Is America in irreversible decline?

by Conrad Black

On the future of the United States.

Editors' note: The following is an edited version of remarks delivered for The New Criterion's third annual Circle Lecture.

The answer to the question that Roger Kimball gave me for reply is that no, the United States is not in irreversible decline at all. It is at a plateau that should be sustainable for a long time. It has had an untimely and even freakish confluence of unfortunate circumstances, but the United States is today no less important a country in the world than it was a year ago or ten or twenty or thirty years ago. It was only thirty years ago that it led the West to the greatest and most bloodless strategic victory in history, in the disintegration of its only rival as a superpower in the world. This disintegration occurred as a result of the inspired policy of containment followed by ten presidents. No shot in anger was ever exchanged between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Irreversible decline is what gradually drove down Spain, Turkey, and the Habsburg Empire from the late sixteenth century into the twentieth century. One hears a good deal of glib talk comparing the United States to the late Roman Empire. This is not informed opinion. There were, depending upon how you count them, fifty Roman emperors from Augustus to Romulus Augustulus, 27 B.C.–453 A.D., and thirty-eight of them died violently. After Constantine died in 337, Rome was ever more frequently and heavily dependent upon mercenaries, frontier barbarians of questionable loyalty, and the interventions of religious leaders. Later Roman government was thoroughly debased, conducted mainly by warlords who had no real fealty to Rome at all. And even after seven hundred years of preeminent influence in western Europe, when the Empire was more or less competently directed from Rome, and after a century of increasing chaos, when it was overwhelmed by barbarian masses, the eastern Roman Empire soldiered on for nearly another thousand years. The extremities of institutional decrepitude, venality, and fragmentation had to be reached before Rome could be described as being in irreversible decline.

I speak as one who is so steeped in Oswald Spengler's claim of the coming "decline of the West"that after the last U.S. presidential election I actually had a dream in which there appeared a modified version of the song from Kiss Me, Kate (1953) in which we are admonished to "brush up your Shakespeare, start quoting him now. . . . Brush up your Shakespeare and they'll all kowtow." In my subconscious version, Spengler replaced Shakespeare, and if we brushed him up we would all better kowtow to the Chinese. The thought that the inexorable decline has already begun certainly seemed plausible, but on considering it carefully and despite the inauspicious beginning of the present administration, I do not think that any such conclusion is justified.

The United States is fundamentally a much more powerful country than China, which lacks the internal resources to support an aging, over-large, and culturally inhomogeneous population; is 40 percent a command economy, riven by corruption; and possesses no civilian institutions that are respected in or outside the country. Several hundred million Chinese still live as their ancestors did two thousand years ago. China is the greatest economic development story in history, and this is the first time a formerly Great Power ceased to be one and has, after a lapse of five hundred years, regained that status. The Chinese challenge has only assumed the proportions it has because of the sudden fragmentation of the normal political consensus on national security matters in the United States at the moment that long-pent-up racial dissension has erupted in what must be its final demonstrative stage. Militant African Americans are making demands and inflicting destruction on a scale that would have been more appropriate sixty years ago. These are now sociopathic attitudes, but they are unrepresentative, though not completely inexplicable. Annoying and worrisome though they are, the events are not entirely negative. I shall return to that point.

The United States had not really thought in terms of being a Great Power in the world at all until the early years of the twentieth century, when President Theodore Roosevelt expanded the Navy and sent it around the world, built the Panama Canal, and mediated the end of the Russo-Japanese War. Isolationism returned and was entrenched in neutrality by President Wilson, until the German emperor forced the United States into the war by attacking and sinking its merchant vessels on the high seas. This produced the second foray of the United States into international affairs, as President Wilson electrified the world in his war message to Congress on April 2, 1917, when he said,

The world must be made safe for democracy. . . . It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars . . . . But the right is more precious than peace . . . . To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know the date has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness, and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.

The German provocation of the United States to enter World War I was equaled only by the Japanese and German initiation of war against the United States in World War II, and Stalin's provocation of the Cold War, as the greatest strategic mistakes of any country of the twentieth century. The common failing of all of them was the underestimation of the power of the United States, and all these adversaries were laid low as a result of it.

From Wilson's time comes the American political requirement for a moral justification for the use of force, which has sometimes created national divisions, as during the Vietnam War, that can be mistaken for decline. All have known that between these events and despite the interruption of the Great Depression, the central fact of world affairs was the absolute and comparative and unprecedentedly swift rise of the power and influence of the United States. But even then, there were occasional claims that America was entering into a period of decline. Josef Goebbels in the 1930s regularly proclaimed the superiority of Nazi society and the German economy over America's, and in 1956 the Soviet leader Khrushchev famously said to the entire capitalist West: "We will bury you." There was also no shortage of local pessimists who agreed with them.

