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Senior Fellow
John R. Bolton
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Betting against the United States--a sport even many Americans engage in--may be popular, but is has never proven profitable. Nor will it as long as the United States adheres to the fundamental and interrelated premises on which it is founded: the centrality of individual liberty, openness to new ideas and opportunities, and the optimism that brought so many of our ancestors to the New World in the first place. It is certainly true that some or all of these attributes are found in one or another quantity in almost all other nations around the globe, so they are certainly not America's possession alone. Some nations may even be said to exhibit these characteristics more fully than the United States in one or another aspect of their economy, politics or culture. But only in America have they come together in the concentration we have seen throughout American history. This is the basis of American "exceptionalism," the characteristic that drives the declinists to drink or distraction more than any other.
At America's beginnings, many in Europe thought it unlikely that the new country could survive, let alone prosper. And, indeed, the outcome was not certain, which is why the War of 1812 with Great Britain is often called the Second War of Independence. Yet, while Europe was consuming itself with its own struggles, the United States grew from a ribbon of settlements along the Atlantic Coast to a continental giant. Unfortunately, that growth was infected by the existence of slavery, and the United States fought a wrenching Civil War, bloody even by the sanguinary standards of its time to eliminate slavery while preserving its hard-won Union. Many predicted that the human, political and financial costs of the war would have the same deadening effects as other massive civil wars, but precisely the opposite happened.
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Many declinists begin to measure the start of America's fall from eminence from 1945, when it is typically assumed that U.S. power was unequalled in the world and could only diminish. |
Rising from the Civil War's deadly battlefields, the industrial revolution fully took hold, the West was integrated with both North and South, and by the end of the Nineteenth Century, only the willfully ignorant could miss America's impending emergence on the world stage. In fact, America's successful western expansion represented the only truly lasting "imperialism" of the Nineteenth Century, since all of the newly acquired western territories were successfully integrated as equal States with the existing Union. Although Europe may not have been paying attention, or fully understanding what was happening, America was entering the world stage while Europe was looking elsewhere. Europeans generally--and the declinists in particular--therefore still tend to ignore U.S. history before the Twentieth Century. They are arguing implicitly that what happened during America's first century was irrelevant to what happened during its second century, and even more irrelevant to its third, what now lies before us in the Twenty-First Century.
It is not simply historical ignorance at work here, however, but ignorance of the common themes of liberty, imagination and optimism that drove America in the Nineteenth Century and that brought it to global dominance in the Twentieth. Of course, it helped America's exceptionalism that much of the rest of the world insisted on continuing its fascination for totalitarian and authoritarian government, or drifted off into variants of fascism or communism. The three great wars of the Twentieth Century, two hot and one cold, each in their own ways, reflected the battle between the basic American foundations and alternatives worldwide. Europe repeatedly faults the United States for becoming "isolationist" after World War I, as if it were America's fault for the rise of fascism and communism on the European continent in the aftermath of that war. In fact, although the United States rejected the treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, the United States was active in financial and arms control diplomacy throughout the inter-war period. If Europe could not save itself from totalitarianism and the League's total failure and collapse, it is entirely unclear what difference the United States could have made.
Many declinists begin to measure the start of America's fall from eminence from 1945, when it is typically assumed that U.S. power was unequalled in the world and could only diminish. Of course, since most of Europe lay in rubble from its own self-inflicted wounds, the real issue was whether it would rise again, as it in fact did with Marshall Plan assistance. By definition, a rising Europe made America, relatively speaking, less the sole superpower, but does anyone argue that America should have behaved differently in the post-World War Two years? Obviously not, this being one of the few debates in recent history that seems conclusively resolved. Unfortunately, however, Soviet espionage brought it nuclear weapons capabilities and the appearance of economic strength, and its Communist ideology precipitated the Cold War.
During that War, numerous theories were advanced about why the United States could not win. One early scenario held that the fragile post-war European democracies in Western Europe would fall to Communism, as had those of Central and Eastern Europe. That didn't happen. Then, there were predictions that the Soviet Union and the United States would battle to a standstill, and that there would be "convergence" between capitalism and communism, with both sides ending up looking much like the other. That didn't happen either. The First World won and the Second World lost.
