A soft landing for America 40 years from now? Don't bet on it. The demise of
the United States as the global superpower could come far more quickly than
anyone imagines. If Washington is dreaming of 2040 or 2050 as the end of the
American Century, a more realistic assessment of domestic and global trends
suggests that in 2025, just 15 years from now, it could all be over except for
the shouting.
Despite the aura of omnipotence most empires project, a look at their history
should remind us that they are fragile organisms. So delicate is their ecology
of power that, when things start to go truly bad, empires regularly unravel
with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union,
eight years for
France, 11 years for the Ottomans, 17 years for Great Britain, and, in all
likelihood, 22 years for the United States, counting from the crucial year
2003.
Future historians are likely to identify the George W Bush administration's
rash invasion of Iraq in that year as the start of America's downfall. However,
instead of the bloodshed that marked the end of so many past empires, with
cities burning and civilians slaughtered, this 21st century imperial collapse
could come relatively quietly through the invisible tendrils of economic
collapse or cyberwarfare.
But have no doubt: when Washington's global dominion finally ends, there will
be painful daily reminders of what such a loss of power means for Americans in
every walk of life. As a half-dozen European nations have discovered, imperial
decline tends to have a remarkably demoralizing impact on a society, regularly
bringing at least a generation of economic privation. As the economy cools,
political temperatures rise, often sparking serious domestic unrest.
Available economic, educational, and military data indicate that, when it comes
to US global power, negative trends will aggregate rapidly by 2020 and are
likely to reach a critical mass no later than 2030. The American Century,
proclaimed so triumphantly at the start of World War II, will be tattered and
fading by 2025, its eighth decade, and could be history by 2030.
Significantly, in 2008, the US National Intelligence Council admitted for the
first time that America's global power was indeed on a declining trajectory. In
one of its periodic futuristic reports, Global Trends 2025, the Council cited
"the transfer of global wealth and economic power now under way, roughly from
West to East" and "without precedent in modern history," as the primary factor
in the decline of the "United States' relative strength - even in the military
realm." Like many in Washington, however, the Council's analysts anticipated a
very long, very soft landing for American global preeminence, and harbored the
hope that somehow the US would long "retain unique military capabilities… to
project military power globally" for decades to come.
No such luck. Under current projections, the United States will find itself in
second place behind China (already the world's second largest economy) in
economic output around 2026, and behind India by 2050. Similarly, Chinese
innovation is on a trajectory toward world leadership in applied science and
military technology sometime between 2020 and 2030, just as America's current
supply of brilliant scientists and engineers retires, without adequate
replacement by an ill-educated younger generation.
By 2020, according to current plans, the Pentagon will throw a military Hail
Mary pass for a dying empire. It will launch a lethal triple canopy of advanced
aerospace robotics that represents Washington's last best hope of retaining
global power despite its waning economic influence. By that year, however,
China's global network of communications satellites, backed by the world's most
powerful supercomputers, will also be fully operational, providing Beijing with
an independent platform for the weaponization of space and a powerful
communications system for missile- or cyber-strikes into every quadrant of the
globe.
Wrapped in imperial hubris, like Whitehall or Quai d'Orsay before it, the White
House still seems to imagine that American decline will be gradual, gentle, and
partial. In his State of the Union address last January, President Barack Obama
offered the reassurance that "I do not accept second place for the United
States of America." A few days later, Vice President Joseph Biden ridiculed the
very idea that "we are destined to fulfill [historian Paul] Kennedy's prophecy
that we are going to be a great nation that has failed because we lost control
of our economy and overextended". Similarly, writing in the November issue of
the establishment journal Foreign Affairs, neo-liberal foreign policy guru
Joseph Nye waved away talk of China's economic and military rise, dismissing
"misleading metaphors of organic decline" and denying that any deterioration in
US global power was underway.
Ordinary Americans, watching their jobs head overseas, have a more realistic
view than their cosseted leaders. An opinion poll in August 2010 found that 65%
of Americans believed the country was now "in a state of decline." Already,
Australia and Turkey, traditional US military allies, are using their
American-manufactured weapons for joint air and naval maneuvers with China.