It is a good thing not to underestimate one's rival, and the American leadership has not underestimated the menace presented to it by the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, and now China, though these three threats are easily distinguishable and have been gradually less deadly and uncivilized. The United States had the good fortune to have a leader during the time of the Nazi threat who knew Germany intimately. fdr was very familiar with Germany and other western European countries and spoke German and French fluently. (As president he always used German with even bilingual German visitors, such as Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, and Hitler's finance minister, Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht.) President Roosevelt saw as soon as Mr. Churchill did that it would be impossible to cooperate or probably even coexist with Hitler.

After the fall of France in 1940, as he broke a tradition as old as the American republic in seeking a third term, President Roosevelt saw that if Germany were able to absorb the Polish, Czech, Scandinavian, Dutch, Belgian, and French populations whose territory it had occupied, and to assimilate those populations over a couple of generations, greater Germany would have a larger population than the United States and its industrial capacities would be approximately as great. In those circumstances, this greater Germany's preeminence in Europe and, if its existing alliances with Japan and the Soviet Union continued, Germany's leadership of the entire Eurasian landmass would pose a deadly threat to America's emerging role in the world. Eurasia is a substantially greater strategic base than the Americas, if it could be pulled together under a unified government or coalition of two or three like-minded and antagonistic powers.

The United States and the world were fortunate that the statesmanship and war leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill transformed the desperate summer of 1940, when Germany, Italy, Japan, and France were all in the hands of dictatorial regimes hostile to the Anglosphere, to the triumphant summer of 1945, when all of those countries, except a small piece of Germany, were in the hands of the Anglos, discovering or reverting to democratic rule, and well along toward being flourishing allies. These were four of the present G7 countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada are the others). And in this great transition, in subduing Nazi Germany, the principal enemy, the Soviet Union had endured over 90 percent of the casualties and 95 percent of the physical damage sustained collectively by the United States, the British Empire, and themselves. This was the supreme triumph of Roosevelt and Churchill.

Franklin Roosevelt, as a member of the Wilson administration, had believed in the concept of the League of Nations, not as a panacea to the world's ills but as a gentle introduction of the United States to fuller participation in the international community. He saw that if the United States were not involved in any way with the security of western Europe and the Far East, those regions would be in constant danger of being taken over by regimes hostile to democracy and to America, meaning that the whole fate of Western civilization could hang in the balance each generation. His purpose in being a champion of the United Nations was to provide cover for what would inevitably be overwhelming U.S. influence in the world: great power would be delegated to the permanent members of the Security Council, and these would be the United States and four other countries heavily indebted to the United States: Great Britain, France, China, and the Soviet Union. American influence would be disguised somewhat through the Security Council and further through the collegiality of the General Assembly. And as he lured the United States out of the cocoon of isolationism, Roosevelt also expected that the existence of the United Nations would at least for a time persuade the American public that the world was a less dangerous place than the tens of millions of people who had fled to America—because of the war, bigotry, oppression, and class rigidities of the Old World—and the descendants of those émigrés thought it to be.

The Soviets were not as belligerent as the Nazis, but the ussr was potentially a more powerful country than Germany, and communism, since it professed universality, not racial superiority, and instead of inegalitarianism a spurious form of economic brotherhood, had much greater international appeal than Nazism. Especially as the colonial era was ending, the danger of the previously colonized populations being seduced by the communist masquerade was considerable. Roosevelt's strategic team, however, was inherited by President Truman: Generals George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, and Douglas MacArthur, the foreign-policy specialists Dean Acheson, George Kennan, and Charles Bohlen, and other experiened officials devised and executed the strategy of "containment."

With the Soviet Union spending eight to ten times more on its military as a percentage of gdp than the United States did, the timely and theatrical production by President Reagan of his Strategic Defense Initiative, the non-nuclear space-based antimissile defense program, alerted many to the possibility that the Soviets' entire military effort might be insufficient to maintain deterrence. Astonishingly, almost miraculously, the whole regime, international communism, and the Soviet Union itself, crumbled; the mortal threat to the West fell like a soufflé.

