The Next American Century? Author(s): Paul Kennedy Source: World Policy Journal, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring, 1999), pp. 52-58 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40209611 Accessed: 20-07-2016 17:04 UTC

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Paul Kennedy is professor of history and director of International Security Studies at Yale University. He is the author of many works, including The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers and Preparing for the Twenty-First Century.

The Next American Century? Paul Kennedy

The American Century. These three words visions. True, turn-of-the-century Amer- surely constitute one of the best-known ex- icans also spoke of their country's "manifest pressions of modern international history. destiny"; but the point is that the race to The phrase was first coined by the highly dominate the global scene during the next successful American publisher, Henry Luce, 100 years was a wide open one to most stra- as the title for an article he wrote in a Febru- tegic experts. Only a few prescient figures ary 1941 edition of his own LIFE magazine. outside the - such as the Brit- Composed months before Hitler attacked ish prime minister William Gladstone, and the and Japan bombed Pearl perhaps even Wilhelm II himself, who in Harbor, it was an amazingly confident pre- 1896 had called for the nations of Europe to scription for the era to come. "American ex- unite against a future American econom- perience," exulted Luce in his article, "is the ic and political domination - sensed that key to the future.... America must be the Washington would one day come to be elder brother of nations in the brotherhood the center of world affairs. of man." Given Congress's desire to avoid war, the still-minuscule American army, An Amazing Country and the massive ambitions of other, heavily What did they, and the more numerous armed, Great Powers, this was a risky vision U.S. nationalists themselves, see in this to advance. amazing country that caused them to as- Yet how much more unlikely must the sume an ever greater American world in- idea have seemed to foreign observers if it fluence? The first factor, surely, was sheer had been advocated 40 years earlier, at the . One did not have to be a beginning of the century Luce claimed as Marxist to recognize that America's mate- the "American" century? Around 1900, it rial assets - abundant land, vast mineral is true, several of the more traditional pow- resources, bounding industrial production, ers (France, Spain, the Hapsburg Empire) immense railway and road networks, bus- seemed to be fading, and the idea was being tling harbors, multimillionaires galore - advanced that the twentieth century would translated into political and strategic sig- be dominated by four great empires - the nificance as well. By the eve of the First British, the Russian, the American, and the World War, the national product of the German - that would compete against each United States was already equal to that of other. This Darwinian view of a future strug- all the other Great Powers combined, a statistic gle among the "Big Four" certainly influ- that would have amazed (and disturbed) enced Admiral von Tirpitz as he strove to Bismarck or Palmerston. create the High Seas Fleet, galvanized Brit- But there were other, less quantifiable ish imperialists like Joseph Chamberlain to signs that suggested a country on the rise. push for reforms of their own empire, and There was an energy among the people, motivated all sorts of Russian expansionist whether corporate robber barons or frontier

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This content downloaded from 140.105.48.199 on Wed, 20 Jul 2016 17:04:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms farmers, that contrasted sharply with the members, courting Turkey, Italy, Bulgaria, staider habits of the Old World. There was Romania, Greece, Japan. a sense that no limits existed to potential fu- Yet, as the British historian A. J. P. ture growth, a confidence imbued by the Taylor pointed out years ago, the only coun- vastness of the country itself compared with try that had the power to change the global crowded little states like England, Italy, the balances was that puzzling transatlantic na- Netherlands. And this broad picture of up- tion, the United States. Already by 1915 its ward mobility in turn drew millions of new financial influence was marked, and in the immigrants eager to make their own for- climactic year of 1918 its military forces tunes to the United States each year, thus were ending the stalemate on the Western boosting the collective national wealth. Front. Moreover, leaders and publics across There were, of course, many negative as- the world had to grapple with the immense pects to this bustling, rambunctious Ameri- ideological impact of the American pres- can society that appalled more traditional ence; 's calls for national foreign observers. Its political affairs, espe- self-determination, a without victory, cially at election times, seemed extremely freedom of the seas, and a new international corrupt even by European standards; it was order resonated everywhere from Danzig widely assumed that every vote in Congress to Dehli, altering the political discourse could be purchased. Its popular culture re- forever. pelled European aesthetes and intellectuals, as it does to this day. Its raw social energies An Erratic Path to Primacy suggested a lack of control, excess, instabil- But if the United States was destined to ity. It was probably comforting to these ob- be the next world hegemon, its path to pri- servers that the United States also seemed of macy was both erratic and half-hearted. Af- little import in world affairs after its brief ter 1919, America was an extremely reluc- war with Spain in 1898. It rejoiced in its iso- tant . By all sorts of measures, lationism from Europe, its executive branch Congress voted for and neu- was weak, and, although it possessed a con- trality. The , Wilson's siderable navy, its army was minor. America proudest creation, was abandoned. The was eccentric (in both senses of the word) army, massively augmented in 1917-18, but harmless. This was a common misper- was just as massively slashed. There were ception of the day. proposals made to abolish the Marine Corps, As it turned out, those who instinc- and some even wondered about preserving tively felt that America's great energies the Department. The secret office that would sooner or later have an impact on deciphered foreign codes was closed down. the global balances - one thinks here also Economically, the nation opted for policies of Sir Edward Grey or of the young Wins- of almost complete self-centeredness, and ton Churchill, both of whom described the the share of its national product derived United States as being "a vast industrial from foreign trade became smaller than ever. machine" - got it right. When the Euro- Yet, paradoxically, the impact of American pean powers went to war in August 1914, commercial and financial policies abroad most experts looked forward to a swift and was more important than ever before, as was decisive outcome; but the very fact that each to be seen in the international ripple of ca- side consisted of an extensive coalition of lamities that followed the 1919 states, with huge productive and personnel crash and the virtual elimination of open in- resources, meant that the conflict would not ternational trade that was provoked by the end quickly. As the costs of the war rapidly 1930 Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act. The world mounted, both alliances looked for new desperately needed a "lender of last resort,"

