The World America Made

by Robert Kagan

  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 twentieth 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 percent after World War II, fell to roughly 25 percent 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? The almost universal assumption is that the United States has indeed lost influence. 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. Every day seems to bring more proof, as things happen in the world that seem both contrary to American interests and beyond American control.

  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, could get other nations to do what it wanted them to do, and could, as the political scientist Stephen Walt put it, “manage the politics, economics and security arrangements for nearly the entire globe.”89

  If we are to gauge America’s relative position today, it is important to recognize that this image of the past is an illusion. There never was such a time. 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: the Marshall Plan, the NATO alliance, the United Nations, and the Bretton Woods economic system all shaped the world we know today. Yet for every great achievement in the early Cold War, there was at least one equally monumental setback.

  During the Truman years, there was the triumph of the Communist Revolution in China in 1949, which American officials regarded as a disaster for U.S. interests in the region and which did indeed prove costly; if nothing else, it was a major factor in spurring North Korea to attack the South in 1950. But the United States was helpless to prevent it. As Dean Acheson summed up, “the ominous result of the civil war in China” had proved “beyond the control of the … United States,” the product of “forces which this country tried to influence but could not.”90 When the Chinese victory was soon followed by revolts against Western control of Indochina, Acheson again observed that events “beyond our control” were “marching on the mainland of Asia.”91 A year later came the unanticipated and unprepared-for North Korean attack on South Korea, and America’s intervention, which, after more than thirty-five thousand American dead and almost a hundred thousand wounded, left the situation almost exactly as it had been before the war. In 1949 there came perhaps the worst news of all: the Soviet acquisition of the atomic bomb and the end of the nuclear monopoly on which American military strategy and defense budgeting had been predicated.

  A year later, NSC 68, the famous strategy document, warned of the growing gap between America’s military strength and its global strategic commitments. If current trends continued, it declared, the result would be “a serious decline in the strength of the free world relative to the Soviet Union and its satellites.” The “integrity and vitality of our system,” the document stated, was “in greater jeopardy than ever before in our history.”92 Douglas MacArthur, giving the keynote address at the Republican National Convention in 1952, lamented the “alarming change in the balance of world power,” “the rising burden of our fiscal commitments,” the ascendant power of the Soviet Union, “and our own relative decline.”93

  Both the outgoing Truman administration and the incoming Eisenhower administration believed it was Soviet strategy to “break the economy of the United States” by forcing it to spend too much on defense, and both feared it would succeed.94 In 1957, the Gaither Commission reported that the Russian economy was growing at a much faster pace than that of the United States and that by 1959 Russia would be able to hit American soil with one hundred intercontinental ballistic missiles, prompting Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House, to ask, “What good are a sound economy and a balanced budget if we lose our national lives and Russian rubles become the coin of the land?”95

  Nor was the United States always able to persuade others, even its closest allies, to do what it wanted, or to refrain from doing what it didn’t want. In 1949 Acheson tried and failed to prevent European allies, including the British, from recognizing Communist China. In 1954 the Eisenhower administration failed to get its way at the Geneva Conference on Vietnam and refused to sign the final accords. Two years later it tried to prevent the British, the French, and the Israelis from invading Egypt over the closure of the Suez Canal, only to see them launch an invasion without so much as a heads-up to Washington. When the United States confronted China over the islands of Quemoy and Matsu, the Eisenhower administration tried and failed to get a show of support from European allies, prompting John Foster Dulles to fear that NATO was “beginning to fall apart.”96 By the late 1950s, Mao believed the United States was a superpower in decline, “afraid of taking on new involvements in the Third World and increasingly incapable of maintaining its hegemony over the capitalist countries.”97

  But what about “soft power”? Wasn’t it true, as political scienist Joseph S. Nye has argued, that the United States used to be able to “get what it wanted in the world” because of the “values expressed” by American culture as reflected through television, movies, and music, and because of the attractiveness of America’s domestic and foreign policies? These elements of soft power made other peoples around the world want to follow the United States, “admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness.”98

