RUMOURS OF AMERICA’S DEMISE ARE AN EXAGGERATION
Robert Kagan
National Post, March 10, 2012
In The World America Made, excerpted below, foreign-policy expert Robert Kagan
challenges the conventional wisdom that U.S. global power and influence are waning:Much of the commentary on American decline these days rests on rather loose analysis, on impressions that the United States has lost its way, that it has abandoned the virtues that made it successful in the past, that it lacks the will to address the problems it faces. Americans look at other nations whose economies are, for the moment, in better shape than their own, and which seem to have the dynamism that America once had, and they lament, as in the title of Thomas Friedman’s latest book, “That used to be us.…”
The perception of decline today is certainly understandable, given the dismal economic situation since 2008 and the nation’s large fiscal deficits, which, combined with the continuing growth of the Chinese, Indian, Brazilian, Turkish, and other economies, seem to portend a significant and irreversible shift in global economic power. Some of the pessimism is also due to the belief that the United States has lost favour, and therefore influence, in much of the world, because of its various responses to the Sept. 11 attacks. The detainment facilities at Guantanamo, the use of torture against suspected terrorists and the widely condemned 2003 invasion of Iraq have all tarnished the American “brand” and put a dent in America’s “soft power”—its ability to attract others to its point of view.… Some compare the United States to the British Empire at the end of the 19th century, with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars serving as the equivalent of Britain’s difficult and demoralizing Boer War.
With this broad perception of decline as the backdrop, every failure of the United States to get its way in the world tends to reinforce the impression.… Iran and North Korea defy American demands that they cease their nuclear weapons programs. China refuses to let its currency rise. Ferment in the Arab world spins out of America’s control. Every day, it seems, brings more evidence that the time has passed when the United States could lead the world and get others to do its bidding.
Powerful as this sense of decline may be, however, it deserves a more rigorous examination.
Measuring changes in a nation’s relative power is a tricky business, but there are some basic indicators: the size and influence of its economy relative to that of other powers; the degree of military power compared with potential adversaries’; the degree of political influence it wields in the international system—all of which make up what the Chinese call “comprehensive national power.” And there is the matter of time. Judgments made based on only a few years’ evidence are problematic. A great power’s decline is the product of fundamental changes in the international distribution of various forms of power that usually occur over longer stretches of time. Great powers rarely decline suddenly. A war may bring them down, but even that is usually a symptom, and a culmination, of a longer process.
Some of the arguments for America’s relative decline these days would be more potent if they had not appeared only in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Just as one swallow does not make a spring, one recession, or even a severe economic crisis, need not mean the beginning of the end of a great power. The United States suffered deep and prolonged economic crises in the 1890s, the 1930s, and the 1970s. In each case, it rebounded in the following decade and actually ended up in a stronger position relative to other powers than before the crisis. The first decade of the 20th century, the 1940s, and the 1980s were all high points of American global power and influence.
Less than a decade ago, most observers spoke not of America’s decline but of its enduring primacy. In 2002, the historian Paul Kennedy, who in the late 1980s had written a much-discussed book on “the rise and fall of the great powers,” America included, declared that never in history had there been such a great “disparity of power” as between the United States and the rest of the world. John Ikenberry agreed that “no other great power” had held “such formidable advantages in military, economic, technological, cultural or political capabilities.… The preeminence of American power” was “unprecedented.” In 2004, Fareed Zakaria described the United States as enjoying a “comprehensive uni-polarity” unlike anything seen since Rome. But a mere four years later, Zakaria was writing about the “post-American world”; and Kennedy, again, about the inevitability of American decline. Did the fundamentals of America’s relative power shift so dramatically in just a few short years? The answer is no.
Let’s start with the basic indicators. In economic terms, and even despite the current years of recession and slow growth, America’s position in the world has not changed. Its share of the world’s GDP has held remarkably steady, not only over the past decade, but over the past four decades. In 1969, the United States produced roughly a quarter of the world’s economic output. Today it still produces roughly a quarter, and it remains not only the largest but also the richest economy in the world.