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This content downloaded from 140.105.48.199 on Wed, 20 Jul 2016 17:04:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms and only America had the resources to play untried atomic bomb, those monies would that role; but it chose not to do so. During be forthcoming. the 1930s, therefore, it no longer occupied its natural place at the center of the world The Elder Brother stage but, like its equally puzzling Soviet By 1945, then, Luce's purposes had been ac- equivalent, stood in the wings as the weak- complished in many parts of the world. Like ened Western democracies were faced with it or not, America was the "elder brother" the rise of fascist dictatorships. everywhere from Brazil to Australia to the It is difficult to know how long this Mediterranean. Amid the national bank- curious situation would have lasted - for ruptcy and exhaustion of most other coun- President Roosevelt and his advisors alone tries, it alone was healthy and strong, it could not have brought America out of its alone could pour out monies for postwar re- isolationism - had it not been for the re- construction. It had by now largely replaced peated and growing aggressions of Adolf the as the greatest maritime, Hitler and the Japanese military leadership. trading, and financial nation, as the new Much as the isolationist lobby resisted it, hegemon. It had been the chief artificer of the United States was being forced to con- the new international architecture, so it was front the threats in Europe and the Pacific, not surprising that the Bretton Woods insti- and to formulate a strategy to deal with tutions (the ; the International those threats. With France and the smaller Monetary Fund) were located in Washing- European states destroyed, the Soviet Union ton, not London, and that the United Na- invaded, and Britain besieged, America was tions Organization was set up in New York, compelled once again to occupy the center not Geneva, thus reflecting this new reality. of the world stage. This was the meaning be- Its armed forces were massive, and it had a hind Henry Luce's 1941 call to his country- monopoly on the atomic bomb. men to step forward into the American How much of America's global reach Century. would have been trimmed back by Con- And, indeed, America's time had come. gress and the public had foreign affairs been Only the United States had the reserve in- stable after 1945, it is hard to say; there dustrial capacities to outbuild the fascist were many withdrawals from overseas army states and supply both its own troops and and air bases, and a drastic reduction in mil- those of its bankrupt allies through the itary personnel. And there were many Amer- unique system of lend-lease. As the war un- icans who wanted to return to the old, pre- folded, the more that potential was realized. war days. But all such calculations were For every merchant ship sunk by German U- upset by the sudden deterioration of rela- boats, America was building another three. tions with the Soviet Union and the onset For every Allied aircraft shot down over of the . Appealing to the "lessons Europe or the South Pacific, America was learned" from the years of appeasement and building another five. In 1944 alone, it as- isolationism, American leaders swiftly re- sembled the staggering total of 96,000 air- versed course and, as in the Truman Doc- craft and launched an every trine, pledged support to all democracies few weeks. When the operations of the Ger- who asked for it. Military assurances were man and Japanese air forces were suspended handed out with a liberality that would because of lack of fuel, the United States have astounded the Founding Fathers - had the spare capacity to fly Christmas pack- to Greece and Turkey, to other NATO allies, ages to its soldiers everywhere in the world. to Japan, to Australia, to the rest of the Nothing was impossible. If it would take Americas. U.S. bomber squadrons returned billions of dollars to construct the new and to their former British air bases; American

