The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

...These are much more contentious points and amount to expressions of opinion rather than truths which can be demonstrated from the historical evidence...

...Pitt the Younger is "assertive" (Elder and Younger Pitts, incidentally, are conflated in the index...

...Then, in the appalling crisis of 1958, Charles de Gaulle returned to power and in just a decade turned France right around...

...In seventeenth-century France there was, it is true, an expansionist party, particularly in Sully's day, but Louis XIV's so-called "wars of conquest" may have been the result more of faction-fighting at the French court, as the latest research suggests, than any deliberate and considered scheme to dominate Europe...

...The book was certainly worth publishing, because it has initiated a useful debate on the role of United States power in the world, and how and whether it should be sustained...

...policy, too...

...If, for instance, the Hitler regime had been content with the frontiers established in the autumn of 1938 by the Munich settlement, as most Germans wanted, it is likely that Germany would have established a military-political paramountcy in Europe without having to fight for it, and would be maintaining it to this day...

...In my time, three particular episodes brought home to me the importance of will in events...

...These are welcome disastrous decade for the United States...

...France had collapsed and made a separate peace, and Britain's position was increasingly desperate...

...He was dismayed by ed as a necessary overhead, like insurthe news because it was the first time ance and repair and maintenance, in the United States had come up against the continuing life of any economy...

...is a well-managed and graceful halved, in fact...

...He could not conceal his pessimism from me, and at my insistence explained the reasons for it in detail...

...Russia survived as a great power and indeed became a superpower as much as a result of chance and accident, and the sheer will of first Lenin, then Stalin, as by virtue of its economic strength...

...Naturally willpower alone is not enough...

...Hegemony, or even paramountcy (except in limited areas of special interest), was never an objective...

...Without them, events would have taken a totally different course, just as the history of Europe in the twenty years 1795-1815 would have been almost unimaginably transformed without Napoleon...

...All the indicators we could discern pointed downward...

...The turnaround has been much less sensational than in Britain, and less attributable to the willpower of a single personality...

...to accept an obligation to keep troops on the eastern side of the Atlantic, and the universal relief when Washington agreed to do so on a permanent basis...

...The way in which Margaret Thatcher, taking office in June 1979, set about the systematic restoration of British power, influence, and self-confidence, recalled the arrival of Churchill nearly forty years before, though the real comparison was with de Gaulle's work in France...

...But of 1945, Hitler and Goebbels, sitting in it indicates that there are no insupertheir Berlin bunker, read the brilliant able physical reasons why the United account of Frederick's survival in the States should not continue its limited biography by Thomas Carlyle—an out- role of preserving peace and maintain-standing exponent of the power of will ing roughly the present power balance in history—and drew comfort from it...

...But is it worth reading...

...That has been the pattern of U.S...

...The contempt in which Britain was held, almost universally, was apparent immediately one traveled abroad, and moves were afoot to formalize the loss of status by depriving Britain of her place as a permanent member of the U.N...

...Again, I was an eyewitness to events in France in the 1950s...

...What would be foolish, presidency, in Washington...

...Napoleon, to be sure, had global, or at any rate continental, visions...

...Of course, looking back on the 1950s with the advantage of hindsight, one can identify a number of hopeful factors in France's society and economy...

...Thus Henri IV is "charismatic," Richelieu "influential," Wallenstein "powerful...

...The United States, with an economy of nearly $8 trillion, will still be producing nearly T offer these reflections for the bene- twice as much as its nearest rival, 1 fit of American opinion-formers China, with an economy of under $4 who are inclined to accept the argu- trillion...

...Old-style diplomats in the nineteenth century used to have a saying about it: "Russia is never as strong as she looks...

...But it is nonetheless remarkable, particularly since at no time has President Reagan's party controlled both houses of Congress...

...The main thesis of the book is that there is an unavoidable correlation between economic and military power, and that when the economic power of a state exercising hegemony or paramountcy begins to decline, relative to others in the game, its military power, and so its political influence, is likely to decline too, sooner or later...

...Both wake of the Watergate abdication was of these involve subjective judgments, a collapse of national will which was and there will always be argument harrowing to observe...

...In all the wars the Hapsburgs undertook in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, dynastic and religious factors were the most important...

...Again, it was a superb demonstration of willpower by one exceptionally clear-sighted, self-assured, and obstinate person...

...spending, as a percentage of GNP, has power is inevitable and will probably fallen from about 13 percent during the accelerate and that the best option for Korean War to 6-7 percent today—the U.S...

...Moreover, they beg the question of what motivates a major power in building or maintaining large military establishments...

...What history teaches is also confirmed, in my view, by the experience of life...

...Indeed it is probably true to say that United States power in the world, in relation to the Soviet Union's, has actually increased over the last eight years, after a quarter-century of relative decline...

...up to the year 2010 and beyond...

...pow-It was put about frequently in the ers and Japan, as seems likely, increase 1970s, a dispiriting and in some ways their contribution...