You will recall that, for a time in the late 1980s and early '90s, Japan appeared to be an economic rival to the United States, and in a new world where peace would be undisturbed (at least between the major powers), it was instantly thought to be an advantage that Japan, in consequence of its surrender and the subsequent government of the country by General MacArthur, had forsworn a serious military capacity—that the avoidance of this burden would facilitate its supposedly irresistible encroachments upon American superiority in manufacturing and finance. You will also recall how quickly that bubble burst, for reasons internal to Japan.

The main Russian threat and Japan's style of techno-rivalry were seen off nearly thirty years ago, leaving the United States absolutely alone at the summit of the world. It is a little early to think of such a country so quickly plunging into a nose-dive. There is no reason whatever to imagine that, if the United States were severely provoked and threatened again, its response would be any less vigorous than on previous such occasions. In 1942, President Roosevelt spoke for the nation when he said: "When the very life of our country is in mortal danger, to serve in the armed forces of the United States is not a sacrifice, it is a privilege." Should such circumstances recur, I put it to you that the response would be similar.

China is the principal cause of the present consternation. It is not only the first country to recycle itself as a Great Power, but it has also repeated this cycle several times. But its limitations have already been summarized: over-populated, aging, resource-deficient, chronically lacking in transparency, beset by rampant corruption, and containing institutions that command no respect and are not believable. Not one word or figure published by the regime in Beijing can be credited. Americans are right to lament the deterioration of ethics in their public life and to some degree the role of money in American political life, but the People's Republic of China is an atrophied totalitarian system riven by Eastern-style factionalism and conspiracism. The great and the good are apt to disappear without notice, expunged, as in Stalinist times.

China has had little relevant recent experience of how to behave like a Great Power. Its generally overbearing and simplistic notions of how to augment its influence in the world and its strategies for pouring money into developing countries will ultimately lead to those investments being nationalized by their hosts. The idea that China will gain any great long-range influence by investing profusely in Africa, much less Afghanistan, is nonsense. They were so heavy-handed in their patronization of the colonels in Myanmar, they were effectively expelled. This gives an indication of the finesse of Chinese diplomacy. Vietnam, despite what it owes China in the success of Ho Chi Minh, has been thoroughly alienated. The wider region has seen the Chinese try to impose an economic boycott on Australia because that country sought a serious inquiry into the role of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the escape of the recent coronavirus. None of the many countries who use the South China Sea is prepared to have it designated as Chinese territorial waters.

China is evidently departing from its previous practice throughout its history of having minimal interest in foreign countries other than its immediate neighbors. It has, historically, exacted the tribute which it has felt to be due to the dominant power at the center of a group of lesser nations. But the countries on China's borders now are not weak countries, and even the current U.S. administration is rallying to the desirability of a modified containment strategy to prevent China's neighbors from being subsumed into a Chinese-dominated orbit. I am almost as far from an apologist for the Biden administration as it is possible to be. But if it were possible to be confident that, shambles though it was, the departure from Afghanistan would be followed by the severance of military aid to Pakistan, whose duplicity with America's enemies has been outstanding in its insolence, and a retrenchment to a more defensible perimeter for the containment of China, that would be a cause for reassurance rather than anxiety. If China wants to put its famous "Belt and Road" through Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran, then the United States and its allies (when they have finished reinvigorating their faith in the alliance with Washington) will be able to draw a firm line, as advantageous to the West as was the Cold War division of Europe. This nato of the East, but with a substantial economic component as well, perhaps based on the reconfigured Trans-Pacific Partnership, would be based on the solidarity of the United States, Japan, Australia, South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, New Zealand, Israel, India, and Taiwan (the last only an economic alliance, unless China really forces the issue). If the posture of such an association were clearly defensive and chiefly motivated by a desire for increased prosperity in the region while resisting Chinese aggrandizements such as in the South China Sea, and if it received consistent and substantial support from the United States, it would succeed. China would have no possible way of surpassing or dangerously threatening the economic or military strength or comparative democratic and civil rights credentials of such a formidable group of countries.

The principal danger that could be posed by China, and practically the only danger that could be posed by Russia, would occur if Russia were so sharply faced down by the West that it rented important parts of Siberia to China for exploitation of its resources by surplus Chinese. If China were to move 50 million people into the almost untouched Siberian treasure house of vast resources, in exchange for a royalty paid to the Kremlin, that collaboration would be dangerous to the United States. This is why President Trump and others who did not wish to drive Russia into the arms of China were correct.

