World Politics

[Indy]

America needs to get it’s shit together.

I don't think it is a recent thing. Like basically forever.

It's a good thing all the other countries have their shit together.

I don't think there is another country in the world that has meddled as much as the US in the last 100 years. Not even close. It isn't about who has their shit together and who doesn't. We have this superiority complex that we push around the world, and the only thing we are actually superior on is creating billionaires and creating weapons. Imagine if we spent 10% less on military and actually taxed corporations... we wouldn't have homelessness and starving kids and people going bankrupt for medical bills.

[3rdside]

How much is $2t?

jfc ..

[3rdside]

https://www.cnsnews.com/article/interna ... taiwan-too
Chinese State Media Outlet Says US Will ‘Abandon’ Taiwan, Too, ‘Once a War Breaks Out’

China holds assault drills near Taiwan after 'provocations'
https://news.trust.org/item/20210817050008-3oull

China is not going to war over Taiwan, almost certain of that .. there's no way it can pull it off without offsiding the whole world and get itself bombed in the process.

[3rdside]

I really want to believe in the Biden administration, you know, that it's the 'clever' party in view of how stupid the GOP has become ... but what's just happened in Afghanistan sounds anything but that.

[Flagrant Fowl]

The US government more or less created the Taliban by sponsoring them to fight the Russians in the 1980's, and it's not the first nor last time they'll do the same thing. There are some truly evil "Americans" who'll sell out humanity for material wealth and power.

Not that this is a recent development. People have been doing stuff like this to each other forever. It needs to stop if we ever want to achieve the peaceful ideals we otherwise project with hot air, and it's why I get frustrated when others tarnish the role of "whistleblowers". There needs to be some accountability for the evil in the world.

The Taliban didn't exist until the 1990s. But yeah, we supported the mujahideen, which eventually morphed enough into the Taliban. I wonder where in the world the US is seen as supportive versus destructive. My guess would be only in very few, mostly white countries, is our country seen as an overall benefit to the world.

Yeah, I left out the Mujahideen part. Thanks for the context.

The general sense in Korea has mostly been that America is and has been a benefit to Korea and the rest of the world, but that's been slowly changing over time. Most of the country probably feels like they need USAFK (US Armed Forces Korea) to stay in the country to help protect them from some form of enemy, whether it be the CCP, North Korean sabre rattling, or Japanese Imperialism.

COVID has been one of the biggest hits to American credibility here recently. It's allowed them to say the quiet part out loud; a lot of Americans are morons.

[Flagrant Fowl]

America needs to get it’s shit together.

I don't think it is a recent thing. Like basically forever.

It's a good thing all the other countries have their shit together.

I don't think there is another country in the world that has meddled as much as the US in the last 100 years. Not even close. It isn't about who has their shit together and who doesn't. We have this superiority complex that we push around the world, and the only thing we are actually superior on is creating billionaires and creating weapons. Imagine if we spent 10% less on military and actually taxed corporations... we wouldn't have homelessness and starving kids and people going bankrupt for medical bills.

It's not a bug, it's a feature.

I don't think the forms of Democracy and Capitalism currently running in America are a good match for the vast majority of people.

[Nodack]

We're all responsible for this debacle. Every single man killed or mutilated, every single woman raped, every single child sold into slavery. None of us can escape the collective responsibility we face as Americans.

What's the solution?

Stop trying to nation build would be a good start. I feel partially responsible as an American but, not solely responsible. If we hadn’t gone in men would still have been killed, women raped and children would be sold into slavery for 20 years. We gave them every chance for Democracy and freedom and spotted them 20 years of protection. We built schools, roads, infrastructure. We trained a 300,000 strong military and they had elected leaders. The nano second we left it all came crashing down. A lot of that’s on the people of Afghanistan that took our protection for granted and surrendered almost without firing a shot.

Biden asked how long the Government and the military would hold out if we left. The military experts said maybe 18 months. None of the experts thought the Taliban would take over in a week. None of them thought the military and government would abandon their posts right away. Yes, we deserve a lot of the blame for going in. We couldn’t stay forever. The people of Afghanistan weren’t willing to even attempt to defend themselves against the Taliban. They get some of the blame.

[virtual9mm]

The general sense in Korea has mostly been that America is and has been a benefit to Korea and the rest of the world, but that's been slowly changing over time. Most of the country probably feels like they need USAFK (US Armed Forces Korea) to stay in the country to help protect them from some form of enemy, whether it be the CCP, North Korean sabre rattling, or Japanese Imperialism.

COVID has been one of the biggest hits to American credibility here recently. It's allowed them to say the quiet part out loud; a lot of Americans are morons.

You seem to know Korea quite well.

Just to add on to your insights, consider that (a) Korea has enough fuel for 5000 nukes; (b) they can build a nuke in under three months; and (c) they've quietly built ballistic missile submarines, acquired nuclear-capable stealth attack aircraft, and put into place intermediate range ballistic missiles. They are really hoping that the Americans stick around but are prepared to rapidly deploy an indigenous nuclear triad if the US goes full-on idiocracy.

Keep in mind that the Koreans are extremely well-educated and well-versed in world affairs. They are fully aware of Lindsey Graham saying that the US should fight a war with China, and should do it on the Korean Peninsula.

