(thanks to the President of the Australian chapter of the WWJD Fan Club, Sandra Sue, for this one)
It’s been an article of faith since WWII that America is the preeminent superpower in the world. Militarily, economically, and in just about every other way you can think of, we Americans see ourselves as #1. By and large, this has been arguably true during the course of much of my lifetime, though I suspect it depends on what your criteria happens to be. There’s little doubt that the American economy has been the engine that’s driven the world economy for most of the last 60 years. We’ve been able to drive growth domestically and around the world, AND we’ve been able to project our military might around the world as well. This is no mean feat…but one Americans have taken for granted to the point that we see it as our birthright.
Historically, empires have come and gone. Greece, Rome, Austria-Hungary, and Great Britain are but a few of the empires that have risen and fallen…and there are lessons to be drawn from each. That being said, Americans are notoriously poor at anything involving history, so learning those lessons is something that just isn’t likely to happen. Indeed, most Americans probably assume that America has always been #1 and always will be, since they’ve never known anything else. Would that this were true. History would teach us that…if we gave a damn about history, which in this case is very definitely more than one damn thing after another.
It’s been said that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it, and this speaks to the reality that the era of American Empire can, will, and must come to an end. The sad thing about history is that the causes of empirical decline often go unnoticed until a country is well down that road…and by that time it’s generally too late to reverse the trend. Reading Niall Ferguson’s “Decline and fall of the US” is a fascinating exercise in what’s currently happening that will eventually (and inevitably) result in our falling back into the pack.
When it will happen is difficult to know, but the reality is that it WILL happen. We’ve spent many years teaching the rest of the world how to be successful, and many countries (like China and Korea) have learned their lessons well. , Combine that with the reality that we’ve become Europe’s de facto protective military umbrella, and it’s easy to see how we’ve become the millstone around our own neck. Our military commitment to Europe has freed those countries to devote resources to their economy that would normally be used for military expenditures. Yes, that’s right; not only is Pax Americana on the downward slope of the bell curve, but we’re greasing the slope down which we’re descending.
How do we cope with the approaching era of American parity with the rest of the developed world? Well, that remains to be seen, but you can bet that our ability to dictate our vision to the rest of the is diminishing with the passage of time. We can rage against the dying light, or we can accept the reality of this historical cycle and adapt accordingly. How well (or if) we manage to do this will go a long ways toward determining what our post-Empire world will look like. It’s a simple case of adapt or die; here’s to hoping that we can find it within ourselves to adapt. Even in a world in which the American Empire is the stuff of history, America will still have a lot to offer the world. We just won’t be as able to project our will around the world or conduct our foreign policy through the barrel of a gun. I don’t think this will be a bad thing for our collective future.