People are rightly mesmerized by the rise of China, India and other Asian nations whose share of the global economy has been climbing steadily, but this has so far come almost entirely at the expense of Europe and Japan, which have had a declining share of the global economy. Optimists about China’s development predict that it will overtake the United States as the largest economy in the world sometime in the next two decades.… The sheer size of an economy, however, is not by itself a good measure of overall power within the international system. If it were, then early-19th-century China, with what was then the world’s largest economy, would have been the predominant power instead of the prostrate victim of smaller European nations. Even if China does reach this pinnacle again—and Chinese leaders face significant obstacles to sustaining the country’s growth indefinitely—it will still remain far behind both the United States and Europe in terms of per capita GDP.
Military capacity matters, too, as early-19th-century China learned, and as Chinese leaders know today. As Yan Xuetong, [Dean of the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University and the Chief Editor of The Chinese Journal of International Politics], recently noted, “Military strength underpins hegemony.” Here the United States remains unmatched. It is far and away the most powerful nation the world has ever known, and there has been no decline in America’s relative military capacity—at least not yet. Americans currently spend roughly $600-billion a year on defence, more than the rest of the other great powers combined. They do so, moreover, while consuming around 4% of GDP annually, a higher percentage than the other great powers but in historical terms lower than the 10% of GDP that the United States spent on defence in the mid-1950s or the 7% it spent in the late 1980s.…
By these military and economic measures, at least, the United States today is not remotely like Britain circa 1900, when that empire’s relative decline began to become apparent. It is more like Britain circa 1870, when the empire was at the height of its power. It is possible to imagine a time when this might no longer be the case, but that moment has not yet arrived.
But what about the “rise of the rest”?… Doesn’t that cut into American power and influence? The answer is: It depends.
The fact that other nations in the world are enjoying periods of high growth does not mean that America’s position as the predominant power is declining, or even that “the rest” are catching up in terms of overall power and influence. Brazil’s share of global GDP was a little over 2% in 1990 and remains a little over 2% today. Turkey’s share was under 1% in 1990 and is still under 1% today. People…are naturally excited about these emerging markets, but just because a nation is an attractive investment opportunity does not mean it is also a rising great power. Wealth matters in international politics, but there is no simple correlation between economic growth and international influence. It is not clear that a richer India today, for instance, wields greater influence on the global stage than a poorer India did in the 1950s and 1960s under Nehru, when it was a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement.…
As for the effect of these growing economies on the position of the United States, it all depends on who is doing the growing. The problem for the British Empire at the beginning of the 20th century was not its substantial decline relative to the United States, a generally friendly power whose interests did not fundamentally conflict with Britain’s. Even in the Western hemisphere, British trade increased as it ceded dominance to the United States. The problem was Britain’s decline relative to Germany, which aimed for supremacy on the European continent, sought to compete with Britain on the high seas, and in both respects posed a threat to Britain’s core security.
In the case of the United States, the dramatic and rapid rise of the German and Japanese economies during the Cold War reduced American primacy in the world much more than the more recent “rise of the rest.” America’s share of the world’s GDP, nearly 50% after the Second World War, fell to roughly 25% by the early 1970s, where it has remained ever since. But that “rise of the rest” did not weaken the United States. If anything, it strengthened it. Germany and Japan were and are close democratic allies, key pillars of the American world order. The growth of their economies actually shifted the balance irretrievably against the Soviet bloc and helped bring about its demise.
When gauging the impact of the growing economies of other countries today, one has to make the same kinds of calculations. Does the growth of the Brazilian economy, or of the Indian economy, diminish American global power? Both nations are friendly, and India is increasingly a strategic partner of the United States. If America’s future competitor in the world is likely to be China, then a richer and more powerful India will be an asset, not a liability, to the United States. Overall, the fact that Brazil, India, Turkey and South Africa are enjoying a period of economic growth—which may or may not last indefinitely—is either irrelevant to America’s strategic position or of benefit to it. At present, only the growth of China’s economy can be said to have implications for American power in the future, and only insofar as the Chinese translate enough of their growing economic strength into military strength.