[virtual9mm]

We're all responsible for this debacle. Every single man killed or mutilated, every single woman raped, every single child sold into slavery. None of us can escape the collective responsibility we face as Americans.

What's the solution?

Stop trying to nation build would be a good start. I feel partially responsible as an American but, not solely responsible. If we hadn’t gone in men would still have been killed, women raped and children would be sold into slavery for 20 years. We gave them every chance for Democracy and freedom and spotted them 20 years of protection. We built schools, roads, infrastructure. We trained a 300,000 strong military and they had elected leaders. The nano second we left it all came crashing down. A lot of that’s on the people of Afghanistan that took our protection for granted and surrendered almost without firing a shot.

Biden asked how long the Government and the military would hold out if we left. The military experts said maybe 18 months. None of the experts thought the Taliban would take over in a week. None of them thought the military and government would abandon their posts right away. Yes, we deserve a lot of the blame for going in. We couldn’t stay forever. The people of Afghanistan weren’t willing to even attempt to defend themselves against the Taliban. They get some of the blame.

I am increasingly feeling that there IS no solution. America WAS the solution. The second half of the 20th Century -- what we call Pax Americana -- certainly had limited wars in the Middle East and East Asia. But it was a golden age for humanity. The likelihood of a given human being being killed in war was 10x or even 100x times lower during this time period than any other time period in history. Entire continents were lifted out of poverty, starting with Western Europe and followed by East Asia. It is no exaggeration to say that Pax Americana was the best time for a human to be alive, ever.

This is where Hegemonic Stability Theory comes in. The US went out of its way to uphold a stable world order favorable for everyone -- but especially favorable for itself. Now, the US is no longer strong or sane enough to uphold this order, and the Chinese are not looking responsible enough to do the same. Meanwhile, environmental collapse is upon us and entire regions of the world will become uninhabitable (without air conditioning) due to heat waves and such. We're looking at global instability beyond what all but the oldest of us have seen in our lifetimes.

My hunch is that we'll have a refugee crisis far larger than anything we've ever seen before, and that no nation on Earth would be willing to accept these refugees. Hence, the power and wealth of the developed world will be used to keep out the starving and the dying from Central America, Africa, and South Asia. Meanwhile, some of these developed nations could make it through the crisis in reasonably good shape if they don't self destruct -- like the US may very well do.

But I don't really think a second US Civil War will get too far because the US military is still universally respected Stateside and will step in if things start getting really violent. Will the American republic go the way of the Roman republic?

It's a bleak future but far from unsurvivable.

[Flagrant Fowl]

The general sense in Korea has mostly been that America is and has been a benefit to Korea and the rest of the world, but that's been slowly changing over time. Most of the country probably feels like they need USAFK (US Armed Forces Korea) to stay in the country to help protect them from some form of enemy, whether it be the CCP, North Korean sabre rattling, or Japanese Imperialism.

COVID has been one of the biggest hits to American credibility here recently. It's allowed them to say the quiet part out loud; a lot of Americans are morons.

You seem to know Korea quite well.

Just to add on to your insights, consider that (a) Korea has enough fuel for 5000 nukes; (b) they can build a nuke in under three months; and (c) they've quietly built ballistic missile submarines, acquired nuclear-capable stealth attack aircraft, and put into place intermediate range ballistic missiles. They are really hoping that the Americans stick around but are prepared to rapidly deploy an indigenous nuclear triad if the US goes full-on idiocracy.

Keep in mind that the Koreans are extremely well-educated and well-versed in world affairs. They are fully aware of Lindsey Graham saying that the US should fight a war with China, and should do it on the Korean Peninsula.

This is not entirely true. Koreans of my same generation (late Y/millennial) were the first to routinely start going to university and traveling abroad, and a significant majority of the 50+ population did not continue their education past high school. On the other hand, those older folks are also typically the most politically engaged. They'd be more likely to know of Graham than a lot of 30-somethings like my Korean friends whom I'm pretty sure don't know about him well because they're more concerned with their daily lives.

There's a misconception about Koreans and education. They go to school a lot, but that doesn't mean they're all smart. Turns out effort and talent still play a pretty large role.

[virtual9mm]

The general sense in Korea has mostly been that America is and has been a benefit to Korea and the rest of the world, but that's been slowly changing over time. Most of the country probably feels like they need USAFK (US Armed Forces Korea) to stay in the country to help protect them from some form of enemy, whether it be the CCP, North Korean sabre rattling, or Japanese Imperialism.

COVID has been one of the biggest hits to American credibility here recently. It's allowed them to say the quiet part out loud; a lot of Americans are morons.

You seem to know Korea quite well.

Just to add on to your insights, consider that (a) Korea has enough fuel for 5000 nukes; (b) they can build a nuke in under three months; and (c) they've quietly built ballistic missile submarines, acquired nuclear-capable stealth attack aircraft, and put into place intermediate range ballistic missiles. They are really hoping that the Americans stick around but are prepared to rapidly deploy an indigenous nuclear triad if the US goes full-on idiocracy.

Keep in mind that the Koreans are extremely well-educated and well-versed in world affairs. They are fully aware of Lindsey Graham saying that the US should fight a war with China, and should do it on the Korean Peninsula.

