The Not-So-Super U.S. Power

...The Reagan Administration was able to bomb Libya only because Margaret Thatcher's government in Britain gave the U.S...

...Our position in the world is not as secure as many here and abroad believe...

...The need to prevent our major Arab allies from quitting the assembled Coalition forced the Bush Administration to call off the Gulf War with Saddam still in power, while the threat of desertion by nervous European allies explains many of the false starts and missteps of the bungled Kosovo campaign...

...bases in Europe...

...until the mid'80s, the U.S...

...I am not trying to make a case for nativism...

...really was in relative decline...

...Thanks to our "volunteer" (i.e...

...Russia or China, for example, can intimidate their different neighbors just by shifting forces within their borders...

...Individual genius and America's culture of creativity and entrepreneurialism cannot be ignored as factors, yet they shouldn't be overrated either...

...Maritime powers like the U. S. and Britain must spend more to match what a continental power can achieve relatively inexpensively...

...The stereotype of the sole superpower quickly and easily dispatching villains and ending chaos around the world by means of a few precise missile strikes cannot really be taken seriously...

...The Pentagon created the Internet (originally Darpanet) to link campuses engaged in defense-related research...

...The distinction is more significant in theory than in practice, because, as I have noted, projecting our military prowess in Europe, Asia and the Middle East depends on our assembling fragile coalitions...

...In 1901, a reasonable person might have believed the 20th century would be the Second British Century—or the First German Century...

...This is transforming civilization as thoroughly as did the Second Industrial Revolution of the early 20th century (electricity, internal combustion engines), and the First Industrial Revolution of the early 19th (steam, railroads...

...By 1900 the United States and Germany, along with lesser powers like Russia and Japan, had mastered steam-era technology and were rising in power and wealth at Britain's expense...

...It would also be foolish to count too heavily on the longterm success of a nation whose economy depends on perpetual Ponzi schemes for importing ever-growing amounts of foreign capital plus ever-swelling numbers of skilled and unskilled foreign workers—and whose intelligentsia consists to a remarkable degree of talented foreigners in search of sinecures more generous than those they can get in their own countries...

...But I would not bet on it...

...Suppose, for example, that every NATO ally refused to let the U.S...

...For more rigorous political philosophy you can turn to American universities, where imported European ideologies like Marxism, Foucaultianism and Straussianism are taught —often by imported Europeans...

...I hope the former analogy holds...

...It took an actual ground invasion to bring the Gulf War to an end— and the threat of a ground invasion to cause Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic to capitulate...

...All other things being equal, one could have predicted in 1980 that personal computer companies succeeding in the U. S. market, whether based here or not, would set emerging world standards simply because of economies of scale...

...intervention in the Balkans...

...We are the only country in the world that has so large a cultural deficit...

...For the U.S...

...They copied the parliamentary governments of Western Europe, using proportional representation rather than plurality voting...

...permission to travel through its airspace—and even then, because of the disapproval of our other NATO allies, American pilots had to take a long and dangerous detour...

...Other than lobbing a few missiles from ships, the U.S...

...After 1945, Britain and Germany were knocked out of the Second Industrial Revolution's competition...

...is at present more akin to Britain in 1920—an empire that had actually expanded its acreage following a recent great-power conflict, yet whose economy was already invisibly rotting and whose elite was already being demoralized by the ethos of Bloomsbury...

...government not created the Internet, refrained from charging for its use, and allowed government-funded researchers to patent their innovations, something no private corporation or foreign country would have done...

...and China over Taiwan, our South Korean and Japanese allies might opt for appeasing China...

...Japanese television and radio are not owned by American media barons...

...As it was, the fiercest opposition to the Gulf War and Kosovo interventions came from the left wing of the Democratic Party...

...It should be remembered, though, that whereas three competing countries —Britain, Germany and the U.S.—pioneered the Second, the U.S...

...Why, then, was the Third Industrial Revolution hatched from silicon eggs in the U.S, rather than in Japan—our nearest rival as a high-tech nation—or Europe...

...If Silicon Valley had not come to the rescue by suddenly changing the rules of the game, the U.S...

