Our Faltering Rivals
The U.S. is in decline, sure — but it's still leading.

It has become a cliché to say that the U.S. is in decline. It is certainly true, but need not be irreversible, and the country has been there before. It was in decline when the Watergate debacle destroyed a successful presidency and the long and costly enterprise in Vietnam ended terribly on the helipad on the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon. But 15 years later, the country was at a unique pinnacle as the world's only superpower. Not even the Roman Empire enjoyed such eminence, though its rivals, Persia and China, were (unlike their current status) too distant to be seriously bothersome.

What is unusual now is that all the Great Powers are in decline, except China — and that country's rise is at least a third composed of a public-relations flim-flam job, of the kind that always recruits the credulous in the West, as Hitler, Stalin, and Japan Inc. did. Western Europe has failed as a coherent force. The Lisbon Constitution is a shambles, and the new leaders of federal Europe are such nebbishes, chosen for their inoffensive unassertiveness, that not 5 percent of Europeans could recall their names.

Europe has been harder hit than the U.S. by the economic crisis, and is mired in spurious rhetoric, much of it in French, limning an illusory social-market variant to "cowboy capitalism." This is like the Holy See's ancient but sporadic search for a third way between socialism and capitalism. It is a vain pursuit of an economic system diluted by the imposition of self-indulgent European cultural fatigue, masquerading as gentility.

Russia is a fraud. Its population is in steep decline and chronically afflicted by alcoholism. The governmental system is authoritarian and corrupt, allied with protégés who have been given monopolistic concessions and who repay their rulers with obscene kickbacks. Except for a few areas that have survived from the USSR's expertise in some defense industries, Russia's manufacturing is continuing to wither, and its economy depends almost entirely on the exportation of natural resources, especially oil. It is not an efficient producer of anything, and commodity prices are always vulnerable.

Japan, which only 20 years ago was making more confident noises than China is today about surpassing the United States economically, is now sluggish and geriatric. It has a new government even more bumptious and inept than Washington's. And its vaunted genius at sophisticated manufacturing has been undermined by the widespread product-quality problems at Toyota, so soon after it became the world's largest automobile manufacturer — displacing General Motors, which, after the pause that refreshes in Chapter 11 to shed unsightly debt, may be starting to recover. Japan is torn between reinvigorating the alliance with the U.S. and detaching from it to appease China.

It now seems clearer than ever that China is manipulating the North Korean nuclear threat to rattle Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Indonesia, while retaining, in a barbarous Beltway phrase, plausible deniability. The U.S. U-turn on missile defense and the production of F-22 Raptors has increased Japan's temptation. But if it departs the U.S. alliance to nuzzle with China, it will be through as a Great Power.

India is a nascent Great Power, about ten years behind China in building a capitalist economy, but with the advantages of reasonably democratic and partially functioning legal systems. Its influence will grow, but does not extend far beyond, or even into, the Indian Ocean now.

The rise of China is not without limits. It still has 900 million peasants living much as they did thousands of years ago. Half the population has little or no exposure to medical care, education and other social services are spotty, corruption is rife, and there are important relics of the command economy still in place. GDP is deemed to be increased whenever an expense or investment is approved, not as the decision is implemented. Parallel indicators such as electricity production are not consistent with economic growth rates on the scale claimed. It is not clear that the Chinese public will buy consumer goods that are not being exported, and although the country now has huge foreign-currency reserves, its financial system is much more opaque than was Japan's when it plunged into stagnation 20 years ago. The enforced population-restraint policy ensures an aging population.

China has managed one of the great economic modernizations of world history, but it is not a naturally rich or particularly skilled country (though higher education is making great strides), and it has a dominant public sector that cannot be relied upon over time to perform better than central planners traditionally have. And the United States is ceasing to ship it millions of jobs and to accept the dumping of billions of dollars of cheap, and often defective, merchandise.

The Great Powers are now like their currencies: They are measurable only in relation to one another. None of the major currencies is objectively strong, except China's, and that is on the basis of unverifiable claims and projections.

The Obama administration has spent a dismal year being rebuffed by the refuse of international despotism to which it has offered an outstretched hand (Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba), condescended to by China, and subjected to gamecock insolences from Russia. Its attempt to advance peace in the Middle East by denying it had made a settlements agreement with Israel was, deservedly, a fiasco.

The administration has left the country and the world completely unenlightened about how it proposes to reduce stupefying deficits and rampant money-supply increases without bringing on a bone-cracking recession and/or rampaging inflation. The domestic front has been a dreadful botch of health care and a scalding, total immersion in Al Gore's self-enriching fantasies about global warming. (For this hare-brained cause, the president bustled around Copenhagen like a one-armed paper-hanger trying to generate enthusiasm for pledging $100 billion per year in compensation to Mugabe, Chávez, the Sudanese genocidists, and China, whose prime minister ceased strutting about the Danish capital like Douglas MacArthur evicting the Bonus Army, as he proclaimed China's predestined supremacy, just long enough to claim the leadership (as the world's greatest emitter of carbons) of the G-77 of compensation claimants.

Despite this appalling year of miscues and vaudeville amateurism, hope persists. The president did the right thing in Afghanistan, and will almost certainly, of all ironies, be a successful war president. He is sending military assistance to Taiwan, and finally meeting the Dalai Lama and ignoring Chinese protests. Obama is no Clinton at opportunistic zigzag course-changing. But if he becomes serious about offshore drilling and nuclear power, taxes financial transactions and elective energy use and doesn't strangle incomes, shows some fiscal restraint, accepts a sane compromise on health care, banishes cap-and-trade to Halloween trick-or-treating (where I assume it came from), revives the alliance with Europe, and applies his outstretched palm to Iran's bewhiskered face at great velocity, he could still be a successful president. Europe, Japan, and (thanks to George W. Bush's diplomacy) India are natural allies, and Russia will go to the highest bidder as long as it is treated politely. And if their interests are defined clearly, there need not be antagonism between the U.S. and China.

In the balance of American standing in the world, in three years, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan may well be countries with reasonable power-sharing, and secular governments favorable to the West. Apart from the collapse of the Iron Curtain, this would be the greatest regional strategic victory in the world since President Truman's successful defense of South Korea.

America appears weak, compared to what it has been and should be; not, thankfully, compared to its rivals.

– Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full. He can be reached at [email protected].

© 2024 Conrad Black