When China Rules the World

It has been estimated that the total budgetary and economic cost to the United States of the Iraq war will turn out to be around $3 trillion. [20] Even with this level of expenditure, the armed forces have come under huge strain as a result of the war. Deployments have got steadily longer and redeployments more frequent, retention rates and recruitment standards have fallen, while the army has lost many of its brightest and best, with a remorseless rise in the number of officers choosing to leave at the earliest opportunity. [21] Such has been the inordinate cost of the Iraqi occupation that, regardless of political considerations, the financial burden of any similar proposed invasion of Iran – in practice likely to be much higher – would always have been too large: for military as well as political reasons, the Bush administration was unable to seriously contemplate similar military action against Iran and North Korea, the other two members of its ‘axis of evil’. [22] The United States is, thus, already beginning to face the classic problems of imperial overreach. The burden of maintaining a huge global military presence, with over 800 American bases dotted around the world, has been one of the causes of the US’s enormous current account deficit, which in 2006 accounted for 6.5 per cent of US GDP. [23] In future the American economy will find it increasingly difficult to support such a military commitment. [24] The United States has ceased to be a major manufacturer or a large-scale exporter of manufactured goods, having steadily ceded that position to East Asia. [25] In recent times it has persistently been living beyond its means: the government has been spending more than it saves, households have been doing likewise, and since 1982, apart from one year, the country has been buying more from foreigners than it sells to them, with a consequent huge current account deficit and a growing volume of IOUs. Current account deficits can of course be rectified, but only by reducing growth and accepting a lower level of economic activity. Growing concern on the part of foreign institutions about these deficits led to a steady fall in the value of the dollar until 2008, and this could well be resumed at some point, further threatening the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency and American financial power. [26] The credit rating agency Moody’s warned in 2008 that the US faced the prospect within a decade of losing its top-notch triple-A credit rating, first granted to US government debt when it was assessed in 1917, unless it took radical action to curb government expenditure. [27] And this was before the financial meltdown in 2008, which, with the huge taxpayer-funded government bail-out of the financial sector, will greatly increase the size of the US national debt. This is not to suggest that, in the short run, the US will be required to reduce its military expenditure for reasons of financial restraint: indeed, given the position that the US military occupies in the national psyche, and the primary emphasis that US foreign policy has traditionally placed on military power, this seems most unlikely. [28] Being an imperial power, however, is a hugely expensive business and, peering into the future, as its relative economic power declines, the United States will no longer be able to sustain the military commitments and military superiority that it presently enjoys. [29]

A NEW KIND OF WORLD

We stand on the eve of a different kind of world, but comprehending it is difficult: we are so accustomed to dealing with the paradigms and parameters of the contemporary world that we inevitably take them for granted, believing that they are set in concrete rather than themselves being the subject of longer-run cycles of historical change. Given that American global hegemony has held sway for almost a lifetime, and that Western supremacy transcends many lifetimes, this is not surprising. We are so used to the world being Western, even American, that we have little idea what it would be like if it was not. The West, moreover, has a strong vested interest in the world being cast in its image, because this brings multifarious benefits. As a matter of course, hegemonic powers seek to project their values and institutions on to subordinate nations and the latter, in response, will, depending on circumstances, adapt or genuflect towards their ways; if they don’t, hegemonic powers generally seek to impose those values and arrangements on them, even in extremis by force. For reasons of both mindset and interest, therefore, the United States, and the West more generally, finds it difficult to visualize, or accept, a world that involves a major and continuing diminution in its influence.