If the United States is not suffering decline in these basic measures of power, isn’t it simply true, nevertheless, that its influence has diminished, that it is having a harder time getting its way in the world?… Whatever the explanation may be—American decline, the “rise of the rest,” the apparent failure of the American capitalist model, the dysfunctional nature of American politics, the increasing complexity of the international system—it is broadly accepted that the United States can no longer shape the world to suit its interests and ideals as it once did.…
And, of course, it’s true: the United States is not able to get what it wants much of the time. But then, it never could. Many of today’s impressions about declining American influence are based on a nostalgic fallacy, that there ever was a time when the United States could shape the whole world to suit its desires.… If we are to gauge America’s relative position today, it is important to recognize that this image of the past is an illusion.… We tend to think back on the early years of the Cold War as a moment of complete American global dominance. They were nothing of the sort. The United States did accomplish extraordinary things in that era…yet for every great achievement in the early Cold War, there was at least one equally monumental setback.
THE GLOBAL MARCH TO JERUSALEM: PART OF THE
INTERNATIONAL CAMPAIGN TO DELEGITIMIZE ISRAEL
Ehud Rosen
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, March 2012
The Political Struggle Against Israel
The political element has always been part of the struggle against Israel, yet less attended to than other, mainly violent sides. However, for more than a decade, the centrality of this element has expanded among those fighting against the existence of Israel as the Jewish state. Two parallel perceptions are gradually becoming the focus of the international campaign to delegitimize Israel—“international mobilization” (“direct action”) and the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.…
These efforts are being undertaken by groups that were never in the center of politics or mainstream public opinion, and therefore turn to places that might serve as bases of mainstreaming and recruitment—the academic world, a natural place for radical views and student activism; the widely developing NGO community and “civil society” organizations; trade unions, which by their nature appeal to the more leftist side; various political echelons, and mass media, as well as religious institutions when relevant.
Several factors have contributed to the advancement of the political struggle:
–The “Durban route” that surfaced at the September 2001 UN-initiated “World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance,” in which Israel was accused of committing genocide. The parallel NGO Forum gave birth to the “NGO Declaration” that spoke about Israel in terms of apartheid and ethnic cleansing. The Durban Conference was followed by other UN-led conferences…where the concept of boycotting Israel…was gradually developed.
–The advance of Sunni Islamism in Europe, and its ascendance to the political stage in the second half of the 1990s; the Arab Spring that brought about the rapid rise to power of Sunni Islamism across the Middle East, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, which has already made significant gains in Tunisia, Egypt, Kuwait, Morocco, Libya and Yemen; and simultaneously the growing involvement of Qatar and Turkey which support it in regional and international politics.
–The route taken by Fatah and the Palestinian Authority (PA) in recent months, with attempts to bypass the Oslo Accords and gain international recognition on the path to independence.
–Growing activism of far-left elements around the world.…
–The ongoing development of social media that facilitates the forging of connections.…
A Focus on Jerusalem
Over the past few years there has been a Palestinian campaign which focuses on the so-called “Judaization” of Jerusalem. A number of related topics have been raised recently in what appears to be an orchestrated campaign initiated by leading figures in the PA, Hamas, and Muslim Brotherhood.
On February 24, 2012, Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh delivered a sermon in Cairo at the prominent Al-Azhar Mosque, in which he reportedly stated: “We paid a lot in blood in order to keep Jerusalem an Arabic and Islamic city. The Arab Spring brought the Islamic nation to the threshold of the city of Jerusalem.”
On the same weekend, a large conference on the defense of Jerusalem was held in Qatar under the patronage of the Arab League featuring what has been called “an unprecedented coalition against Israel.” This is the second Arab League conference on the topic; the first took place in Sirte, Libya, in March 2010, hosted by the country’s late president Gaddafi. The current conference reportedly featured the Qatari emir, politicians, and diplomats from other Middle East countries, secretaries-general of both the Arab League and Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), Sheikh Qaradawi and various other figures from the Middle East, Europe, and the U.S. affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, Arab-Israeli MKs, senior Fatah and PA figures including President Mahmoud Abbas, and several rabbis from the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta group. In addition, eight UN officials from various departments attended, as well as Western politicians and academics, representatives of far-left political groups.… Iran is also involved more than usual, through three delegates representing the Tehran-based Neda Institute for Scientific Political Research…[which] has served as the major point of contact bringing together Western Holocaust deniers with their Middle East counterparts.…
Parallel to the Qatar conference, a meeting took place in Jordan of the International Committees of the Global March to Jerusalem. This…strengthen[ed] the impression that the conference in Qatar…had been scheduled to coincide with preparations for the march.…
The Global March to Jerusalem
In mid-January 2012, the European Preparatory Committee for the Global March to Jerusalem published an invitation for European participation and support, stating: “We say no to Zionism; and to an exclusive Jewish colonial state, which reacts to the legitimate struggle of the indigenous Palestinian people with the expansion of its Apartheid rule.”