...If we examine American policy in the period since 1945, similar aims were predominant...

...The likelihood is that abdication of responsibilities...

...decade, especially if both the E.C...

...To be ef- military rival, the USSR, will have sunk fective in history, the human will must to fourth place in the table by 2010—be combined with judgment and fifth if you count the European Comrealism...

...Frederick the Great saved the way ahead is not going to be easy, as Prussian state from disaster during the Discriminate Deterrence, the recently Seven Years War by prodigies of will- released report of the President's Corn-power, but he still possessed the nude- mission on Integrated Long Term us of an excellent army...

...Accord-machine had already been destroyed, ing to the report's forward projections and no amount of willpower could of economic growth, America's chief have saved the Third Reich...

...The United States, it seems to me, has always been a most reluctant superpower, and the fundamental instincts of the American people, I fear, are still isolationist...

...At home, the trade unions were aimlessly destroying not only the economy but the very rule of law itself...

...Certainly, if one examines English policy at the Anglo-Spanish talks at Somerset House in 1604, or the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) or the Congress of Vienna (1814-15) or the Treaty of Versailles (1919), the one thread running consistently through them all is thedesire for a secure and durable settlement which will allow military spending to be drastically reduced...

...This kind of large-scale potted history is extremely difficult to carry off, and I am afraid Professor Kennedy does not know how to do it...

...or, if so, he kept his optimism to himself...

...The first half is a long summary of the rise and fall of Hapsburg Spain, of Bourbon and Napoleonic France, and of the British Empire...

...The last years of the Fourth Republic were ones of unrelieved gloom, especially as France's decline did not seem to be a temporary or even a novel phenomenon, but part of a demoralizing process that had been going on, with brief interruptions, since 1815...

...He knew a great deal and I knew nothing at all, but I was not convinced by what he said because I had heard Churchill, who had just taken over as prime minister, on the radio, and was completely captured by his defiant—and to my father's mind, vainglorious—rhetoric...

...So I, in my ignorance, was proved right, and my father, in his knowledge and wisdom, wrong...

...Germany's power collapsed as a result of Hitler's reckless miscalculations—the mistakes of a single individual—rather than because of some inexorable laws of military-economic correlation...

...The need to cover the ground in a limited space reduces him to such feeble devices as encapsulating leading figures with a single adjective...

...I used to cite the case of de Gaulle single-handedly restoring France to national health as an outstanding example of the impact of will on politics which I had actually witnessed, little thinking I would see an equally impressive demonstration in my own country...

...what prevented him from doing so was not the lack of physical power but the logic of his race ideology...

...I spent the year about whether the right balance has 1980, the last of the debilitating Carter been struck...

...Reporting from Paris, I used to write articles with titles like "The Sick Man of Europe," the analogy being with nineteenth-century Turkey...

...munity as a single power...

...The relative decline in the economy seemed inexorable...

...Therein lay the careful balance of what a nation origin of the decision to extricate believes it can afford with what it America from Vietnam, in itself a rea- likewise believes is the minimum sonable one...

...The first was in the early summer of 1940, when I was eleven years of age...

...In an excellent review of the Kennedy book in Foreign Affairs, Professor W. W. Rostow has pointed out that it confuses powers which seek to establish a position of hegemony, like Napoleonic France in Europe, and powers which merely wish to preserve a certain balance of power, like England and (Rostow argues) the United States...

...they did not need a Professor Kennedy to warn them about the dangers of overstretching their resources in schemes of world conquest, since they went bankrupt often enough...

...I well remember the almost desperate eagerness with which postwar British and French governments pressed the US...

...That depends on how much time you have on your hands...

...Indeed, without it, the revival of France would not have taken place...

...But what followed in the necessary to preserve its security...

...Security Council...

...Napoleon could certainly have fenced Russia out of eastern Europe, had he chosen...

...Where I go further than Professor Rostow is in questioning some of Kennedy's assumptions about the drive to hegemony of the powers...

...the physical limitations of its resources That level has to be determined by a in determining policy...

...Japan could have destroyed the Russian position in East Asia in the first decade of the twentieth century, had not other great powers prevented her...

...military support, that the relative decline in U.S...

...Churchill had nothing really to contribute except his will, but it was a very strong will, and in the event it was enough to enable us to survive and turn the tide...

...If we look at the interwar period, for instance, the history of Europe was settled to a great extent by the overwhelming personalities of two extraordinary men, Hitler and Stalin...

...That But by then, of course, the German war is as far as anyone needs to see...

...There must be a minimal physical basis of power from which it can SARKES TARZIAN INC WRCB KTVN WITS WGTC WAJI CORPORATE OFFICE 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1988 operate...

...I recall a conversation with my father, who had fought through the First World War, was extremely well informed, and was only too well aware of the nature of our plight...

...liberals—who seem to have fallen eagerly on the text as a master plan for reducing America's overseas and defense commitments—than it does about America's real predicament...