This is not entirely true. Koreans of my same generation (late Y/millennial) were the first to routinely start going to university and traveling abroad, and a significant majority of the 50+ population did not continue their education past high school. On the other hand, those older folks are also typically the most politically engaged. They'd be more likely to know of Graham than a lot of 30-somethings like my Korean friends whom I'm pretty sure don't know about him well because they're more concerned with their daily lives.

There's a misconception about Koreans and education. They go to school a lot, but that doesn't mean they're all smart. Turns out effort and talent still play a pretty large role.

Yup -- I am probably going by the Taxi Driver Test too much here. And educated does not necessarily mean smart...

Even with this, though, the level of knowledge of the outside world compared to the US is night and day.

[Flagrant Fowl]

The general sense in Korea has mostly been that America is and has been a benefit to Korea and the rest of the world, but that's been slowly changing over time. Most of the country probably feels like they need USAFK (US Armed Forces Korea) to stay in the country to help protect them from some form of enemy, whether it be the CCP, North Korean sabre rattling, or Japanese Imperialism.

COVID has been one of the biggest hits to American credibility here recently. It's allowed them to say the quiet part out loud; a lot of Americans are morons.

You seem to know Korea quite well.

Just to add on to your insights, consider that (a) Korea has enough fuel for 5000 nukes; (b) they can build a nuke in under three months; and (c) they've quietly built ballistic missile submarines, acquired nuclear-capable stealth attack aircraft, and put into place intermediate range ballistic missiles. They are really hoping that the Americans stick around but are prepared to rapidly deploy an indigenous nuclear triad if the US goes full-on idiocracy.

Keep in mind that the Koreans are extremely well-educated and well-versed in world affairs. They are fully aware of Lindsey Graham saying that the US should fight a war with China, and should do it on the Korean Peninsula.

This is not entirely true. Koreans of my same generation (late Y/millennial) were the first to routinely start going to university and traveling abroad, and a significant majority of the 50+ population did not continue their education past high school. On the other hand, those older folks are also typically the most politically engaged. They'd be more likely to know of Graham than a lot of 30-somethings like my Korean friends whom I'm pretty sure don't know about him well because they're more concerned with their daily lives.

There's a misconception about Koreans and education. They go to school a lot, but that doesn't mean they're all smart. Turns out effort and talent still play a pretty large role.

Yup -- I am probably going by the Taxi Driver Test too much here. And educated does not necessarily mean smart...

Even with this, though, the level of knowledge of the outside world compared to the US is night and day.

I agree with that, and being innately misinformed about the happenings of the rest of the world is basically an American trademark at this point. It took living in abroad for a while to completely understand why a lot of people around the world are annoyed by Americans. It makes a lot of sense though. The US is a huge country with a lot of huge states and cites. There isn't much incentive to know about events happening in places like Korea or Ethiopia, for example. The problem is when Facebook Frank starts sharing his uninformed opinions on geopolitics or about the culture of a place it takes him 3 minutes to find on a map.

I think this is a part of the reason I find Americans to be more similar to mainland Chinese than I would've ever thought. The pathway of Chinese ignorance is a little different, but the end result is pretty much the same as it is for Americans.

[virtual9mm]

The general sense in Korea has mostly been that America is and has been a benefit to Korea and the rest of the world, but that's been slowly changing over time. Most of the country probably feels like they need USAFK (US Armed Forces Korea) to stay in the country to help protect them from some form of enemy, whether it be the CCP, North Korean sabre rattling, or Japanese Imperialism.

COVID has been one of the biggest hits to American credibility here recently. It's allowed them to say the quiet part out loud; a lot of Americans are morons.

You seem to know Korea quite well.

Just to add on to your insights, consider that (a) Korea has enough fuel for 5000 nukes; (b) they can build a nuke in under three months; and (c) they've quietly built ballistic missile submarines, acquired nuclear-capable stealth attack aircraft, and put into place intermediate range ballistic missiles. They are really hoping that the Americans stick around but are prepared to rapidly deploy an indigenous nuclear triad if the US goes full-on idiocracy.

Keep in mind that the Koreans are extremely well-educated and well-versed in world affairs. They are fully aware of Lindsey Graham saying that the US should fight a war with China, and should do it on the Korean Peninsula.

This is not entirely true. Koreans of my same generation (late Y/millennial) were the first to routinely start going to university and traveling abroad, and a significant majority of the 50+ population did not continue their education past high school. On the other hand, those older folks are also typically the most politically engaged. They'd be more likely to know of Graham than a lot of 30-somethings like my Korean friends whom I'm pretty sure don't know about him well because they're more concerned with their daily lives.

There's a misconception about Koreans and education. They go to school a lot, but that doesn't mean they're all smart. Turns out effort and talent still play a pretty large role.

Yup -- I am probably going by the Taxi Driver Test too much here. And educated does not necessarily mean smart...

Even with this, though, the level of knowledge of the outside world compared to the US is night and day.