The organizers of the march, which they describe as a “pluralistic initiative transcending cultural and religious borders on a simple political platform”…are aiming to hold marches to Jerusalem “or the nearest point to it” on March 30, to coincide with the annual Palestinian “Land Day.” Originally, marches were planned in Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and the four neighboring countries: Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. From Europe they state: “We join this.… Our intention is to build a bridge for peace between the Arab region, Europe and other parts of the world.…”
Later in January, the Central Committee for the march, comprised of 40-42 members, held a conference in Beirut. The committee is headed by…former Lebanese Prime Minister Salim el-Hoss, who also served as honorary president of the International Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza (ICESG). The closing statement of the committee’s first meeting…called on all “free people of the world” to protect Jerusalem, its sanctuaries, and historical sites; stated that the attempt to change Jerusalem’s Arab, historical, and cultural identity is a “crime against humanity”; condemned the “Judaization” of Jerusalem and “ethnic cleansing” performed by Israel in the city and the ongoing building of the “racist separation wall”; and restated the Palestinians’ right of return and self-determination.…
In the committee’s second meeting, the Jordan-based Dr. Rebhi Halloum was elected to head the global march. Halloum is a former Fatah and PLO senior official, who left due to his rejection of the Madrid peace talks and the Oslo Accords.… [At the meeting], Halloum asserted that masses of people coming from all sides will render the Israeli army unable to decide on a course of action. He also stressed that peaceful mobilization is not a substitute for resistance [muqawama].…
It is hard to predict the results of the preparations for the march. A few points, however, are noticeable, reflecting the structure of the international campaign to delegitimize Israel:
1. For most participants in the campaign, the gradually adopted idea of “non-violence” does not replace its violent nature, rather it is in addition to it.
2. The participation of Sunni-Islamist circles…is increasing, encouraged by their rise due to the Arab Spring.… Fatah, the PLO, and the PA are also becoming more involved both officially and unofficially.…
3. The circles of those taking part in the campaign are widening to include more Islamist jihadi forces, more far-right European elements than before, and new participants from more countries.…
Lara Friedman of Americans for Peace Now, who attended the aforementioned conference in Qatar, said after its first day that she came to the conference thinking that the Arab League wanted to look into the full complexity of the issue, and include “openly pro-Israel, pro-peace voices.” “However, it seems that virtually every conversation I am having here involves me…having to…assert and defend the Jewish stake in Jerusalem.…”
The following is excerpted from the Resolution adopted
at the Conference on Jerusalem in Qatar:“We, the participants at the International Conference on Jerusalem held at Doha, Capital of the State of Qatar 26-27/2/2012…gathering worldwide in solidarity with the Palestinian people in Al Quds [Jerusalem]…[vow to] stand up against the Judaization of the city.…
Having conducted an insightful study of the current situation as well as the major challenges confronting [Jerusalem’s] Arab identity coupled with Judaization threats, including the forced eviction of its population, sustainable and progressive measures involving the destruction of its Islamic and Christian sanctities, and obliterating its history and human heritage…[we]:
–Stress that Al Quds is the permanent capital of the State of Palestine.…
–Extend a salute in great respect and reverence to the Palestinian people in Al Quds for their…resistance to all Israeli violations.…
–Commend and support the proposal…for resorting to the [UN] Security Council in order to obtain a resolution entailing setting up an international committee to examine all measures taken by Israel since 1967 occupation in Arab Al Quds intended to eradicate its Islamic and Arab features.…
–Reiterate that forced eviction of Al Quds population by means of the Judaization plans, denying the right, obliterating the history and heritage, usurping land, and confiscating properties are violations of the International Law and Humanitarian International Law. Therefore, we are calling upon the international powers that are silent about Israeli violations to assume their responsibilities.…
In conclusion, we extend our thanks to the State of Qatar…for hosting this Conference, providing all possible means that would ensure its success, demonstrating support and standing by Al Quds and its steadfast people against the Israeli occupation as well as the continuous plans for Judaizing the City.”