Already, America's closest economic partners are backing away from Washington's
opposition to China's rigged currency rates. As the president flew back from
his Asian tour last month, a gloomy New York Times headline summed the moment
up this way: "Obama's Economic View Is Rejected on World Stage, China, Britain
and Germany Challenge US, Trade Talks With Seoul Fail, Too."
Viewed historically, the question is not whether the United States will lose
its unchallenged global power, but just how precipitous and wrenching the
decline will be. In place of Washington's wishful thinking, let's use the
National Intelligence Council's own futuristic methodology to suggest four
realistic scenarios for how, whether with a bang or a whimper, US global power
could reach its end in the 2020s (along with four accompanying assessments of
just where we are today). The future scenarios include: economic decline, oil
shock, military misadventure, and World War III. While these are hardly the
only possibilities when it comes to American decline or even collapse, they
offer a window into an onrushing future.
Economic decline: Present situation
Today, three main threats exist to America's dominant position in the global
economy: loss of economic clout thanks to a shrinking share of world trade, the
decline of American technological innovation, and the end of the dollar's
privileged status as the global reserve currency.
By 2008, the United States had already fallen to number three in global
merchandise exports, with just 11% of them compared to 12% for China and 16%
for the European Union. There is no reason to believe that this trend will
reverse itself.
Similarly, American leadership in technological innovation is on the wane. In
2008, the US was still number two behind Japan in worldwide patent applications
with 232,000, but China was closing fast at 195,000, thanks to a blistering
400% increase since 2000. A harbinger of further decline: in 2009 the US hit
rock bottom in ranking among the 40 nations surveyed by the Information
Technology & Innovation Foundation when it came to "change" in "global
innovation-based competitiveness" during the previous decade. Adding substance
to these statistics, in October China's Defense Ministry unveiled the world's
fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, so powerful, said one US expert, that it
"blows away the existing No 1 machine" in America.
Add to this clear evidence that the US education system, that source of future
scientists and innovators, has been falling behind its competitors. After
leading the world for decades in 25- to 34-year-olds with university degrees,
the country sank to 12th place in 2010. The World Economic Forum ranked the
United States at a mediocre 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its
university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly half of all graduate
students in the sciences in the US are now foreigners, most of whom will be
heading home, not staying here as once would have happened. By 2025, in other
words, the United States is likely to face a critical shortage of talented
scientists.
Such negative trends are encouraging increasingly sharp criticism of the
dollar's role as the world's reserve currency. "Other countries are no longer
willing to buy into the idea that the US knows best on economic policy,"
observed Kenneth S Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International
Monetary Fund. In mid-2009, with the world's central banks holding an
astronomical $4 trillion in US Treasury notes, Russian President Dimitri
Medvedev insisted that it was time to end "the artificially maintained unipolar
system" based on "one formerly strong reserve currency."
Simultaneously, China's central bank governor suggested that the future might
lie with a global reserve currency "disconnected from individual nations" (that
is, the US dollar). Take these as signposts of a world to come, and of a
possible attempt, as economist Michael Hudson has argued, "to hasten the
bankruptcy of the US financial-military world order."
Economic decline: Scenario 2020
After years of swelling deficits fed by incessant warfare in distant lands, in
2020, as long expected, the US dollar finally loses its special status as the
world's reserve currency. Suddenly, the cost of imports soars. Unable to pay
for swelling deficits by selling now-devalued Treasury notes abroad, Washington
is finally forced to slash its bloated military budget. Under pressure at home
and abroad, Washington slowly pulls US forces back from hundreds of overseas
bases to a continental perimeter. By now, however, it is far too late.
Faced with a fading superpower incapable of paying the bills, China, India,
Iran, Russia, and other powers, great and regional, provocatively challenge US
dominion over the oceans, space, and cyberspace. Meanwhile, amid soaring
prices, ever-rising unemployment, and a continuing decline in real wages,
domestic divisions widen into violent clashes and divisive debates, often over
remarkably irrelevant issues. Riding a political tide of disillusionment and
despair, a far-right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric,
demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation
or economic reprisal. The world pays next to no attention as the American
Century ends in silence.