I agree with that, and being innately misinformed about the happenings of the rest of the world is basically an American trademark at this point. It took living in abroad for a while to completely understand why a lot of people around the world are annoyed by Americans. It makes a lot of sense though. The US is a huge country with a lot of huge states and cites. There isn't much incentive to know about events happening in places like Korea or Ethiopia, for example. The problem is when Facebook Frank starts sharing his uninformed opinions on geopolitics or about the culture of a place it takes him 3 minutes to find on a map.

I think this is a part of the reason I find Americans to be more similar to mainland Chinese than I would've ever thought. The pathway of Chinese ignorance is a little different, but the end result is pretty much the same as it is for Americans.

Sounds about right to me although I don't actually speak Mandarin and haven't spent too much time outside Beijing, Shanghai, (wealthy) Zhejiang Province, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou. The folks I interacted within places like Kaiping and Yangzhou were in the tourist industry or political or economic elites. I can only go by what I hear from my friends.

Did you get a chance to get out into the interior or the Northeast?

[Superbone]

Those sure are broad stokes that you guys paint whole populations with.

[Flagrant Fowl]

Those sure are broad stokes that you guys paint whole populations with.

Of course. I'm speaking in broad terms. Both countries are massive in size with huge populations, so I think there are many general similarities to observe between the two for that reason.

[3rdside]

https://www.cnsnews.com/article/interna ... taiwan-too
Chinese State Media Outlet Says US Will ‘Abandon’ Taiwan, Too, ‘Once a War Breaks Out’

China holds assault drills near Taiwan after 'provocations'
https://news.trust.org/item/20210817050008-3oull

China is not going to war over Taiwan, almost certain of that .. there's no way it can pull it off without offsiding the whole world and get itself bombed in the process.

Niall Ferguson and Francis Fukuyama know a lot more about things than I do, and they both talk of possible war with China.

Experts can be wrong of course and I'd like to believe it won't happen, but again, they're the experts:


Francis Fukuyama on the end of American hegemony - The Economist

(Summarises that USA's biggest threat is internal division rather than over extension internationally).

Spoiler: show/hide

Afghanistan does not mark the end of the American era; the challenge to its global standing is political polarisation at home, says a foreign-policy expert



Aug 18th 2021

THE HORRIFYING images of desperate Afghans trying to get out of Kabul this week after the United States-backed government collapsed have evoked a major juncture in world history, as America turned away from the world. The truth of the matter is that the end of the American era had come much earlier. The long-term sources of American weakness and decline are more domestic than international. The country will remain a great power for many years, but just how influential it will be depends on its ability to fix its internal problems, rather than its foreign policy.

The peak period of American hegemony lasted less than 20 years, from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to around the financial crisis in 2007-09. The country was dominant in many domains of power back then—military, economic, political and cultural. The height of American hubris was the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when it hoped to be able to remake not just Afghanistan (invaded two years before) and Iraq, but the whole of the Middle East.


The country overestimated the effectiveness of military power to bring about fundamental political change, even as it under-estimated the impact of its free-market economic model on global finance. The decade ended with its troops bogged down in two counterinsurgency wars, and an international financial crisis that accentuated the huge inequalities that American-led globalisation had brought about.

The degree of unipolarity in this period has been relatively rare in history, and the world has been reverting to a more normal state of multipolarity ever since, with China, Russia, India, Europe and other centres gaining power relative to America. Afghanistan’s ultimate effect on geopolitics is likely to be small. America survived an earlier, humiliating defeat when it withdrew from Vietnam in 1975, but it quickly regained its dominance within a little more than a decade, and today it works with Vietnam to curb Chinese expansionism. America still has many economic and cultural advantages that few other countries can match.

The much bigger challenge to America’s global standing is domestic: American society is deeply polarised, and has found it difficult to find consensus on virtually anything. This polarisation started over conventional policy issues like taxes and abortion, but since then has metastasised into a bitter fight over cultural identity. The demand for recognition on the part of groups that feel they have been marginalised by elites was something I identified 30 years ago as an Achilles heel of modern democracy. Normally, a big external threat such as a global pandemic should be the occasion for citizens to rally around a common response; the covid-19 crisis served rather to deepen America's divisions, with social distancing, mask-wearing and now vaccinations being seen not as public-health measures but as political markers.

These conflicts have spread to all aspects of life, from sports to the brands of consumer products that red and blue Americans buy. The civic identity that took pride in America as a multiracial democracy in the post-civil rights era has been replaced by warring narratives over 1619 versus 1776—that is, whether the country is founded on slavery or the fight for freedom. This conflict extends to the separate realities each side believes it sees, realities in which the election in November 2020 was either one of the fairest in American history or else a massive fraud leading to an illegitimate presidency.

Throughout the cold war and into the early 2000s, there was a strong elite consensus in America in favour of maintaining a leadership position in world politics. The grinding and seemingly endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq soured many Americans not just on difficult places like the Middle East, but international involvement generally.

Polarisation has affected foreign policy directly. During the Obama years, Republicans took a hawkish stance and castigated the Democrats for the Russian “reset” and alleged naïveté regarding President Putin. Former President Trump turned the tables by openly embracing Mr Putin, and today roughly half of Republicans believe that the Democrats constitute a bigger threat to the American way of life than does Russia. A conservative television-news anchor, Tucker Carlson, travelled to Budapest to celebrate Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orban; “owning the libs” (ie, antagonising the left, a catch-phrase of the right) was more important than standing up for democratic values.

