discover that imperialism is not a negative-sum game. And most importantly, the globalists will find that American culture itself is not constant: bloated statism has not only brought America into indebted decline, but also leaves it with a dependent citizenry unable to ever fight its way back to the top.

The American order.
To brace for American decline is of course not to say that American principles and ideas never reflected the global order. Quite to the contrary, what makes the stakes of American decline so high is that, until recent years, America had been the unipolar power presiding over what Kagan correctly calls “the world America made.” America had taken the baton of Western values from Britain after World War II and enjoyed a greater capability than any other state to project its corollary interests. Its success in doing so lay in adhering to the very values it espoused: first, as Princeton theorist John Eikenberry notes, “the rule of law, constitutional principles, and inclusive institutions of political participation,”[3] and second, as Columbia’s Charles Calomiris notes, a Hayekian vision of free markets and “competition in trade.”[4]

At the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama giddily announced the arrival of “the end of history.” Certainly the emergence of a unipolar American order boded well for the peaceful spread of Western values. As Eikenberry argues, America was a benevolent superpower overseeing an order whose “open and institutionalized character…minimized the possibilities of hegemonic excess over the long term.”[5] Yet Fukuyama’s analysis – and later Tom Friedman’s exuberant globalization analysis – failed to give culture and ideology their due.  America’s unipolar moment did not mean the extinction of other ideologies. In fact, what made America so exceptional was not simply an adherence to Princeton scholar Robert Keohane’s procedural “institutional checks against retrogression,”[6] but what Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth call an ability to distinguish “substance” of policies, such as accepting unilateralism when it meant defending Kosovo.[7] Meanwhile, while the US was not the only country to embrace globalization, globalization synergized well with American culture. As Calomiris argues, “meaningful and lasting economic progress must be grounded in the deeply rooted evolution of institutions and individual attitudes.”[8]

Yet the individual attitudes that will have the greatest influence in the coming nonpolar world are less clear, though likely more illiberal.  Constructivist Alexander Wendt famously argued that anarchy is what states make of it, and indeed, amid the power diffusion of the nonpolar world, global order will reflect the ideologies and cultures brought to bear on it. Unfortunately, the very economic and military power that Huntington believes must be maintained in order to preserve Western values is the very power that the pro-decline Westerners seek to limit. And whereas Huntington calls on the West “to develop a more profound understanding of the basic religious and philosophical assumptions underlying other civilizations,” the multi-cultural West sees no threat worth investigating.[9]

Rise of non-liberal powers.
The clearest winners of American decline are America’s illiberal enemies. While Columbia’s Jack Snyder argued in 2004 that “no combination of states or other powers can challenge the United States militarily, and no balancing coalition is imminent,” recent developments suggest a grimmer reality.[10] Just last September, a few impoverished, poorly trained Taliban inflicted one of the most damaging air losses in US military history when they destroyed six harrier jets in Afghanistan. Only days earlier, terrorists had killed the US ambassador to Libya, destroying a US diplomatic mission, shortly after mobs in Egypt attempted to overrun the embassy in Cairo.  Yet more valuable to the rising Islamists than these military defeats are the cultural defeats: President Obama responded to the Benghazi attack in his United Nations speech, for example, by denouncing blasphemy.  Fukuyama warned of the political relevance of Islam, but found it “hard to believe that the movement will take on any universal significance.”[11]Yet the changing demographics in Europe tell a different story. Unfortunately, the failure to understand the illiberal ideologies misidentifies the West as their cause. In reality, Western decline is their unleashing.

Realist perspective.
Realists welcome a measured American decline as a means to avoiding imperial overstretch. They accept the French label for America as a “hyperpower.” Such powers, Waltz argues, “facing few impediments to the exercise of their wills, often act in ways that create future enemies.”[12] For Betts, an end to unipolarity brings “humility about one country’s capacity to remake another in its own image.”[13]. As Waltz puts it, “Both the predominance of America and, one may hope, the militarization of international affairs will diminish with time.”[14] Yet for all the realist emphasis on zero-sum games, they overlook the ideological zero-sum game at play. Shariah law in a post-America Afghanistan, for example, will have a much different effect than the US Army’s Counterinsurgency Manual.

