Not Fade Away: The Myth of American Decline (page 2)

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II.

IF THE UNITED STATES is not suffering decline in these basic measures of power, isn’t it true 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 is true that the United States is not able to get what it wants much of the time. But then it never could. Much of today’s impressions about declining American influence are based on a nostalgic fallacy: that there was once a time when the United States could shape the whole world to suit its desires, and could get other nations to do what it wanted them to do, and, as the political scientist Stephen M. Walt put it, “manage the politics, economics and security arrangements for nearly the entire globe.”

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 American 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 as Dean Acheson concluded, “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.” A year later came the unanticipated and unprepared-for North Korean attack on South Korea, and America’s intervention, which, after more than 35,000 American dead and almost 100,000 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.” 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.” 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?”

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 did not 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.” 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.”

BUT WHAT ABOUT “soft power”? Wasn’t it true, as the political scientist Joseph S. Nye Jr. 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.”

Again, the historical truth is more complicated. During the first three decades after World War II, great portions of the world neither admired the United States nor sought to emulate it, and were not especially pleased at the way it conducted itself in international affairs. Yes, American media were spreading American culture, but they were 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. 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 the CIA-orchestrated overthrows of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala did not help. In 1957, demonstrators attacked the vice president’s motorcade in Venezuela, shouting, “Go away, Nixon!” “Out, dog!” “We won’t forget Guatemala!” 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.” And then, of course, came Vietnam—the 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.

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. 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. According to Allen Dulles, the CIA director, 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.” Dictators such as Egypt’s Nasser and Indonesia’s Sukarno found the state-dominated model especially attractive, but so did India’s Nehru. Leaders of the emerging Non-Aligned Movement—Nehru, Nasser, Tito, Sukarno, Nkrumah—expressed little admiration for American ways.

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.” 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. They found that the aid, while eagerly accepted, guaranteed neither allegiance nor appreciation. 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 U.N. General Assembly became a forum for constant expressions of anti-Americanism.

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.” 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.”

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. 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.”

The low point came in 1979, when the Shah was overthrown, the radical Islamic revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, and 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.”

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.... Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed.” 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.

With economic difficulties came political and strategic insecurity. First came the belief that the tide of history was with the Soviet Union. Soviet leaders themselves believed the “correlation of forces” favored communism; the American defeat and withdrawal from Vietnam led Soviet officials, for the first time, to believe they might actually “win” in the long Cold War struggle. A decade later, in 1987, Paul Kennedy depicted both superpowers as suffering from “imperial overstretch,” but suggested that it was entirely possible that the United States would be the first to collapse, following a long historical tradition of exhausted and bankrupt empires. It had crippled itself by spending too much on defense and taking on too many far-flung global responsibilities. But within two years the Berlin Wall fell, and two years after that the Soviet Union collapsed. The decline turned out to be taking place elsewhere.

THEN THERE WAS the miracle economy of Japan. A “rise of the rest” began in the late 1970s and continued over the next decade and a half, as Japan, along with the other “Asian tigers,” South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan, seemed about to eclipse the United States economically. In 1989, the journalist James Fallows argued that the Japanese state-directed economy was plainly superior to the more laissez-faire capitalism of the United States and was destined to surpass it. Japan was to be the next superpower. While the United States had bankrupted itself fighting the Cold War, the Japanese had been busy taking all the marbles. As the analyst Chalmers Johnson put it in 1995, “The Cold War is over, and Japan won.” Even as Johnson typed those words, the Japanese economy was spiraling downward into a period of stagnation from which it has still not recovered.