There is more apparent consensus regarding China: both Republicans and Democrats agree it is a threat to democratic values. But this only carries America so far. A far greater test for American foreign policy than Afghanistan will be Taiwan, if it comes under direct Chinese attack. Will the United States be willing to sacrifice its sons and daughters on behalf of that island’s independence? Or indeed, would the United States risk military conflict with Russia should the latter invade Ukraine? These are serious questions with no easy answers, but a reasoned debate about American national interest will probably be conducted primarily through the lens of how it affects the partisan struggle.

Polarisation has already damaged America’s global influence, well short of future tests like these. That influence depended on what Joseph Nye, a foreign-policy scholar, labelled “soft power”, that is, the attractiveness of American institutions and society to people around the world. That appeal has been greatly diminished: it is hard for anyone to say that American democratic institutions have been working well in recent years, or that any country should imitate America’s political tribalism and dysfunction. The hallmark of a mature democracy is the ability to carry out peaceful transfers of power following elections, a test the country failed spectacularly on January 6th.

The biggest policy debacle by President Joe Biden’s administration in its seven months in office has been its failure to plan adequately for the rapid collapse of Afghanistan. However unseemly that was, it doesn’t speak to the wisdom of the underlying decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, which may in the end prove to be the right one. Mr Biden has suggested that withdrawal was necessary in order to focus on meeting the bigger challenges from Russia and China down the road. I hope he is serious about this. Barack Obama was never successful in making a “pivot” to Asia because America remained focused on counterinsurgency in the Middle East. The current administration needs to redeploy both resources and the attention of policymakers from elsewhere in order to deter geopolitical rivals and to engage with allies.


The United States is not likely to regain its earlier hegemonic status, nor should it aspire to. What it can hope for is to sustain, with like-minded countries, a world order friendly to democratic values. Whether it can do this will depend not on short-term actions in Kabul, but on recovering a sense of national identity and purpose at home.

_______

Francis Fukuyama is a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Mosbacher Director of its Centre on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.

Niall Ferguson on why the end of America’s empire won’t be peaceful - The Economist

(Summarises the similarities and differences between the end of the British Empire and the American one that's heading in the same direction, and how the withdrawal from Afghanistan will be perceived as weakness, therefore an opportunity for the Russians and Chinese to exploit particularly as the USA is so divided at home).

Spoiler: show/hide

As it leaves Afghanistan in chaos, America’s decline mirrors Britain’s a century ago. It may also invite wider conflict, warns a historian



Aug 20th 2021
Give this article
This By-invitation commentary is part of a series by outside contributors on the future of American power—taking a broad look at the forces shaping the country's global standing in the 20 years since 9/11, from the rise of China to the withdrawal from Afghanistan. More articles are available here.

“THE MULTITUDES remained plunged in ignorance… and their leaders, seeking their votes, did not dare to undeceive them.” So wrote Winston Churchill of the victors of the first world war in “The Gathering Storm.” He bitterly recalled a “refusal to face unpleasant facts, desire for popularity and electoral success irrespective of the vital interests of the state.” American readers watching their government’s ignominious departure from Afghanistan, and listening to President Joe Biden’s strained effort to justify the unholy mess he has made, may find at least some of Churchill’s critique of interwar Britain uncomfortably familiar.


Britain’s state of mind was the product of a combination of national exhaustion and “imperial overstretch”, to borrow a phrase from Paul Kennedy, a historian at Yale. Since 1914, the nation had endured war, financial crisis and in 1918-19 a terrible pandemic, the Spanish influenza. The economic landscape was overshadowed by a mountain of debt. Though the country remained the issuer of the dominant global currency, it was no longer unrivalled in that role. A highly unequal society inspired politicians on the left to demand redistribution if not outright socialism. A significant proportion of the intelligentsia went further, embracing communism or fascism.

Meanwhile the established political class preferred to ignore a deteriorating international situation. Britain’s global dominance was menaced in Europe, in Asia and in the Middle East. The system of collective security—based on the League of Nations, which had been established in 1920 as part of the post-war peace settlement—was crumbling, leaving only the possibility of alliances to supplement thinly spread imperial resources. The result was a disastrous failure to acknowledge the scale of the totalitarian threat and to amass the means to deter the dictators.

Does Britain’s experience help us understand the future of American power? Americans prefer to draw lessons from the United States’ history, but it may be more illuminating to compare the country to its predecessor as an Anglophone global hegemon, for America today in many ways resembles Britain in the interwar period.

Like all such historical analogies, this one is not perfect. The vast amalgam of colonies and other dependencies that Britain ruled over in the 1930s has no real American counterpart today. This allows Americans to reassure themselves that they do not have an empire, even when withdrawing their soldiers and civilians from Afghanistan after a 20-year presence.

Despite its high covid-19 mortality, America is not recovering from the kind of trauma that Britain experienced in the first world war, when huge numbers of young men were slaughtered (nearly 900,000 died, some 6% of males aged 15 to 49 died, to say nothing of 1.7m wounded). Nor is America facing as clear and present a threat as Nazi Germany posed to Britain. Still, the resemblances are striking, and go beyond the failure of both countries to impose order on Afghanistan. (“It is clear,” noted The Economist in February 1930, after “premature” modernising reforms had triggered a revolt, “that Afghanistan will have none of the West”.) And the implications for the future of American power are unnerving.