But the declinists are nothing but not persistent in their own peculiar way. They theorized that Japan would overtake the United States, a theory that had great favor right up until the bursting of the Japanese bubble in the 1990's, from which Japan has not yet fully recovered. Then, we were told that the European Union would inevitably overtake the United States, a predicted that looks less and less likely as birth rates in most European Union countries continue to fall. Moreover, in places like Ireland, on the fringes of Europe, apparently no one got the word that the EU project was supposed to progress unimpeded. Democracy seems poised to pass out of fashion in Europe (and perhaps it already has after a brief appearance in Russia), while somehow American democracy continues at full strength.
Today's predictions of American decline rest on the argument that countries of the former Third World--China, India, and Brazil are the usual nominees--will inevitably rise in importance, even if the United States does not actually decline. This is a somewhat more sophisticated view of decline, namely the relative eclipse of the United States rather than an actual worsening of economic conditions or reduction in political-military power. Predictions of when the tipping point will be reached vary, with authors competing to advance that happy day when the United States takes its proper place in the food chain of nations, instead of standing outside of it as it has for so long.
All I can say is: don't hold your breath.
Adherents of the declinist view for America make several significant mistakes. First, they tend to "straight line" positive developments in some other countries indefinitely into the future, while doing the same to existing U.S. problems or difficulties. Second, they invariably ignore alternative scenarios that are inconsistent with their predetermined conclusion. Such alternatives may in fact be less likely than those preferred by the declinists, but it by no means makes them impossible. And third, where alternative futures are considered, America's always turn out to be the worst possible, whereas "the rest" somehow always get lucky.
These analytical shortcoming underline the importance not simply for taking a longer-term historical perspective but for understanding what causes the perspective to be what it is in the first place, both in the United States and in its would be peer-competitors.
The biggest risk for America is that it becomes too much like "the rest." In Europe, for example, the "precautionary principle" is now received wisdom. This principle holds, essentially, that any risk than can be avoided should--or even must--be avoided. This is very nearly the precise opposite of the way the United States has acted over the years, as first exemplified by David Crocket's famous aphorism, "first, be always sure you're right, then, go ahead." In his day, Crocket, a more well-known politician than is today appreciated, and his ilk were called "Go Ahead Men," as indeed the United States was a "go ahead nation." Application of the precautionary principle might have prevented the Alamo, but it also would have lost Texas to the United States, and perhaps the rest of our current national territory.
Similarly, the High Minded in much of the world are now obsessed with Global Warming or "Climate Change" as some of its worshippers call it, and to be fair this obsession is rampant in America as well. Czech President Vaclev Klaus has rightly observed that Warming has overtaken Socialism as an organizing principle around which the High Minded are rallying to advocate new rationales for greater governmental control over our individual lives, substituting one rationale for another in the quest to achieve the same objective: stronger governmental authority and less individual freedom. Here, the importance of alternative scenarios becomes important. Much as I fear it, I cannot deny that sacrificing liberty on the altar of Global Warming is a real possibility for the United States. If we sacrifice enough of it, the declinists may well turn out to be correct, although not for the reasons they relied upon.
Finally, theories of American decline also rest in part on the ahistorical notion that there are no longer real threats to Western countries, as some put it because we have come to "the end of history." With no threats to worry about, this logic continues, who needs a military superpower to protect itself or the rest? American might, under this theory is therefore irrelevant, and need not be counted in comparing relative national strengths, this greatly diminishing America's standing in the world. If only. The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction--nuclear, chemical and biological--remains an acute threat, whether in the hands of rogue states like Iran or North Korea, or in the hands of terrorists. These threats may be asymmetric for now, but they would be no less fatal for the citizens of any nation subject to attack with such weapons. Unfortunately, we see considerable evidence today that Europe as a whole does not take these threats as seriously as the United States, and the consequences of this lack of concern may well be extremely dangerous, both for Europe and the United States.
I have taken an historical approach to the claims of American decline because we have heard them so many times before, and they have been wrong so many times before. Hearing them again today has to be understood in that context.
It would, however, be foolhardy not to be continuously concerned about America's place in the world. Complacency is always a threat and a temptation, and it is one to which the United States, like many others, has sometimes succumbed. But over the sweep of America's history, even if short by European standards, complacency has never taken root for long. Doubtless, in twenty-five years, we could return to the subject of America's "decline," and there will be many people arguing that the decline has in fact commenced. They will be just as wrong then as they are today.
John R. Bolton is a senior fellow at AEI.