Betts mocks Eikenberry’s defense of America having its cake and eating it by saying “So the strong do what they want – when they can – after all.”[15] Yet Betts overlooks the possibility that the powers that replace America will do just that. It takes a strong faith in American exceptionalism indeed to believe that the US can shrink from the global stage and not face the strong-handed antics and norms of the next power.  “Idealism,” according to Snyder, “stresses that a consensus on values must underpin any stable political order.”[16] Unfortunately, the realists have yet to posit such values, let alone a strategy for defending them.

Democratic perspective.
Other Western scholars embrace American decline as the humbling of an aggressive, anti-democratic hegemony. For Kishore Mahbubani, American hegemony was at best a well-intentioned meddler, ignorant of the fact that “no country welcomes foreign invaders.” Khalidi, who claims that America has never done anything to promote democracy in the Middle East, argues that in fact, “the entire Arab regional system was upheld by that hyper-power, whose support was crucial to the survival of most of the dictatorial regimes now trembling as their peoples challenge them.”[17] Lustick goes so far as to claim that a “plausible and historically valid Iraqi analysis” of the Gulf War was Saddam’s own characterization of the war as “the U.S. colonial invasion of a part of our homeland.”[18]

Yet these democrats view American power in a vacuum, ignoring the tyrannies that American decline promises to embolden. As theorist E.H. Carr notes, “readiness to fight to prevent change is just as unmoral as readiness to fight to enforce it.”[19] The Syrian revolutionaries who watched earlier this year as the US told Turkey it could not establish a humanitarian corridor in Syria must share Carr’s sentiment. Furthermore, GWU’s Martha Finnemore argues that “the pattern of intervention cannot be understood apart from the changing normative context in which it occurs.”[20] The regional hegemons that fill the American void will likely not share America’s liberal motives for intervention. Even Sheri Berman, a scholar of the left, admits America’s positive role in promoting democracy. “The liberal left,” she argues, “has been wrong to dismiss the neoconservative logic of war and foreign-led transformation applied to democracy.”[21] As America declines, authoritarian states can be take solace in knowing they are more secure than ever.

Globalist perspective.
For the globalists who believe the US has taken advantage of liberal economic institutions in order to enrich itself at the expense of the world, American decline offers an opportunity to reset the economic order. “With globalization,” argues Stiglitz, “when the United States sneezes, much of the rest of the world risks catching pneumonia.”[22] Stiglitz blames America’s “unfettered market ideals,” as well as the US government’s “failure to design an effective stimulus package,” for the 2008 global economic meltdown.  While Stiglitz believes the $16 trillion US debt is “not a big problem right now,” he admits that “the question is not whether the world will move away from the dollar reserve system altogether, but whether it does it thoughtfully and carefully,” embracing such a system as a means to “curb America’s profligacy.”

While Stiglitz is right that the US sneezed and gave the world pneumonia, he misdiagnoses the sneeze’s cause. “The presence of implicit protection via government bail-outs,” Calomiris argues, “especially of insolvent banks, means that taxpayers in developing countries are perpetually at risk of transferring vast sums of money to the privileged elites within their countries as the result of emergency transfers to insolvent banks and borrowers.”[23] Thus, the problem was not too much unfettered competition, but not enough. Furthermore, Stiglitz’ prescription of a “global regulatory regime” is not just misguided, but naïve: an America in decline is appealing to realists precisely because it will have less ability to engineer the world, yet Stiglitz finds American decline compatible with an unfettered Mr. Fix-It role.