So many books and articles predicting American decline have been written in recent decades that “declinism” has become a cliché. But Britain’s experience between the 1930s and the 1950s is a reminder that there are worse fates than gentle, gradual decline.

Follow the money
Start with the mountains of debt. Britain’s public debt after the first world war rose from 109% of GDP in 1918 to just under 200% in 1934. America’s federal debt is different in important ways, but it is comparable in magnitude. It will reach nearly 110% of GDP this year, even higher than its previous peak in the immediate aftermath of the second world war. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it could exceed 200% by 2051.

An important difference between the United States today and the United Kingdom roughly a century ago is that the average maturity of American federal debt is quite short (65 months), whereas more than 40% of the British public debt took the form of perpetual bonds or annuities. This means that the American debt today is a great deal more sensitive to moves in interest rates than Britain’s was.

Another key difference is the great shift there has been in fiscal and monetary theories, thanks in large measure to John Maynard Keynes’s critique of Britain’s interwar policies.

Britain’s decision in 1925 to return sterling to the gold standard at the overvalued pre-war price condemned Britain to eight years of deflation. The increased power of trade unions meant that wage cuts lagged behind price cuts during the depression. This contributed to job losses. At the nadir in 1932, the unemployment rate was 15%. Yet Britain’s depression was mild, not least because abandoning the gold standard in 1931 allowed the easing of monetary policy. Falling real interest rates meant a decline in the burden of debt service, creating new fiscal room for manoeuvre.

Such a reduction in debt-servicing costs seems unlikely for America in the coming years. Economists led by the former treasury secretary, Lawrence Summers, have predicted inflationary dangers from the current fiscal and monetary policies. Where British real interest rates generally declined in the 1930s, in America they are projected to turn positive from 2027 and rise steadily to hit 2.5% by mid-century. True, forecasts of rising rates have been wrong before, and the Federal Reserve is in no hurry to tighten monetary policy. But if rates do rise, America’s debt will cost more to service, squeezing other parts of the federal budget, especially discretionary expenditures such as defence.


That brings us to the crux of the matter. Churchill’s great preoccupation in the 1930s was that the government was procrastinating—the underlying rationale of its policy of appeasement—rather than energetically rearming in response to the increasingly aggressive behaviour of Hitler, Mussolini and the militarist government of imperial Japan. A key argument of the appeasers was that fiscal and economic constraints—not least the high cost of running an empire that extended from Fiji to Gambia to Guiana to Vancouver—made more rapid rearmament impossible.

It may seem fanciful to suggest that America faces comparable threats today—not only from China, but also from Russia, Iran and North Korea. Yet the mere fact that it seems fanciful illustrates the point. The majority of Americans, like the majority of Britons between the wars, simply do not want to contemplate the possibility of a major war against one or more authoritarian regimes, coming on top of the country’s already extensive military commitments. That is why the projected decline of American defence spending as a share of GDP, from 3.4% in 2020 to 2.5% in 2031, will cause consternation only to Churchillian types. And they can expect the same hostile reception—the same accusations of war-mongering—that Churchill had to endure.

Power is relative
A relative decline compared with other countries is another point of resemblance. According to estimates by the economic historian Angus Maddison, the British economy by the 1930s had been overtaken in terms of output by not only America’s (as early as 1872), but also Germany’s (in 1898 and again, after the disastrous years of war, hyperinflation and slump, in 1935) and the Soviet Union (in 1930). True, the British Empire as a whole had a bigger economy than the United Kingdom, especially if the Dominions are included—perhaps twice as large. But the American economy was even larger and remained more than double the size of Britain’s, despite the more severe impact of the Great Depression in the United States.

America today has a similar problem of relative decline in economic output. On the basis of purchasing-power parity, which allows for the lower prices of many Chinese domestic goods, the GDP of China caught up with that of America in 2014. On a current-dollar basis, the American economy is still bigger, but the gap is projected to narrow. This year China’s current-dollar GDP will be around 75% of America’s. By 2026 it will be 89%.

It is no secret that China poses a bigger economic challenge than the Soviet Union once did, since the latter’s economy was never more than 44% the size of America’s during the cold war. Nor is it classified information that China is seeking to catch up with America in many technological domains with national-security applications, from artificial intelligence to quantum computing. And the ambitions of China’s leader, Xi Jinping, are also well known—along with his renewal of the Chinese Communist Party’s ideological hostility to individual freedom, the rule of law and democracy.

American sentiment towards the Chinese government has markedly soured in the past five years. But that does not seem to be translating into public interest in actively countering the Chinese military threat. If Beijing invades Taiwan, most Americans will probably echo the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, who notoriously described the German bid to carve up Czechoslovakia in 1938 as “a quarrel in a far away country, between people of whom we know nothing”.

