By Daniel Simpson
LONDON – Plus ça change in Washington, plus c’est la même chose, sort of.
The Bush/Cheney “War on Terror” is now Obama’s “Overseas Contingency Operation”. The Surge has hopped east to Afghanistan, and military spending is up, despite media claims it’s been “gutted“. Pakistan remains the nightmare-in-waiting, and China’s rise continues unimpeded. The only real shift is in expectations. Clinton-era fantasies about “full spectrum dominance” are as distant as Bush Jr’s vision of forces “strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States.” Instead, there’s greater realism, albeit tempered by Imperial delusions. The New World Order might be multi-polar after all, but the Pentagon still spends as much as every foreign force combined. The irony is how little influence this buys, despite hundreds of bases in two thirds of the countries on Earth. In which case, why bother having them?
The U.S. was “Number One in Relative Decline” a generation ago, when Paul Kennedy wrote his classic Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Now it’s like a heavyweight pinned to the ropes, at least when it comes to dictating outcomes. Iran seems to have won the Iraq war, while in the tribal badlands rechristened “Af-Pak”, turbaned men with beards look as resistant as ever to superpower arsenals, which more often than not blow away civilians. Elsewhere, China’s dropping hints about dropping the dollar. And for all the talk of a G2 axis with Beijing, Washington seems to be trying to hang onto influence via the G20, or any new clubs that might still do some of its bidding. Meanwhile, its economy’s unravelling. Never mind the debts and deficits that worried Kennedy, it will be tough to divert an ever-increasing share of shrinking output to the military-industrial complex, however many jobs it might provide. This all adds up to a clamp-down on spending, provided a lobby-hobbled Congress plays ball.
Nonetheless, the omens are confusing. “It has been a common dilemma facing previous ‘number-one’ countries,” Kennedy observed, “that even as their relative economic strength is ebbing, the growing foreign challenges to their position have compelled them to allocate more and more of their resources into the military sector, which in turn squeezes out productive investment and, over time, leads to the downward spiral of slower growth, heavier taxes, deepening domestic splits over spending priorities, and a weakening capacity to bear the burdens of defence.” Hence Britain’s bankruptcy east of Suez, or any number of earlier precedents, and the impossibility of a 1,000-year Reich, even under Uncle Sam’s soft power. However, Kennedy concluded, “there is no obvious ’successor state’ which can take over America’s global burdens in the way that the United States assumed Britain’s.” These amount to playing Caesar and keeping highways open; or at any rate shipping lanes for oil. Upon rising to pre-eminence in 1945, U.S. planners said Middle Eastern crude was “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.” Ensuring its safe passage has been an axiom of policy ever since.
For all the bluster about Chinese naval expansion, Beijing seems happy to let America do this work for the time being. Instead, it’s focused on buying influence, trading no-strings aid for mineral rights in Africa, Arabia and beyond. For now, the plan’s not backed with boots on the ground, or even the capacity to deliver them. But will long-term competition start an arms race, proxy skirmishes or full-blown conflict? None is inevitable, though Paul Kennedy stresses that “those who assume that mankind would not be so foolish as to become in another ruinously expensive Great Power war perhaps need reminding that that belief was also widely held for much of the nineteenth century.” It’s also worth recalling what ended the Great Depression, and precipitated U.S. hegemony. To quote the columnist Paul Krugman: “what saved the economy, and the New Deal, was the enormous public works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy’s needs.”