Oil shock: Present situation
One casualty of America's waning economic power has been its lock on global oil
supplies. Speeding by America's gas-guzzling economy in the passing lane, China
became the world's number one energy consumer this summer, a position the US
had held for over a century. Energy specialist Michael Klare has argued that
this change means China will "set the pace in shaping our global future".
By 2025, Iran and Russia will control almost half of the world's natural gas
supply, which will potentially give them enormous leverage over energy starved
Europe. Add petroleum reserves to the mix and, as the National Intelligence
Council has warned, in just 15 years two countries, Russia and Iran, could
"emerge as energy kingpins".
Despite remarkable ingenuity, the major oil powers are now draining the big
basins of petroleum reserves that are amenable to easy, cheap extraction. The
real lesson of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was not
BP's sloppy safety standards, but the simple fact everyone saw on "spillcam":
one of the corporate energy giants had little choice but to search for what
Klare calls "tough oil" miles beneath the surface of the ocean to keep its
profits up.
Compounding the problem, the Chinese and Indians have suddenly become far
heavier energy consumers. Even if fossil fuel supplies were to remain constant
(which they won't), demand, and so costs, are almost certain to rise - and
sharply at that. Other developed nations are meeting this threat aggressively
by plunging into experimental programs to develop alternative energy sources.
The United States has taken a different path, doing far too little to develop
alternative sources while, in the last three decades, doubling its dependence
on foreign oil imports. Between 1973 and 2007, oil imports have risen from 36%
of energy consumed in the US to 66%.
Oil shock: Scenario 2025
The United States remains so dependent upon foreign oil that a few adverse
developments in the global energy market in 2025 spark an oil shock. By
comparison, it makes the 1973 oil shock (when prices quadrupled in just months)
look like the proverbial molehill. Angered at the dollar's plummeting value,
OPEC oil ministers, meeting in Saudi Arabia, demand future energy payments in a
"basket" of yen, yuan, and euros. That only hikes the cost of US oil imports
further. At the same moment, while signing a new series of long-term delivery
contracts with China, the Saudis stabilize their own foreign exchange reserves
by switching to the yuan. Meanwhile, China pours countless billions into
building a massive trans-Asia pipeline and funding Iran's exploitation of the
world largest natural gas field at South Pars in the Persian Gulf.
Concerned that the US Navy might no longer be able to protect the oil tankers
traveling from the Persian Gulf to fuel East Asia, a coalition of Tehran,
Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi form an unexpected new Gulf alliance and affirm that
China's new fleet of swift aircraft carriers will henceforth patrol the Persian
Gulf from a base on the Gulf of Oman. Under heavy economic pressure, London
agrees to cancel the US lease on its Indian Ocean island base of Diego Garcia,
while Canberra, pressured by the Chinese, informs Washington that the Seventh
Fleet is no longer welcome to use Fremantle as a homeport, effectively evicting
the US Navy from the Indian Ocean.
With just a few strokes of the pen and some terse announcements, the "Carter
Doctrine," by which US military power was to eternally protect the Persian
Gulf, is laid to rest in 2025. All the elements that long assured the United
States limitless supplies of low-cost oil from that region - logistics,
exchange rates, and naval power - evaporate. At this point, the US can still
cover only an insignificant 12% of its energy needs from its nascent
alternative energy industry, and remains dependent on imported oil for half of
its energy consumption.
The oil shock that follows hits the country like a hurricane, sending prices to
startling heights, making travel a staggeringly expensive proposition, putting
real wages (which had long been declining) into freefall, and rendering
non-competitive whatever American exports remained. With thermostats dropping,
gas prices climbing through the roof, and dollars flowing overseas in return
for costly oil, the American economy is paralyzed. With long-fraying alliances
at an end and fiscal pressures mounting, US military forces finally begin a
staged withdrawal from their overseas bases.
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