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This content downloaded from 140.105.48.199 on Wed, 20 Jul 2016 17:04:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms troops returned to their barracks in the complete but steadily losing ground and Rhineland and Bavaria. It was not long be- unraveling. As the Soviet Union weakened, fore the words "Pax " were a com- it lost its hold over Eastern Europe and then monplace. And, in fact, American power over its own non-Russian states within the vis-a-vis the other nations of the globe was union. This dealt a virtual deathblow to the possibly more pronounced than at any time international appeal of communism and, by since that of Imperial Rome vis-a-vis its extension, to the popularity of socialist plan- neighbors. ning and policies. While the Cold War stimulated Ameri- The second factor was the remarkable ca- can engagement in the world, curiously pacity of American industry to "re-tool" it- enough it also disguised its unique position. self from the early 1980s onward, and thus The existence of the Soviet Union, with its regain a great deal of its earlier leadership vast conventional forces and (a little later) in manufacturing and production. This re- its nuclear arsenal, possessing its own array newal of the industrial spirit was usually ac- of allies in Eastern Europe and in the devel- companied by brutal measures - downsizing oping world, and brandishing its own com- the workforce; destroying, or at least weak- peting ideology, combined to suggest that ening, the trade unions; creating millions of this was a bipolar system, a world of two su- uninsured, part-time jobs; relocating pro- perpowers. By the late 1960s, Khrushchev duction to cheap-labor sites in the develop- was promising to overtake the United States ing world. No European country, except and bury capitalism in the process. Then Margaret Thatcher's Britain, felt it could do there were other negatives. Many develop- the same, the others being constrained by ing countries disliked both alliance blocs. their postwar "social contracts." Even today There was considerable anti-Americanism there is strong resistance to American-style in Europe, and at the . The capitalism. But such critics can hardly deny Vietnam War caused not only convulsions that the end result of the American indus- at home but bitter criticism of America trial renewal was that the U.S. economic ma- abroad. The ending of the Bretton Woods chine became much more competitive and system in 1971 pointed to growing eco- the envy of many a foreign businessman. nomic weaknesses. The Furthermore, the bold new technologies weakened the U.S. presidency. The Ameri- of the 1970s and 1980s played to American can failure in Iran was a humiliation. The strengths. Computers, communications sys- rise of Japan, and of East Asia in general, tems, new software applications, and the led to criticisms of U.S. industrial tech- coming of the Internet together constituted niques and a fear of being overtaken. All a "knowledge revolution" that could only this suggested not an American century have emerged from a decentralized economy but an America in relative decline. and society, yet also benefited such a society much more than it could a sclerotic Soviet Forecasters of Doom Union or a bureaucratically encumbered There was much truth in such negatives, Europe and Japan. The knowledge revolu- but the forecasters of doom missed a num- tion produced a feedback loop, giving an ber of important points. The first was that advantage to the people (like Bill Gates) America's archrival, the Soviet Union, was who had created it in the first place. And exhibiting even greater economic weak- this was not merely of commercial bene- nesses, although many Cold War advocates fit, for the U.S. armed forces also profited refused for years to admit this. Russia, to greatly from adopting these new technolo- use the author Paul Dibbs's term, was "the gies to enhance their combat effectiveness, incomplete superpower" - and not just in- making the American military unequaled

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This content downloaded from 140.105.48.199 on Wed, 20 Jul 2016 17:04:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms in many operational and strategic aspects tion - but to the young people of the world of warfare. it was immensely attractive because of its liberating messages. It was also insidious, A Culture That Knew No Limits and evaded the attempts of Muslim ayatol- And while European intellectuals might lahs, Soviet commissars, and French educa- sneer at the crassness and greed and uncar- tion ministries to prevent penetration of ing nature of Ronald Reagan's America, these "dangerous" American habits. tens of millions of people from other socie- Yet while Hollywood films and Ameri- ties - in Eastern Europe, the Caribbean, can youth culture might be intellectually East Asia - were all panting to get to the low, there were other strands to the U.S. United States, where they hoped to achieve resurgence of the past two decades that a better life for their families. With millions pointed to the increasing concentration of of additional immigrants being admitted in the world's scholarly, scientific, and techno- each decade, there was reinforced the sense logical skills within the boundaries of this of a special American culture that knew no single nation. It is home to the great sci- limits. ence laboratories, developed by Bell Labs Moreover, U.S. politicians, from Reagan and IBM or by the rising biotechnology and to Clinton, deliberately pushed for further pharmaceutical industries. It has come to economic transformations, seeking to reduce dominate the world's computer software in- government spending (and public expecta- dustry. It possesses incredible intellectual as- tions of what government could provide its sets in its great research universities, with citizens), slashing taxes, and eliminating all which the higher education systems of other forms of exchange controls on currencies and countries nowadays simply cannot compete. capital. This liberalization of capital, which The annual roll call of Nobel science prize- was also pursued eagerly by the British, but winners provides a regular witness to this more slowly and reluctantly by other coun- dominance. Young scholars from Scotland tries, meant that a vast amount of venture and Cambodia, India and Brazil, flock to capital was now circling the globe, looking study in America. German pharmaceutical for investment opportunities, rewarding companies have moved their research labora- countries and regions that followed Ameri- tories across the Atlantic, while their boards can laissez-faire practices, and punishing of directors conduct company business in those who tried to resist, whether it be Mit- the English language. terrand's France or Suharto's Indonesia. Thus, in virtually all dimensions of Since the communications revolution of power, whether it be the "" of the past two decades was chiefly U.S.-based, youth culture or the "" of mili- this also led to the export, intentionally and tary hardware, in all areas from finance to unintentionally, of American culture. This scholarship, the United States seems at pre- did not simply mean the spreading of Amer- sent in a relatively more favorable position ican free-market rules in the businessplace, in the world than at any time since the or American dress styles, or American hotels 1940s. Partly this is due to the exploitation (so that the Hilton in Singapore looks no and recovery of its own inherent strengths, different from the Hilton in Dallas). It also but this is also surely caused by the serious included the perhaps even more important weaknesses of its competitors. The Soviet spreading of American youth culture - MTV, Union has broken up, and Russia can hardly casual dress, blue jeans, Hard Rock Cafes, feed or govern itself. The Japanese banking Hollywood movies, and the rest. None of system is dangerously close to a meltdown. this had much intellectual content; it was China is grappling with the problems that crass and noisy, offering immediate gratifica- affect all of Asia. And Europe, while inching