It should be possible to outbid China for Russia's goodwill without recreating the ussr, and in a broader sense we certainly want Russia in the Western world. While the Cold War was in progress, the eastern edge of the Western world was only a hundred miles beyond the Rhine at the East German border; it has now advanced into eastern Ukraine, and we ought to embrace Russia as the western European powers did from the time of Peter the Great to the Bolshevik Revolution. Russia is truculent and particularly testy after its decisive defeat in the Cold War. It should be possible to trace a path between wholesale appeasement of Russian revanchism and such a cold repulse that the Kremlin consents to live as a rentier of China. It is not clear that the Biden State Department or National Security Council thinks in such realistic terms of the American national interest. But all the elements are at hand to assure a successful response to the Chinese challenge, especially as the Chinese are not nearly as ambitious or reckless as the Nazis and are much more economically successful and amenable to coexistence than were most of the pre-Gorbachev leaders of the Soviet Union.

The various strategic pieces are ready to be assembled by the United States and its collaborators in a manner that retains the paramount influence of this country in the affairs of the world. Concerns about irreversible decline naturally arise after frightful episodes of blunderbuss foreign policy, such as in the abandonment of Afghanistan and on the southern U.S. border. But whatever the policy shortcomings of the present administration, it will become more effective or eventually be replaced. The only thing that would really incite such fears of imminent American decline would be if the American people itself should lose its ambition to be—and its pride in remaining—the greatest national force and influence in the world. There is no evidence that anything like this has happened.

Not to oversimplify well-known events, I suggest that the most disconcerting upheavals in American social and political life of the last several years are already settling down, and, as I said at the beginning of these remarks, they do contain a couple of positive elements. No country has ever made such prodigious and largely successful efforts to raise a subjugated racial minority to genuine equality and to atone for what Mr. Lincoln called "the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil," followed by a century of the pall of segregation. Magnificent though the progress and reconciliation of Caucasian and African Americans has been, it is not in the abstract surprising that there is some whiplash of continued and even exaggerated resentment. Slavery was abominable, but it was at one time the almost universal practice of nations. America's performance as a slave-holding country was not markedly worse than that of other countries, and its record as in emancipation, desegregation, and the promotion of racial equality has been exceptionally determined.

At no point have the recent ambitions of certain African Americans for re-segregation come close to prevailing in the general opinion of that community over the heritage of Martin Luther King and others seeking integration and equality. It is inconceivable that a majority would join the extremist African-American cause, and it is unlikely that self-hating liberal white indulgence will continue to be as kindly disposed to the provocations of African-American extremists as they were last summer. As all will recall, billions of dollars of damage from vandalism, theft, and arson that had nothing to do with the horrifying death of George Floyd were patiently described as "peaceful protests." And the assault upon the effigies of great leaders and supporters of the African-American interest of the past, including Lincoln, Grant, and even Frederick Douglass, was inexplicably tolerated by many who knew better.

The United States was at a unique political crossroads when a man who had never served in any public office nor held a high military command, elected or unelected, astounded the country by winning the presidency—the only such candidate to do so, ever—on a campaign to reverse bipartisan agreed policy and to reorient or dismiss almost the entire community of senior government personnel. Despite President Trump's undoubted success in many policy areas, his stylistic infelicities and the threat that he posed to the bipartisan establishment that operated the government for decades briefly and unprecedentedly created against him a coalition of disgruntled status-quo-seeking Republicans and outraged displaced Democrats, an alliance against the incumbent president such as the country has never seen. The Democratic Party became an incongruous coalition of New Deal–Great Society–New Democrat traditionalists, anti-Trump Republicans, almost all the academy and the national political media, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the African-American extremists. It was all covered in nostalgia, with an atmosphere of Norman Thomas socialism personified by Senator Bernie Sanders and young legislators like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And it all somewhat recalled Herbert Marcuse, that venerable twentieth-century Marxist, and the energetic youngsters of the Holy Barbarians at Berkeley and similar groups across the country in the 1960s and '70s. Unfortunately, there was also a violent accompanying riff-raff of hooligans, Antifa, and the militant wing of Black Lives Matter in particular. Nothing as absurd and churlish as contemporary "wokeness" can long escape the Thermidorean instincts of American society and even of its academics. It is unrigorous and malignant faddishness, without legs, as they say in Hollywood (which is inevitably one of the most bilious sources of the "woke" nonsense).

The shortcomings of the present administration will hasten the disintegration of this discordant coalition which only arose to be the evocator and the voice of Trump-hate. What is unprecedented is this tremendous wave of American self-loathing. It is aberrant, unjustified, and must be understood as the brief palliative to what has come to be seen by many Americans as a prolonged American taste for self-flattering historical mythmaking. There is a quantity of truth in that reproach. It is one of the great ironies of modern times that, although the world chiefly owes the relative success of democratic government and free market economics to the influence, energy, and leadership of the United States, it is not now one of the world's best-functioning democracies.

