Published September 13th, 2007 by Future Atlas
No decline for the US?
Last week Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post wrote that he would “bet on America” when forecasting the dominant world power of 50 years from now.
He recites the “declinist” case, but argues that
The evidence for our nation’s downward spiral isn’t sufficient to rule out the very opposite possibility: that the United States will become, in purely geopolitical terms, even stronger in coming decades. The mistake we make is not so much overestimating our problems, but underestimating the problems of our potential rivals.
Achenbach notes the weaknesses of potential rivals:
- China’s economy is currently much smaller than that of the US, and the country is beset by environmental problems. It’s population is aging rapidly, and it “will be the first country to get old before it gets rich.”
- Russia, Japan, and Germany also all face demographic decline; Russia is already shrinking.
- The European Union lacks a level of unity basic to an effective nation-state.
The US, meanwhile, has completely unrivaled military power.
Achenbach does suggest these caveats:
- The American “machine for wealth creation has also been a machine for income inequality;” “geopolitical dominance doesn’t guarantee that we’ll have a country we can be proud of.”
- “Globalization may make the nation-state increasingly irrelevant.”
- As Joseph Nye Jr. puts it, “by traditional measures of hard power …. the United States will remain number one, but being number one ain’t going be what it used to be.”
Achenbach is correct the the US has the strongest shot at remaining number one for decades.
European nations and Japan are under fundamental constraints. China–and India too, though it is unmentioned in this article–are both more likely to stumble or even melt down than is the United States.
But 50 years is a long time. By 2050, some models project the Chinese economy to be considerably larger than that of the United States. India may have caught up by then as well.
Power follows economics. For those sure of America’s perpetual ascendancy, consider a statement at the start of the 20th century by the First Lord of the Admiralty of a then-dominant Britain, as he observed economic trends: “The United Kingdom by itself will not be strong enough to hold its proper place alongside of the U.S., or Russia, and probably not Germany. We shall be thrust aside by sheer weight.” (Quoted in Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 229.)