Chateau Lloyd

Back in 1987, Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers created a huge discussion within the strategic community.  It was a sweeping survey of international power politics using extensive data sets to map out the strengths and weaknesses of the various hegemons.

I devoured it, and was delighted to find that was on the required reading list for one of my classes when I went to college.  I was more than a little smug when I set my battered hardcover edition down on the table, where it stood out from the paperback editions everyone else had picked up at the student book store.  My was a first edition, meaning I read it as a freshman in high school.

Anyhow, in retrospect Kennedy has been spectacularly wrong in his analysis.  "Imperial Overstretch" does not exist.  Empires often rise and fall simply because of a leadership crisis.  As we are seeing in real time, the ongoing decline of many nations is simply a choice of the ruling class.  They prefer poorer, squabbling subjects rather than independent, prosperous one.  The post-war dissolution of the British Empire was not economically or strategically necessary but instead the result of a socialist political agenda.

Of particular note was Kennedy's prediction that Japan would soon displace the US at a global power.  Talk about a miss!  

Anyhow, I do like Kennedy's book as a survey of history and also the framing he used in terms of describing the power structures over the centuries.  He described the 20th Century as the crisis of the great powers and the coming of a bipolar world, which was the one he was describing in 1987.  That note that the US was about to collapse because of the Reagan buildup was widely regarded as absurd, and the facts bore it out.  The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and the bipolar world became a unipolar one, with the United States standing unchallenged.

That world no longer exists, and there are three great powers, along with several rising contenders.  The final nail in the coffin to the unipolar world was the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which proved decisively that all the blather about Russia having a GDP the size of the Netherlands was bad propaganda.

In fact, the very measure of GDP is now highly suspect, since it rates government spending as the same as consumption and investment, which is clearly is not.  We need a new measure to measure, which cuts out government spending that does not product tangible things like roads or warships.

The growing understanding in American circles of this strategic reality means that we can perhaps finally put away anti-Russian animus and a Cold War mentality and look at the world as it is.  Russia and China are superpowers in their own right, and will not accept dictation from Washington.  Weaponizing currency and banking only creates incentives go create alternative means of exchange that are less vulnerable to external manipulation.

India is another rising power, though less strategically ambitious.  Brazil remains the nation of the future and always will be (to recycle an old joke).

The upshot is that we are in a new strategic environment where realpolitik and strategic necessity must supersede ideology.   Gone are the days when presidential pronouncements produced immediate and positive results.  The blindness of our leadership greatly increased the risk of miscalculation that could have had catastrophic consequences.

I think the new US leadership understands this, and as a result I'm sleeping a little better at night.