...to put intimidating forces on the borders of an enemy state in Europe or Asia, by contrast, requires massive air and sea shipments of personnel and materiel across great distances...

...By and large the foreigners who succeed here are more able than their American counterparts...

...economy has lots of problems...

...Two of the targets of American missile bombardment, Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Muslim terrorist mastermind Osamabin Laden, continue to threaten American interests...

...Her Majesty's Government may knight a foreign-born intellectual (like Sir Lewis Namier or Sir Isaiah Berlin), but it would never appoint a poet laureate who, like the late Joseph Brodsky, for a time the Poet Laureate of the United States, could not write or speak the English language with facility...

...Americans do not edit British or French magazines and newspapers...

...For their part, many American soldiers seem to regard the military as a jobs program (who can blame them...

...The buildup often takes time—witness the long delays in the assembly of forces prior to both the Gulf and Kosovo wars...

...If our military and our economy are, at least currently, the envy of the world, this cannot be said of our antiquated political system...

...Actually, that neoisolationist option is one many Americans, perhaps a majority, would prefer...

...The mainstream American Right is not isolationist (as liberals often claim), but rather unilateralist...

...professional) military, recruited heavily from low-income groups, the lives of the sons and daughters of the overclass need not be disrupted by the demands of national defense...

...forces remained in Okinawa and South Korea for a decent interval...

...German universities are not filled with expatriate American professors...

...Like the British Empire, the Pax Americana depends on a worldwide network of bases...

...American films and popular music provide what there is of a common global culture...

...But those who predicted that our professional soldiers would be used as cannon fodder by a cynical imperial leadership have been mistaken...

...Moreover, the sea lanes and airways must be defended from interdiction...

...In theory the European Union has more consumers than the U.S., but it is far from a single market in fact...

...Indeed, America's global strategy is as much a weakness as a strength...

...America's business and financial institutions are widely, though not universally, seen as models that successful countries must emulate...

...A crisis that ripped apart America's alliances in Europe or Asia, or both, would abruptly put an end to America's global role...

...depends on inflows of foreign capital, because domestic savings rates are so low...

...The sheer scale of the U. S. market was another reason for America's technological success...

...The dependence of American society on immigration is often touted as a source of pride, but it ought to be a source of embarrassment...

...In the early 20th century, French and German filmmakers were superior to their American counterparts in terms of both art and technology, but Hollywood prevailed for the same reason Hong Kong action films and Indian musicals tend to dominate Asian movie-making...

...Nor is this a new phenomenon...

...Today the U.S...

...Because a Democratic President was in office, liberals generally supported the U.S...

...For all the talk about the American "empire," the U.S...

...America's advantage in high tech, however, is a wasting asset that will diminish as, inevitably, our economic rivals catch up and perhaps surpass us...

...It could defend its own quartersphere, but its ability to influence the course of Eurasia, home to the bulk of the world's population, industrial capacity and military muscle, would be extremely limited...

...Similarly, in a confrontation between the U.S...

...We take as a sign of our generosity to immigrants what in fact is proof of our shameful failure to cultivate the talent we have in a country of 281 million people...

...can hardly do anything in Europe, Asia or the Middle East without the consent of its allies...

...It is a delusion to think, as many conservatives do, that superweapons can replace allies...

...The 2000 election, in which our 18th-century British plurality voting system enabled Green Party candidate Ralph Nader to derail Democrat Al Gore, and our 18th-century Electoral College chose George W. Bush as President despite his losing the popular vote, was merely the latest embarrassment...

...A country whose soldiers are imbued with an ethic more civilian than military is not likely to last very long as the world's leading military power...

...could fairly quickly go from being a global power with forward bases in Europe and Asia to being a more or less purely North American power—albeit one with a mighty fleet, a first-rate air force and space forces...

...Nor are the difficulties merely logistical...

...In the past, too, we compensated by luring away people formed in cultures that prized education more than we do, including scholars like Louis Agassiz and Franz Boas, scientists like Albert Einstein, and engineers and inventors like Alexander Graham Bell and Guglielmo Marconi and Wernher von Braun...

...come to Israel's aid during an Arab-Israeli war...

...Most Democrats in Congress, however, voted against the Gulf War, and if a Republican had led the U. S. into fighting in Yugoslavia, it is far from clear the Democrats would have supported him...