  Again, the historical truth is more complicated. During the first three decades after World War II, great portions of the world did not admire the United States. They did n
ot seek to emulate it, and they were not especially pleased at the way it conducted itself in international affairs. Yes, American media was spreading American culture, but it was spreading images that were not always flattering. In the 1950s the world could watch televised images of Joseph McCarthy and the hunt for communists in the State Department and Hollywood. American movies depicted the suffocating capitalist conformism of the new American corporate culture. Best-selling novels such as The Ugly American painted a picture of American bullying and boorishness. There were the battles over segregation in the 1950s and 1960s, the globally transmitted images of whites spitting at black schoolchildren and police setting their dogs on black demonstrators. (That “used to be us,” too.) The racism of America was practically “ruining” the American global image, Dulles feared, especially in the so-called Third World.99 In the late 1960s and early 1970s came the Watts riots, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the shootings at Kent State, and then the government-shaking scandal of Watergate. These were not the kinds of images likely to endear the United States to the world, no matter how many Jerry Lewis and Woody Allen movies were playing in Parisian cinemas.

  Nor did much of the world find American foreign policy especially attractive during these years. Eisenhower yearned “to get some of the people in these down-trodden countries to like us instead of hating us,” but CIA-orchestrated overthrows of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran and Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala didn’t help.100 In 1957 demonstrators attacked the vice president’s motorcade in Venezuela, shouting, “Go away, Nixon!” “Out, dog!” “We won’t forget Guatemala!”101 In 1960, Khrushchev humiliated Eisenhower by canceling a summit when an American spy plane was shot down over Russia. Later that year, on his way to a “goodwill” visit in Tokyo, Eisenhower had to turn back in mid-flight when the Japanese government warned it could not guarantee his security against students protesting American “imperialism.”

  Eisenhower’s Democratic successors fared little better. John F. Kennedy and his wife were beloved for a time, but America’s glow faded after his assassination. Lyndon Johnson’s invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 was widely condemned not only in Latin America but also by European allies. De Gaulle warned American officials that the United States, like “all countries that had overwhelming power,” had come “to believe that force would solve everything” and would soon learn this was “not the case.”102 And then, of course, came Vietnam, with its destruction, the scenes of napalm, the My Lai massacre, the secret incursion into Cambodia, the bombing of Hanoi, and the general perception of a Western colonialist superpower pounding a small but defiant Third World country into submission. When Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, visited West Berlin in 1967, the American cultural center was attacked, thousands of students protested American policies, and rumors swirled of assassination attempts. In 1968, when millions of Europe’s youth took to the streets, they were not expressing their admiration for American culture. As one senior Johnson official put it, “The things we have to do in Vietnam and elsewhere are a heavy burden for us to bear in the Afro-Asian world as well as Europe.”103

  Nor were the great majority of nations around the world trying to emulate the American system. In the first decades of the Cold War, many were attracted to the state-controlled economies of the Soviet Union and China, which seemed to promise growth without the messy problems of democracy.104 The economies of the Soviet bloc had growth rates as high as those in the West throughout much of this period, largely due to a state-directed surge in heavy industry.105 According to the CIA director, Allen Dulles, many leaders in the Third World believed that the Soviet system “might have more to offer in the way of quick results than the U.S. system.”106 Dictators such as Egypt’s Nasser and Indonesia’s Sukarno found the state-dominated model especially attractive, but so did India’s Nehru.107

