Foreign Pulse: Don’t cry for Uncle Sam

The world is changing so fast that taking one’s eyes off the ball could be a blinder. It has gone almost unnoticed that this year China will surpass the United States in overall economic size measured by the purchasing power parity (PPP) method. Michael Forsythe and Neil Gough of the New York Times extrapolate from World Bank figures of 2011 to the present and conclude that China “is on track to overtake the United States this year as the world’s biggest economy, years sooner than many economists had previously forecast.” The same economic data set reveals that India is now “the world’s third largest economy, moving ahead of Japan.”

While academicians debate the accuracy and appropriateness of the PPP method vis-à-vis the nominal method of calculating gross domestic product (GDP), the reality is that America can no longer sustain itself as the number one economy. This change of guard has huge implications for global order.

The American scholar Joseph Nye argued in 2010 that “economic power has been multipolar for more than a decade, with the United States, Europe, Japan and China as the major players and others gaining in importance.” The latest advent of India into the top league and the further shuffling of the deck among major players, wherein the US is ceding the leading spot to China, signify that a new era has dawned.

The former have-nots who were colonised and whose historic clocks were deliberately frozen for three centuries are now reclaiming their lead roles.
The “American century”, which Henry Luce equated to the 20th century in Life magazine’s 1941 edition on grounds that the United States was “the most powerful and the most vital nation in the world”, is now passé.

To be sure, the US still retains unrivalled supremacy in relative military strength, with China and the rest lagging behind at a safe distance. Nye reminds us that “military power is largely unipolar, and the United States is likely to retain primacy for quite some time.” America’s comparative fall in global power standings is limited to economic indicators. But given the conversion mechanism between economic and military capabilities, we can imagine the US conceding even military leadership of the world within our lifetimes.

When GDP stagnates and the economy gets into a long funk, as has been the case with the US since 2008, allocating massive sums to defence and continuing expan-sionist military policies worldwide are no longer easy options. The high government debt-to-GDP ratio in America of over 100 per cent and the attendant across-the-board budget cuts have created a new long-term trajectory of military downsizing, whose effects in battle and armed power projection will be evident in a decade from now.

As if taking a bow to this less rosy future for the American military, US President Barack Obama delivered a major speech at the United States Military Academy at West Point last week rebutting the conservative belief “that every problem has a military solution.”

He is signalling and preparing the American public and intelligentsia for a new sobered age when the US would not have the means to use gunboats, fighter jets and boots on the ground with the same gung-ho self-assuredness that marked Luce’s “American century”. The cowboy has realised that he is running out of ammo. In light of the economic displacement of the United States by China and its potential drag-down effect on the American military, what kind of new forces will be able to take the lead in ordering the world? Mr Obama’s rhetorical flourish at West Point contended that “America must always lead on the world stage. If we don’t, no one else will.”

The US defence secretary, Chuck Hagel, echoed his boss’ views by painting America as an “indispensable nation” for global security that performs functions that “no other nation in the world can do or has done.” The transnational power of US academia and news media have tried to hammer into the world’s psyche that America is the most crucial pillar of international stability and economic prosperity.

The sales pitch is as follows: America is the greatest liberal hegemon ever. Its dominance is benevolent in nature. It supplies “global public goods” like safety of the sea lanes for commerce, respect for international laws by one and all, and some form of likeable global police service that keeps extremism and dictatorships under check. What is good for America, according to this lore, is good for the planet.

If one were to believe this yarn, then the relative decline of the US power is bad news for the international system because no one else can do its upkeep. Nationalistic American academics and policy wonks have been peddling this line in recent years as if to compensate the loss of material capabilities in the realm of global public opinion.

A bold new book by India-born Canadian academic, Amitav Acharya, The End of American World Order, calls for junking this propaganda and shows how Pax Americana was built upon coercion, sabotage, aggression and exploitation. Acharya sees no reason for panicking about the dwindling appeal of an American-dictated Western democratic and capitalist model of governing the world. Rather, he welcomes a “multiplex world order” where regional cooperation and balance of power ensure some form of diversity and stability in a “post-hegemonic era.”

Who is afraid of Uncle Sam’s loss of preponderance and the onset of several great powers (including the US, China, Russia, India, Brazil, et al)?
It is mostly American elites who have enjoyed the privileges of strutting around the world as the sheriffs. There is also a tribe of non-American opinion makers who derive personal benefits from American patronage and parrot the cliché that a post-American international order will be violent, chaotic and inhumane.

Some US-crafted rules and actions do indeed produce benefits, but these positives can be preserved even when leadership of the world is shared. In India, we must stop fearing that America’s relative decline will leave us at the mercy of Chinese domination. Instead, we have to begin carving out regional and inter-regional institutions that keep China as well as America in check. This is the time for proactive diplomacy to shape the future, not backward thinking about America rebounding to rule the world again.

The writer is a professor and dean of the Jindal School of International Affairs