...Thatcher got precious little support even from her own cabinet colleagues, let alone a nervous party and a demoralized nation...

...He hints that this has been happening to the United States and that its best course now is to reduce its physical outlays and concentrate on rebuilding its non-military economy...

...Again, Ludendorf had beaten Russia in 1918 and would have destroyed her as a major European power, had he not lost the war on the Western front...

...Indeed, a further weakness of Ken- nedy's book—to my mind its fundamental weakness—is that its quasi-deterministic approach, and the exaggerated stress it places on economic factors, itself reflecting the unconscious Marxist assumptions of the modern campus, makes far too little allowance for the importance of will in the shaping of great events...

...In the spring Strategy, makes abundantly clear...

...Gustavus Adolphus is also "influential" but "attractive" as well, lucky fellow...

...Initially at any rate, Mrs...

...The THE RISE AND FALL OF THE GREAT POWERS: ECONOMIC CHANGE AND MILITARY CONFLICT FROM 1500 TO 2000 Paul Kennedy/Random House/$24.95 Paul Johnson THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1988 39 states which most obviously fit into the pattern Kennedy seeks to impose on history are Hitlerite Germany and Russia, but both raise more problems for his general thesis than they solve...

...The more I study history, the more convinced I am that what happens is influenced as much by the willpower of key individuals as by the underlying pressure of collective forces...

...But again, over the last eight basis of a theoretical view of history years, we have all been able to watch which exaggerates the economic factors an impressive restoration of American while ignoring the human ones...

...Anyone who has followed British politics closely for the last thirty years will be familiar with such arguments, in relation to British overseas commitments...

...The truth of this admittedly ambiguous maxim has been demonstrated time and again...

...But no one was aware of them at the time...

...developments, and no one doubts that, As early as March 1968 the Treasury other things being equal, a nation is had impressed on Lyndon Johnson healthier if it spends less rather than that the country simply could not af- more on its armed forces...

...But Kennedy also argues, or rather appears to suggest (he tends to qualify or retract his major assertions), that the effort to prolong a paramountcy in a military sense after the economic power has passed its peak merely accelerates the relative economic decline...

...book about...

...In a sense this proposition is so obvious as to be a truism, and is scarcely worth stating, let alone writing a 650-page Paul Johnson is the author of Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties, The History of Christianity, and A History of the Jews...

...My advice to the reader is to skip the whole of the first half and begin the book on page 347...

...Hitler was certainly in a position to "tame" the Soviet Union in 1941, possibly by changing the regime...

...ments which Kennedy's book seems to It is worth recalling that U.S...

...Already it is becoming difficult to recall the sheer hopelessness and despondency of British public life in the 1970s...

...All kinds of factors contributed to this transformation, which reversed a decline lasting over 150 years, but the biggest single one was de Gaulle's own massive will...

...he also has a great many fascinating statistical tables, though perhaps they do not prove as much as he seems to think...

...That is another example of the influence of will on geopolitics...

...I doubt if there was ever any Hapsburg plan to establish a European hegemony, more an unwillingness to surrender any of the rights of the family firm, including the right to impose a religious settlement of the prince's choosing...

...One of the tragedies of the 1930s, as the British see it, was the inability of their governments to persuade the United States to undertake any kind of physical role in Europe...

...but it is odd that he should have agreed to the Louisiana Purchase, recognized even at the time as an extraordinary act of largesse...

...The THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1988 41...

...publishing industry, and the state of mind of U.S...

...Russia is never as weak as she looks...

...For the second half, covering the last half-century, the professor is familiar with the sources and has a lot of instructive things to say...

...Her economy was integrated, her political influence restored, and, perhaps most important, the French themselves came to believe that their country had a future again...

...But other ford both rising expenditure on the things are not always equal, and a pruVietnam war and the expanding Great dent level of defense should be regard-Society program...

...In point it will fall still further during the next of fact this argument is not exactly new...

...Having watched the power of will at work three times in my own lifetime, pushing on the hinge of history and turning the door against the apparent pressure of events, I have no doubt that it is a major factor in determining the destiny of nations, and that historians must allow for its importance—as of course the good ones have always done...

...Because ofthis, the Czarist empire, and its Soviet successor, have always looked both menacing and fragile—vertiginous is perhaps the word...

...Observing however, would be to follow Paul Ken-the way the administration operated, I nedy's advice and begin a systematic lost confidence, for the first time, in the scaling down of American political and ability of the United States to lead the military efforts in the world on the West...

...Czar Alexander I is "messianic," Nicholas I merely "autocratic...

...The case of Russia is even more interesting and mysterious because Russia has always, during the past 400 years, maintained a military establishment and pursued schemes of territorial aggrandizement, well beyond her apparent economic resources...

...They are strongly held on the center-left of the spectrum but remain unproven...

...Even in the nineteenth century, when Britain was at the height of its relative economic power, governments of all complexions were usually most reluctant to accept new commitments...

...self-confidence and resolve...