A crucial source of British weakness between the wars was the revolt of the intelligentsia against the Empire and more generally against traditional British values. Churchill recalled with disgust the Oxford Union debate in 1933 that had carried the motion, “This House refuses to fight for King and country.” As he noted: “It was easy to laugh off such an episode in England, but in Germany, in Russia, in Italy, in Japan, the idea of a decadent, degenerate Britain took deep root and swayed many calculations.” This of course is precisely how China’s new breed of “wolf-warrior” diplomats and nationalist intellectuals regard America today.

Nazis, fascists and communists alike had good reason to think the British were succumbing to self-hatred. “I did not even know that the British Empire is dying,” George Orwell wrote of his time as a colonial policeman in his essay “Shooting an Elephant.” Not many intellectuals attained Orwell’s insight that Britain’s was nevertheless “a great deal better than the younger empires that [were] going to supplant it.” Many—unlike Orwell—embraced Soviet communism, with disastrous results for Western intelligence. Meanwhile, a shocking number of members of the aristocratic social elite were attracted to Hitler. Even readers of the Daily Express were more inclined to make fun of the Empire than to celebrate it. “Big White Carstairs” in the Beachcomber column was an even more absurd caricature of the colonial type than David Low’s Colonel Blimp.

The end of empires
America’s empire may not manifest itself as dominions, colonies and protectorates, but the perception of international dominance, and the costs associated with overstretch, are similar. Both left and right in America now routinely ridicule or revile the idea of an imperial project. “The American Empire is falling apart,” gloats Tom Engelhardt, a journalist in The Nation. On the right, the economist Tyler Cowen sardonically imagines “what the fall of the American empire could look like.” At the same time as Cornel West, the progressive African-American philosopher, sees “Black Lives Matter and the fight against US empire [as] one and the same”, two pro-Trump Republicans, Ryan James Girdusky and Harlan Hill, call the pandemic “the latest example of how the American empire has no clothes.”


The right still defends the traditional account of the republic’s founding—as a rejection of British colonial rule—against the "woke” left’s attempts to recast American history as primarily a tale of slavery and then segregation. But few on either side of the political spectrum pine for the era of global hegemony that began in the 1940s.

In short, like Britons in the 1930s, Americans in the 2020s have fallen out of love with empire—a fact that Chinese observers have noticed and relish. Yet the empire remains. Granted, America has few true colonies: Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands in the Caribbean, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands in the north Pacific, and American Samoa in the south Pacific. By British standards, it is a paltry list of possessions. Nevertheless, the American military presence is almost as ubiquitous as Britain’s once was. American armed-forces personnel are to be found in more than 150 countries. The total number deployed beyond the borders of the 50 states is around 200,000.

The acquisition of such extensive global responsibilities was not easy. But it is a delusion to believe that shedding them will be easier. This is the lesson of British history to which Americans need to pay more heed. President Joe Biden’s ill-advised decision for a “final withdrawal” from Afghanistan was just the latest signal by an American president that the country wants to reduce its overseas commitments. Barack Obama began the process by exiting Iraq too hastily and announcing in 2013 that “America is not the world's policeman.” Donald Trump’s “America First” doctrine was just a populist version of the same impulse: he too itched to get out of Afghanistan and to substitute tariffs for counterinsurgency.

The problem, as this month’s debacle in Afghanistan perfectly illustrates, is that the retreat from global dominance is rarely a peaceful process. However you phrase it, announcing you are giving up on your longest war is an admission of defeat, and not only in the eyes of the Taliban. China, which shares a short stretch of its vast land border with Afghanistan, is also closely watching. So is Russia, with zloradstvo—Russian for Schadenfreude. It was no mere coincidence that Russia intervened militarily in both Ukraine and Syria just months after Obama’s renunciation of global policing.

Mr Biden’s belief (expressed to Richard Holbrooke in 2010) that one could exit Afghanistan as Richard Nixon exited Vietnam and “get away with it” is bad history: America’s humiliation in Indochina did have consequences. It emboldened the Soviet Union and its allies to make trouble elsewhere—in southern and eastern Africa, in Central America and in Afghanistan, which it invaded in 1979. Reenacting the fall of Saigon in Kabul will have comparable adverse effects.

The end of American empire was not difficult to foresee, even at the height of neoconservative hubris following the invasion of Iraq in 2003. There were at least four fundamental weaknesses of America’s global position at that time, as I first argued in “Colossus: The Rise and Fall of America’s Empire” (Penguin, 2004). They are a manpower deficit (few Americans have any desire to spend long periods of time in places like Afghanistan and Iraq); a fiscal deficit (see above); an attention deficit (the electorate’s tendency to lose interest in any large-scale intervention after roughly four years); and a history deficit (the reluctance of policymakers to learn lessons from their predecessors, much less from other countries).

These were never deficits of British imperialism. One other difference—in many ways more profound than the fiscal deficit—is the negative net international investment position (NIIP) of the United States, which is just under -70% of GDP. A negative NIIP essentially means that foreign ownership of American assets exceeds American ownership of foreign assets. By contrast, Britain still had a hugely positive NIIP between the wars, despite the amounts of overseas assets that had been liquidated to finance the first world war. From 1922 until 1936 it was consistently above 100% of GDP. By 1947 it was down to 3%.