With the Soviet Union gone and China yet to demonstrate the staying power of its economic boom, the United States suddenly appeared to be the world’s “sole superpower.” Yet even then it was remarkable how unsuccessful the United States was in dealing with many serious global problems. The Americans won the Gulf War, expanded NATO eastward, eventually brought peace to the Balkans, after much bloodshed, and, through most of the 1990s, led much of the world to embrace the “Washington consensus” on economics—but some of these successes began to unravel, and were matched by equally significant failures. The Washington consensus began to collapse with the Asian financial crisis of 1997, where American prescriptions were widely regarded as mistaken and damaging. The United States failed to stop or even significantly to retard the nuclear weapons programs of North Korea and Iran, despite repeatedly declaring its intention to do so. The sanctions regime imposed against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was both futile and, by the end of the decade, collapsing. The United States, and the world, did nothing to prevent the genocide in Rwanda, partly because a year earlier the United States had been driven out of Somalia after a failed military intervention. One of the most important endeavors of the United States in the 1990s was the effort to support a transition in post-Soviet Russia to democracy and free-market capitalism. But despite providing billions of dollars and endless amounts of advice and expertise, the United States found events in Russia once again to be beyond its control.

Nor were American leaders, even in the supposed heyday of global predominance, any more successful in solving the Israeli-Palestinian problem than they are today. Even with a booming economy and a well-liked president earnestly working to achieve a settlement, the Clinton administration came up empty-handed. As the former Middle East peace negotiator Aaron David Miller recounts, Bill Clinton “cared more about and invested more time and energy in Arab-Israeli peace over a longer period of time than any of his predecessors,” and was admired and appreciated by both Israelis and Palestinians—and yet he held “three summits within six months and fail[ed] at every one.” Clinton’s term ended with the collapse of peace talks and the beginning of the second Palestinian intifada.

Even popularity was elusive in the 1990s. In 1999, Samuel P. Huntington labeled America the “lonely superpower,” widely hated across the globe for its “intrusive, interventionist, exploitative, unilateralist, hegemonic, hypocritical” behavior. The French foreign minister decried the “hyperpower” and openly yearned for a “multipolar” world in which the United States would no longer be dominant. A British diplomat told Huntington: “One reads about the world’s desire for American leadership only in the United States. Everywhere else one reads about American arrogance and unilateralism.”

THIS WAS NONSENSE, of course. Contrary to the British diplomat’s claim, many other countries did look to the United States for leadership, and for protection and support, in the 1990s and throughout the Cold War. The point is not that America always lacked global influence. From World War II onward, the United States was indeed the predominant power in the world. It wielded enormous influence, more than any great power since Rome, and it accomplished much. But it was not omnipotent—far from it. If we are to gauge accurately whether the United States is currently in decline, we need to have a reasonable baseline from which to measure. To compare American influence today with a mythical past of overwhelming dominance can only mislead us.

Today the United States lacks the ability to have its way on many issues, but this has not prevented it from enjoying just as much success, and suffering just as much failure, as in the past. For all the controversy, the United States has been more successful in Iraq than it was in Vietnam. It has been just as incapable of containing Iranian nuclear ambitions as it was in the 1990s, but it has, through the efforts of two administrations, established a more effective global counter-proliferation network. Its efforts to root out and destroy Al Qaeda have been remarkably successful, especially when compared with the failures to destroy terrorist networks and stop terrorist attacks in the 1990s—failures that culminated in the attacks of September 11. The ability to employ drones is an advance over the types of weaponry—cruise missiles and air strikes—that were used to target terrorists and facilities in previous decades. Meanwhile America’s alliances in Europe remain healthy; it is certainly not America’s fault that Europe itself seems weaker than it once was. American alliances in Asia have arguably grown stronger over the past few years, and the United States has been able to strengthen relations with India that had previously been strained.

So the record is mixed, but it has always been mixed. There have been moments when the United States was more influential than today and moments when it was less influential. The exertion of influence has always been a struggle, which may explain why, in every single decade since the end of World War II, Americans have worried about their declining influence and looked nervously as other powers seemed to be rising at their expense. The difficulties in shaping the international environment in any era are immense. Few powers even attempt it, and even the strongest rarely achieve all or even most of their goals. Foreign policy is like hitting a baseball: if you fail 70 percent of the time, you go to the Hall of Fame.

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