The federal criminal-justice system is just a conveyor belt to the bloated prison system. Every informed person knows that current plea-bargaining procedure enables prosecutors to extort and suborn perjury from cooperating witnesses who themselves receive an assurance of immunity to prosecution for perjury. This chiefly explains why 98 percent of American federal criminal trials produce convictions, and 95 percent of those without trials. The United States has six to twelve times as many incarcerated people per capita as comparable countries, like the large, prosperous democracies of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom. This has played some role in the recent unreasonable hostility to police and to some prosecutors.

American exceptionalism today is chiefly a matter of scale. Many other countries have better judicial systems and less compromising use of money in politics, and many are equally meritocratic. This is not any denigration of the genius of the Founders, of the success of the U.S. Constitution, and of the completely unique rise of the Americans, in two long lifetimes, from a few million settlers and slaves to citizens of the most powerful country in the world. Mr. Churchill said in his parliamentary eulogy of President Roosevelt that "he had raised the strength, might, and glory of the Great Republic to a height never attained by any nation in history," which included, at the end of World War II, an atomic monopoly and half the gross economic product of the war-ravaged world.

As for the country's beginnings, of course the British botched the Stamp Tax, because it couldn't be collected. But in fairness, Britain had tripled its national debt in the Seven Years' War, largely to expel the French from Canada at the insistent request of the Americans, especially Benjamin Franklin. And as the Americans were, on average, the wealthiest British citizens, there was an argument to be made that they should pay the tax the British were already paying to rid the Americans of the French threat in Quebec, which didn't bother the British but greatly perplexed the Americans. They should have imposed the tax before they defeated the French, when there would have been no resistance to it, rather than imposing it retroactively to pay for what had already been achieved. In its early days, as the United States did not have a language and civilization of its own, unlike England, France, Holland, Spain, and other countries, and as its lore was in its prospects and not its past, America's propagandists, chiefly Jefferson and Paine, fabricated the theory that the young country was ushering in a "new order of the ages" and the dawn of human liberty. This was the first American recourse to what Donald Trump calls "truthful hyperbole."

In fact, the country had no more liberty than it had had before the Revolutionary War, only its own government, and at no point did the Americans have greater liberties than the British, Swiss, Dutch, or most Scandinavians. But they had the genius of the spectacle: the world was riveted by the American experiment and has not ceased to be so. I do not for a moment diminish American traditions. It is a magnificent country with a tremendous level of achievement in almost every field, even today; countries of such fermentation and vital energy are not in decline. It is rather at a point of renewal, made even more intense than it would normally be by both the tumult of the Trump and Biden elections and, in very different ways, the uniqueness of their administrations.

Donald Trump did the nation a service in recognizing the level of public discontent and the drift away from an incentive economy and into indecisive foreign policy. He achieved a great deal, especially in eliminating unemployment and generating a greater percentage of economic growth among the lowest 20 percent of income earners than the highest 10 percent. But his war on the political establishment made him vulnerable, and his vulnerabilities were compounded by his bombast and tactical errors at times. His enemies, however, strained the system by defaming him as an agent of a foreign power, by abusing the impeachment process, by rendering the 2020 election result questionable by their handling of over 40 million mailed, dropped, or harvested ballots, most of which could not be verified, and finally by launching a war of extermination against anyone who questioned the result of the election. Those results were questionable, but the election is over, and the administration that has been installed has not so far been competent. If it doesn't raise its game, either Trump or a candidate supported by him will be elected in 2024.

But the crisis of society is passing, even if public-policy problems are not. Trump is mellowing; the effort to use the rickety platform of the Democratic Left to transform the United States into a torpid socialist country will fail. Adam Smith famously said that "there is a great deal of ruin in a nation." And there is a great deal of general failure before a great nation goes into inexorable decline. This is no time for complacency, but no such decline is in process. Americans are still highly motivated and very patriotic. American political institutions, though strained and tainted at times, still function; the national political media are starting to retrieve a modicum of professionalism, and China has no answer to the full force of American creativity, spontaneity, and focused national determination.

Conrad Black is The New Criterion's Visiting Critic for the 2021–22 season and the 2020 recipient of the Edmund Burke award. His book Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other was recently published in an updated paperback edition by Encounter Books.