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This content downloaded from 140.105.48.199 on Wed, 20 Jul 2016 17:04:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms toward monetary unity, is a long way from War. All or any of the above could diminish unitary political coherence and effectiveness. America's global lead. With the other major units of power in dis- The question arises whether it is wise array, the United States at the end of this to measure "power" and "influence" in the decade may be closer than ever to Henry future simply from the perspective of nation- Luce's dream of the coming of the Ameri- states like America and Russia, or conglom- can Century. erate-states like the . The decentralization of knowledge is working America's Prospects to the advantage of individuals and compa- What, then, could be said of America's nies, but not to that of nations themselves. prospects for the century to come? Will World finance is "unhinged," in free float, its relative position improve still further? and it is difficult to think of how it can be There are certain indications that it could controlled. Many observers think that the do so: the globalization of U.S. commercial large multinational corporations, with their standards continues apace, American culture ability to shift resources from one part of continues to extend its reach, and democra- our planet to another, are really the sover- tization is spreading into newer regions of eign players on the world stage. Global the planet. While domestic patriots look drug traffickers and international terrorists forward to the "" of every- also pose new and difficult threats to tradi- thing, foreign nationalists from Canada to tional state powers. So how much "influ- Malaysia are appalled. Nonetheless, a large ence" can really be defined as American, or number of people clearly do anticipate an non- American? increase of the American position in the More than that, as the end of the cen- world. tury approaches, it is difficult not to hear Other trends, however, point in the op- many parts of the structure of international posite direction. The more Americanization affairs creaking and groaning under the and globalization that occurs, the greater newer pressures for change. Many experts the likelihood of a backlash, as we are now think we are approaching real thresholds witnessing in Russia and Indonesia, and in - in the environmental damage we have many other places where the inhabitants feel inflicted on our planet, in the continuing that they have been left vulnerable to the enormous increases in human population, creative gales of international capitalism. in the uncontrollable volatility of our finan- Second, while it is difficult to forecast cial system - and that major societies will the condition of, say, Europe or China in 25 simply collapse under these strains. years' time, both of them have the potential Will the United States, with or with- to equal or exceed the United States, at least out allies, be able to handle these newer in economic power. Moreover, while it was challenges, especially in an age of divided relatively easy for the U.S. government to government in Washington? It is not clear unite its people, and its allies, against the that it can, which may mean that we have to common Cold War foe, it is much harder to think differently about the twenty-first cen- unite them now when threats to American tury than we have thought about our pre- interests seem much more diffuse and much sent century. more complicated. Finally, America's own Undoubtedly, the United States of troubled domestic scene, and the inward- America has had more influence upon our ness of its own special cultural wars, sug- world over the past 100 years than any other gests that it may have more difficulty in country, and to that extent this century may producing leaders who can focus on inter- be termed, in shorthand, "America's," even national issues than it had during the Cold more than the sixteenth century seemed to

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This content downloaded from 140.105.48.199 on Wed, 20 Jul 2016 17:04:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms be Spain's, the eighteenth France's, and the in the present age are so profound that it nineteenth Britain's. There is equally little would be rash to claim that the next cen- doubt that the United States will enter the tury, too, must be America's. By choosing twenty-first century as the world's number- intelligent policies, it is possible that the one power. But whether it will continue to United States could stay at the top for many be so into and through the next century is years to come. Yet it is wise to recall Vol- open to question. For the pace of the tech- taire's question: "If Rome and Carthage fell, nological, financial, demographic, and en- which Power is then immortal?" His answer vironmental changes that affect our planet was "None."#

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