The late Tony Judt shares Stiglitz’ contempt for Hayekian liberalism, yet proposes a more targeted solution: rather than re-engineer the world, Judt argues for re-engineering America. His vision for America is a European style “social service state.”[24] This raises a key point of American decline: just as Calomiris reminds us that in addition to the static efficiency gains of free markets there are also gains in “ideas and opportunities,” so too does the American retreat to the European welfare state bring with it hidden costs: Tocqueville warned that America would decline when it fell victim to “democratic despotism,” in which “an immense, protective power” would keep Americans “in perpetual childhood.”[25] This declinist state “hinders, restrains, enervates, stifles, and stultifies so much that in the end each nation is no more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as its shepherd.” Judt idealizes the timid flock, what he calls “a social democracy of fear.” He rejects the Hayekian notion of “optimistic progress” and calls for a conservative Keynesian state.  Yet by eroding self-reliance, Tocqueville warned, “such nations are made ready for conquest,” for unfortunately America’s enemies have maintained their survival instincts.

Conclusion.
The world order that will succeed the American unipolar moment is difficult to forecast. Illiberal non-state actors like al Qaeda might grow, or might die out. Rising economic powers like China might act aggressively as a mostly male generation takes power, or might opt to implement the Stiglitz model for global regulation. What is certain, however, is that Americans will have less and less of a say in the matter. In the cultural battle, American economic and military decline means American values matter less. Ultimately, American decline is a choice Americans make for themselves. If America chooses to firmly reject the very Hayekian and Tocquevillian cultural values that made it successful, the brave new nonpolar world will have no shortage of over-zealous ideologies eager to forcefully fill the void.







[1] Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations,” Foreign Affairs (Summer 1993). p. 2.
[2] Joseph Stiglitz, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy (New York: Norton & company 2010) pp.210.
[3] G. John Ikenberry, “Getting Hegemony Right,” The National Interest (Spring 2001) . p. 24.
[4] Charles Calomiris, “A Globalist Manifesto for Public Policy: The Tenth Annual. p. 14.
[5] G. John Ikenberry, “Getting Hegemony Right,” The National Interest (Spring 2001) . p. 22.
[6] Robert Keohane, “Twenty Years of Institutional Liberalism,” International Relations Volume 22, Issue 2 (June 2012). P. 136.
[7] Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy (Princeton University Press 2010) pp. 18.
[8] Charles Calomiris, “A Globalist Manifesto for Public Policy: The Tenth Annual. p. 24.
[9] Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations,” Foreign Affairs (Summer 1993). p. 12.
[10] Jack Snyder, "One World, Rival Theories," Foreign Policy (November/December 2004). P. 56.
[11] Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest Volume 16 (Summer 1989)
[12] Kenneth Waltz, “Globalization and American Power,” The National Interest (Spring 2000) pg. 55.
[13] Richard K. Betts, “Not With My Thucydides, You Don't,” The American Interest Volume II, Issue 4 (March/April 2007). P. 143.
[14] Kenneth Waltz, “Globalization and American Power,” The National Interest (Spring 2000) pg. 56.
[15] Richard Betts, “Institutional Imperialism,” The National Interest (May/June 2011). P. 3.
[16] Jack Snyder, "One World, Rival Theories," Foreign Policy (November/December 2004). P. 55.
[17] Rashid Khalidi, “Preliminary Historical Observations on the Arab Revolutions of 2011,” Jadaliyya (March 21 2011)
[18] Ian Lustick, “The Absence of Middle Eastern Great Powers: Political ‘Backwardness’ in Historical Perspective,” International Organization, Volume 51, Issue 4 (Autumn 1997). P. 673.
[19] Edward Hallett Carr, “Realism and Idealism;” and Robert Gilpin, “Hegemonic War and International Change;” in Richard K. Betts, ed. Conflict After the Cold War: Arguments on Causes of War and Peace, Third Edition (New York: Pearson-Longman 2008).
[20] Martha Finnemore, "Constructing Norms of Humanitarian Intervention," in Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press 1996) p. 154.
[21] Sheri Berman, “How Democracies Emerge: Lessons from Europe,” Journal of Democracy (January 2007); and “The Debate on Sequencing,” response byThomas Carothers. P. 18.
[22] Joseph Stiglitz, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy (New York: Norton & company 2010) pp.210-237
[23] Charles Calomiris, “A Globalist Manifesto for Public Policy: The Tenth Annual. p. 24.
[24] Tony Judt, “What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy?” NYU Speech. 17 Dec 2009.
[25] Alexis De Tocqueville. Democracy in America. (1848).


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