Last fall, television stations carried a 60-second ad for Audi’s A6 car. The opening images showed a pitted, potholed American road while the voice-over gloomily intoned, “Across the nation, over 100,000 miles of highways and bridges are in disrepair.” Fear not, said the voice; Audi’s smart gizmos would help. The spot’s message was clear: roads in the US are now so bad, you need a foreign car to negotiate them.
The Audi ad was seized upon as evidence of American decline, now such a regular meme that the Foreign Policy magazine website runs a dedicated blog, “Decline Watch”. Books have been in plentiful supply, and now come two more, helpfully approaching the subject from left and right, as if to demonstrate declinism’s bipartisan credentials.
The authors are big hitters in the geopolitics genre. Robert Kagan coined what passes for a catchphrase in the international relations field when he declared a decade ago that “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus”. At the time, Kagan, a veteran of Ronald Reagan’s State Department, was one of the leading advocates of military action against Iraq. Zbigniew Brzezinski, still best known for his service as national security adviser to Jimmy Carter, has filled the three intervening decades with a throng of books on the same terrain: what America should do in the world.
There are big differences between the two. Kagan barely mentions the Iraq war in The World America Made, and certainly feels no need to explain his past enthusiasm for a decision that many now regard as a calamity. By contrast, Brzezinski is scathing in Strategic Vision, judging Iraq “a costly diversion” from the fight against Al Qaeda. The war, he says, was justified by dubious claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that “evaporated altogether within a few months” and that sapped America’s international standing.
The former Carter official regards climate change as a grave global threat; the ex-Reagan appointee hardly mentions it. When Brzezinski lays out the obstacles to America’s keeping its position as international top dog, he includes ever-widening inequality between the richest and the rest and an unsustainable financial system that benefits “greedy Wall Street speculators”. Kagan allows that the post-2008 woes look like capitalism “discrediting itself” but confidently asserts that “the liberal economic order is in everyone’s interest” even as some voices are having severe doubts about key tenets of neoliberal economics.
The two books are different in temperament and style, too, in ways that say much about the contrast between left and right. Brzezinski’s is full of wonkish detail and some truly leaden language: “ ... with the potential international benefits of the foregoing unfortunately vitiated by the cumulatively destructive consequences of continued and maybe even somewhat expanded....” Kagan prefers to paint with a broad brush, sprinkling a memorable metaphor here, a striking simile there. International “rules and institutions are like scaffolding around a building: they don’t hold the building up; the building holds them up” (the building being America).
Yet the great surprise is how much they agree with each other. They both insist that reports of America’s decline are exaggerated. Both note that the US still accounts for a quarter of the world’s GDP, a proportion that has held steady for over 40 years. Both note America’s military strength, with a budget greater than that of all its rivals combined.
Usefully, Kagan states that much of the current decline talk is based on a “nostalgic fallacy”, imagining a golden past in which America was all but omnipotent. There never was such a time, he says, not even during those periods now remembered as the glory days of American might. Kagan’s message is that America has been gripped by these fears before, only to bounce back.
Both men dismiss that other plank of declinist conventional wisdom, the assumption that China’s hot breath is on America’s neck and that it is about to take over. That’s an “overreaction”, Brzezinski writes, on a par with 1980s fears that the US was about to become a wholly owned subsidiary of Japan. China is still decades behind on all the measures that count and has shown little sign of wanting to assume America’s central role. It might just be biding its time, but Kagan makes a good case that its geopolitical position is not propitious: while the US is flanked by oceans, China is encircled by wary, watchful neighbours. It cannot so easily head out into the world to serve as a global naval power and hegemon.
Above all, Brzezinski and Kagan unite in arguing against fatalism. American decline is not preordained, but neither is the status quo. If Americans want to remain on top, they will have to fight for that position, making some painful changes in the process (including, Brzezinski says, to a dysfunctional, paralysed political system). But it’s worth it, chiefly because the current international order – more or less stable and free from world war for seven decades – will not maintain itself. Given what else is out there, the world still needs America.
STRATEGIC VISION
America and the Crisis of Global Power
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Basic Books; 208 pages; $26
THE WORLD AMERICA MADE
Robert Kagan
Alfred A Knopf; 149 pages; $21
©2012 The New York Times News Service