...the factories of East Asia would not shut down in the absence of a constant stream of guest workers from Kansas and Oregon...

...The new subculture of hackers and dot-coms, with their distaste for government, would never have existed had the U.S...

...From that point through the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union (in the military realm) and Japan (in the realm of civilian production) were rapidly catching up with the U.S...

...and even inflows of unskilled cheap labor, because members of the American elite are unwilling to pay native-born janitors, maids and the like wages that self-respecting Americans rightly demand to do such jobs...

...That simply means the other world powers limit their activi ties to their regions, as most great powers in history have done...

...Apart from the tech sector, the U.S...

...might have continued to lose ground to Moscow and Tokyo, as predicted by the "declinists" of the 1970s and 1980s, who included Henry A. Kissinger and Paul Kennedy...

...Still, it would be foolish to extrapolate from the first year of the 21 st century to the remaining 99...

...is the laboratory of the Third Industrial Revolution (computers, the Internet, biotechnology...

...If we had SDI, we wouldn't need any allies," a former Reagan official told me in the late 1980s—divulging what motivates so many proponents of impractical missile defense schemes...

...alone leads the Third in the same way that solitary Britain led the First...

...We should consider the possibility, though, that the U.S...

...is a leader of a hegemonic alliance, not an imperial state...

...For Americans, as for 19th-century British, the result may be an advantage that lasts for several decades...

...When Communism fell in Eastern Europe, the new regimes did not look to the U.S...

...inflows of foreign talent, because the American schools do not turn out enough scientists and engineers...

...Other countries regard it with the mixture of bafflement and loathing exhibited in 1800 by enlightened monarchists and republicans contemplating the ramshackle, decaying Holy Roman Empire...

...and to resent the disruption of their schedules by a real conflict that exposes them to the hazards of combat...

...If Silicon Valley can't function without importing ever growing numbers of Indian and East Asian technicians, that is proof of Asia's superior school systems...

...To begin with, there is less to U. S. military hegemony than meets the eye...

...The fact that China does not send forces to the Middle East or Latin America is small consolation to those worried about its growing influence and prestige in East Asia...

...It was a classic national infrastructure project, like the Transcontinental Railroad, and hardly proof of spontaneous innovation bubbling up from below...

...They proved to be poor prophets, but they were accurate observers...

...The United States is the dominant—indeed, the only —global superpower...

...America's days as the dominant Asian power would be numbered, even if U.S...

...To judge from its emotional reaction to casualties during U.S...

...To be sure, the U.S...

...America's economic supremacy is as tenuous as its military dominance...

...There were none, if accidental deaths are not counted...

...Even with "smart" missiles, air power has been oversold...

...efforts in Lebanon, Iraq, the Gulf, and the Balkans, the American public views professional soldiers doing what they were trained for as the moral equivalent of throwing hapless conscripts into harm's way...

...But it will not last forever...

...President Bill Clinton waged an inefficient and counterproductive air war in Kosovo for78 days in order to attain every contemporary Commander-inChief's goal: no American combat deaths...

...That might very well be the end of NATO, and, consequently, of American military dominance in the Middle East (since this depends on U.S...

...to learn how to organize a fair, stable democratic system...

...In short, the U.S...

...The greatest is its reliance on foreigners...

...It may be that today's triumphalists are right, and that the U.S., like Britain after 1815, is positioned to translate a technological revolution into global paramountcy for generations...

...Talk about America's "global reach" is rather empty as well...

...The necessary, though not sufficient, conditions for the digital revolution were America's military-industrial complex and its mass market...

...The digital technologies associated with the Third Industrial Revolution are being forged in Seattle, California's Silicon Valley, Austin's Silicon Hills, and New York's Silicon Alley...

...It became apparent during the Vietnam War that most members of the American elite were not willing to send their children to fight in anything short of a repeat of World War II...

...Factors of class and culture may be more important...

...Asked to defend Americanpolitical traditions, our own political theorists typically quote a few passages from Alexis de Tocqueville or the Federalist, as though they were verses from the Bible deployed as an alternative to argument by a Primitive Baptist...