© Fernand Braudel Center 1998.
"How Strong is the Superpower?"
Wallerstein
It is commonplace to call the United States today the only superpower. But what does this really mean? The expression conveys an impression of overwhelming strength in the geopolitical arena. Is this exact? Or is the United States, in Mao Zedong's expression, a "paper tiger"?
The first thing we think of when we discuss geopolitical strength is military power. There seems to be no question that the military hardware at the disposal of the U.S. government, combined with their well-trained armed forces, are superior to that of any other state today, and probably by far. But there are two crucial questions about military superiority. One is the consideration, in the eventuality of a real war, of how much damage an enemy force could wreak on the U.S. before it lost the war, and this measured both in terms of loss of life and potential material damage to the United States itself. If a second state could wreak sufficient damage, warfare, even were the U.S. to win the war, might not be considered a feasible option. This was clearly the case during the U.S.-U.S.S.R. cold war.
Is it still true today?
But there is a second consideration. Waging war requires a certain degree of popular consent within the country. This is normally achieved via patriotic commitment. But patriotic commitment has its limits. The population must be persuaded that the war is in its view just, and they must be persuaded that military victory is a feasible objective.
Neither of these conditions are fully in place today. The ability of another state to cause significant military damage to the U.S. is clearly one of the main current worries of the U.S. It explains the constant and enormous pressure to limit nuclear proliferation as well as the expansion of the capacity of other countries to wage chemical and biological warfare. While the U.S. has no doubt slowed down the process, and maintained its own edge in these fields, continuing to block such spread seems a losing cause over the next 10-25 years.
Even more worrisome from the U.S. point of view is the attitude of the U.S. population, who suffer from the famous "Vietnam syndrome." The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the repugnant face of Nazism furnished the strong basis for popular support during the Second World War. During the Cold War, the menace of Communism mobilized patriotic sentiment in the U.S., although already at this time, the U.S. public was deeply split over the legitimacy and worthwhileness of its intervention in Vietnam. By the time of the Persian Gulf war, U.S. popular support was conditioned on the assurance that almost no lives would be lost, which made it impossible for President Bush even to think of marching on Baghdad. The U.S. hyper-reluctance to engage in serious military action in Bosnia or Kosovo is clearly based in large part on the knowledge that the use of land forces would involve a long, costly interaction, with considerable loss of U.S. lives, and that the U.S. public would not support it, seeing neither justification for the action nor a clear prospect of clearcut military victory.
Of course, military power does not exist in a vacuum. It is based on the strength of the country both in the economic and the political arenas. Here too, it is not clear that the U.S. can still be called a superpower. The economic strength of the U.S. is worth a separate commentary. But one shouldn't take too seriously the bloated image of U.S. economic strength of the last five years. The fact is that, in terms of relative economic strength in the world-economy, the U.S. was at its high point in 1945 and has been on a steady decline ever since. This decline was scarcely noticeable until the late 1960's, but after that the world began to talk of a triad of strong economic loci - the U.S., western Europe (or Germany), and Japan - and it was clear that, on many measures, the three were at near parity. There is very little likelihood that this will change over the next 10-25 years, and if it does, it is more likely that U.S. relative economic strength will decline still further than the reverse.
This parity of the triad has two immediate consequences. It means that the U.S. has less money available for military expenditures or, that if it continues expenditures at the present level, that this will hurt further the so-called competitivity of the U.S. And the second consequence is that the triad have become serious rivals, which affects deeply the political strength of the U.S.
The political strength of the U.S. is what we usually discuss under the label of leadership. The U.S. "led" the so-called Free World in the struggle against the Soviet bloc. What this meant is that U.S. governments defined the basic political objectives to be achieved and both the strategy and the tactics of the ongoing political struggles.
The U.S. then took the lead in implementing the consequent political decisions, and insisted that its allies assist it in this task.
Such a definition of leadership describes the relationship of the United States to its NATO partners and to Japan in the 1950's and 1960's. But with the growing economic strength of these allies, the description became less and less correct thereafter. In the 1970's there was talk of "trilateralism," which was essentially a figleaf, a paper concession by the U.S. to west European and Japanese sensibilities. As long as the U.S.S.R. continued to exist, the U.S. allies were reluctant to do too much to reduce the U.S. role in world affairs. But ever since 1989, it has been clear that there has been a slow moving apart of the triad on political views, and that this moving apart is likely to grow rapidly in the decade to come.
The assessment of U.S. strength as a state requires a distinction between strength as an ordinal measure and hegemony as a concept. Today, the U.S. remains the strongest state in the world, even if the gap between it and others is declining. But it is no longer hegemonic as it was in the period 1945-1970. To be hegemonic means to have a really significant economic lead over others. It means therefore to get one's way politically virtually all of the time, with relatively few significant compromises. It means NOT to have to use military force, except in a minor way, because the mere threat of using it, even merely an implied threat, suffices to make the target back down, and therefore it becomes unnecessary to use the force. This was the situation once, in the period from 1945 to circa 1970. It is no longer the case.
Today, the U.S. realizes that developments in the world-economy are flying beyond its ability to manage them. It has no clear political objectives in the world arena that are widely legitimated by others. Its allies are beginning to implement their autonomous strategies and tactics. And above all, the U.S. is a hamstrung military power because it cannot easily wage any war that will be protracted and costly. Furthermore, there is nothing on the horizon that is likely to improve this prospect for the U.S. in any of these regards. Quite the contrary. And, indeed, one could argue that the unhappiness and frustration of the U.S. public with the decline of U.S. power explains much of U.S. internal politics today. The U.S. is not yet a paper tiger, and may still be the world's only superpower, but how much control can it be said to have over the world's trajectory in the next 10-25 years? I would say, not very much.