Selling off the remaining imperial silver (to be precise, obliging British investors to sell overseas assets and hand over the dollars) was one of the ways Britain paid for the second world war. America, the great debtor empire, does not have an equivalent nest-egg. It can afford to pay the cost of maintaining its dominant position in the world only by selling yet more of its public debt to foreigners. That is a precarious basis for superpower status.

Facing new storms
Churchill’s argument in “The Gathering Storm” was not that the rise of Germany, Italy and Japan was an unstoppable process, condemning Britain to decline. On the contrary, he insisted that war could have been avoided if the Western democracies had taken more decisive action earlier in the 1930s. When President Franklin Roosevelt asked him what the war should be called, Churchill “at once” replied: “The Unnecessary War.”

In the same way, there is nothing inexorable about China’s rise, much less Russia’s, while all the lesser countries aligned with them are economic basket cases, from North Korea to Venezuela. China’s population is ageing even faster than anticipated; its workforce is shrinking. Sky-high private-sector debt is weighing on growth. Its mishandling of the initial outbreak of covid-19 has greatly harmed its international standing. It also risks becoming the villain of the climate crisis, as it cannot easily kick the habit of burning coal to power its industry.

And yet it is all too easy to see a sequence of events unfolding that could lead to another unnecessary war, most probably over Taiwan, which Mr Xi covets and which America is (ambiguously) committed to defend against invasion—a commitment that increasingly lacks credibility as the balance of military power shifts in East Asia. (The growing vulnerability of American aircraft carriers to Chinese anti-ship ballistic missiles such as the DF-21D is just one problem to which the Pentagon lacks a good solution.)

If American deterrence fails and China gambles on a coup de main, the United States will face the grim choice between fighting a long, hard war—as Britain did in 1914 and 1939—or folding, as happened over Suez in 1956.


Churchill said that he wrote “The Gathering Storm” to show:

how the malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous; how the structure and habits of democratic States, unless they are welded into larger organisms, lack those elements of persistence and conviction which can alone give security to humble masses; how, even in matters of self-preservation … the counsels of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger … [how] the middle course adopted from desires for safety and a quiet life may be found to lead direct to the bull’s-eye of disaster.

He concluded the volume with one of his many pithy maxims: “Facts are better than dreams.” American leaders in recent years have become over-fond of dreams, from the “full spectrum dominance” fantasy of the neoconservatives under George W. Bush to the dark nightmare of American “carnage” conjured up by Donald Trump. As another global storm gathers, it may be time to face the fact that Churchill understood only too well: the end of empire is seldom, if ever, a painless process.
_____________

Niall Ferguson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and managing director of Greenmantle, a political-economic advisory firm. His latest book is “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe” (Allen Lane, 2021).

[virtual9mm]

Those sure are broad stokes that you guys paint whole populations with.

Of course. I'm speaking in broad terms. Both countries are massive in size with huge populations, so I think there are many general similarities to observe between the two for that reason.

Massive range of variation within China, just like there is within the US. Just like most tourists to the US interact with folks in New York or San Francisco or someone working in hospitality in Flagstaff, most Americans in China interact mainly with the educated elite in Shanghai or a tour guide in some place like Huangshan. Hence my comment on how poor, undereducated folks in rural Chinese provinces were a blind spot for me. I will say, though, that I do know Korea quite well.

[virtual9mm]

Niall Ferguson and Francis Fukuyama know a lot more about things than I do, and they both talk of possible war with China.

I don't know Ferguson but I used to see Fukuyama several times a month and be on a first name basis with him. Don't be fooled by his reputation as a neocon -- he repudiated them a long time ago. He's among the most clearheaded thinkers on what's going on in the US and the world.

[3rdside]

Niall Ferguson and Francis Fukuyama know a lot more about things than I do, and they both talk of possible war with China.

I don't know Ferguson but I used to see Fukuyama several times a month and be on a first name basis with him. Don't be fooled by his reputation as a neocon -- he repudiated them a long time ago. He's among the most clearheaded thinkers on what's going on in the US and the world.

Oh nice .. and I'm sure he is (and if he's writing for the Economist he's almost certainly not going to be a Neocon!).

The more this Afghanistan issue sinks in the more it feels like a huge, huge own goal from Biden.

The UK and EU are furious, Tony Blair has called it imbecilic - as much as he is responsible for getting us all into this mess, he is one of last clear thinking, international statesman the UK has and if he's saying that, well you know you've f****d up.

[virtual9mm]

Niall Ferguson and Francis Fukuyama know a lot more about things than I do, and they both talk of possible war with China.

I don't know Ferguson but I used to see Fukuyama several times a month and be on a first name basis with him. Don't be fooled by his reputation as a neocon -- he repudiated them a long time ago. He's among the most clearheaded thinkers on what's going on in the US and the world.

Oh nice .. and I'm sure he is (and if he's writing for the Economist he's almost certainly not going to be a Neocon!).

The more this Afghanistan issue sinks in the more it feels like a huge, huge own goal from Biden.

The UK and EU are furious, Tony Blair has called it imbecilic - as much as he is responsible for getting us all into this mess, he is one of last clear thinking, international statesman the UK has and if he's saying that, well you know you've f****d up.

It was a different life -- seems like a lifetime ago.

Any expectation that the world had of the US acting more responsibly under Biden has just been flushed into the shitter.