  Leaders of the emerging Non-Aligned Movement—Nehru, Nasser, Tito, Sukarno, Nkrumah—expressed little admiration for American ways. Fairly or unfairly, some of their “deeply held resentments against the exploitative policies and racism of the West” were transferred from their former colonial masters to the United States when America became the superpower. After the death of Stalin, moreover, both the Soviet Union and China engaged in hot competition to win over the Third World, taking “goodwill tours” and providing aid programs of their own. Eisenhower reflected that “the new Communist line of sweetness and light was perhaps more dangerous than their propaganda in Stalin’s time.”108 The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations worried constantly about the leftward tilt of all these nations and lavished development aid on them in the hope of winning hearts and minds. Yet they found the aid, while eagerly accepted, guaranteed neither allegiance nor appreciation.109 Eisenhower frequently worried that “the peoples of the Near East and of North Africa and, to some extent, all of Asia and all of Africa, would be consolidated against the West to a degree which, I fear, could not be overcome in a generation and, perhaps, not even in a century, particularly having in mind the capacity of the Russians to make mischief.”110 One result of Third World animosity was that the United States steadily lost influence at the United Nations after 1960. Once the place where the American war in Korea was legitimized, from the 1960s until the end of the Cold War the UN General Assembly became a forum for constant expressions of anti-Americanism.111

  In the late 1960s, Henry Kissinger despaired of the future. The “increased fragmentation of power, the greater diffusion of political activity, and the more complicated patterns of international conflict and alignment,” he wrote to Nixon, had sharply reduced the capacity of both superpowers to influence “the actions of other governments.”112 And things only seemed to get more difficult as the 1970s unfolded. The United States withdrew from Vietnam in defeat, and the world watched the first-ever resignation of an American president mired in scandal. And then, perhaps as significant as all the rest, world oil prices went through the roof.

  The last problem pointed to a significant new difficulty: the inability of the United States to wield influence effectively in the Middle East. Today people point to America’s failure to bring Israelis and Palestinians to a negotiated settlement, or to manage the tumultuous Arab Awakening, as a sign of weakness and decline. But in 1973 the United States could not even prevent the major powers in the Middle East from engaging in all-out war. When Egypt and Syria launched their surprise attack on Israel, it was a surprise to Washington as well. The United States eventually had to go on nuclear alert to deter Soviet intervention in the conflict. The war led to the oil embargo, the establishment of OPEC as a major force in world affairs, and the sudden revelation that, as historian Daniel Yergin put it, “the United States itself was now, finally, vulnerable.” The “world’s foremost superpower” had been “thrown on the defensive, humiliated, by a handful of small nations.” Many Americans “feared that the end of an era was at hand.”113

  In the 1970s the dramatic rise in oil prices, coupled with American economic policies during the Vietnam War, led the American economy into a severe crisis. Gross national product fell by 6 percent between 1973 and 1975. Unemployment doubled from 4.5 percent to 9 percent.114 The American people suffered through gas lines and the new economic phenomenon of stagflation, combining a stagnant economy with high inflation. The American economy went through three recessions between 1973 and 1982. The “energy crisis” was to Americans then what the “fiscal crisis” is today. In his first televised address to the nation, Jimmy Carter called it “the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes.” It was especially humiliating that the crisis was driven in part by two close American allies, the Saudi royal family and the Shah of Iran. As Carter recalled in his memoirs, the American people “deeply resented that the greatest nation on earth was being jerked around by a few desert states.”115

  The low point came in 1979, when the Shah was overthrown, the radical Islamic revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, an
d fifty-two Americans were taken hostage and held for more than a year. The hostage crisis, as Yergin has observed, “transmitted a powerful message: that the shift of power in the world oil market in the 1970s was only part of a larger drama that was taking place in global politics. The United States and the West, it seemed to say, were truly in decline, on the defensive, and, it appeared, unable to do anything to protect their interests, whether economic or political.” Secretary of Energy James Schlesinger declared that Americans faced “a world crisis of vaster dimensions than Churchill described half a century ago—made more ominous by the problems of oil.” There was, he said, “little, if any, relief in prospect.” As Carter put it, “They have us by the balls.”116

  If one wanted to make a case for American decline, the 1970s would have been the time to do it; and many did. The United States, Kissinger believed, had evidently “passed its historic high point like so many earlier civilizations … [E]very civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed.”117 It was in the 1970s that the American economy lost its overwhelming primacy, when the American trade surplus began to turn into a trade deficit, when spending on entitlements and social welfare programs ballooned, when American gold and monetary reserves were depleted.