World View: 'A lone superpower that lacks true power, a world leader nobody follows and few respect, and a nation drifting dangerously amidst a chaos it cannot control."
This bleak description of the US is offered by the distinguished American historian and world systems analyst, Immanuel Wallerstein. His theme is its imperial decline which will, he argues, usher in a chaotic world over the next 20 or 30 years.
His work on comparative world history over the last generation has been very influential, creating a school of analysis that starts with the transnational capitalist system since the 17th century and relates it to developing inter-state systems since then.
In his most recent work, The Decline of American Power: The US in a Chaotic World, he examines what lessons history has for his own country.
The argument has attracted greater attention because of the widespread international discussion about whether imperial analogies validly apply to US power, engaging conservatives of various hues in and around the Bush administration as well as its liberal and left-wing critics, Wallerstein among them.
The controversy may be followed on a useful website, www.globalpolicy.org/empire/analysis
Wallerstein traces the rise of US global hegemony back to the 1870s, when the US and Germany began to acquire an increasing share of world markets, mainly at the expense of the steadily receding British economy. The period 1914-1945 is best understood as a continuous "30-years war" for world dominance between Germany and the United States .
He divides the post-war era into three periods. Until 1967-73 the US enjoyed indomitable military, economic and political power in the two-thirds of the world secured under the Yalta agreement.
Vietnam, 1968 and the economic recovery of western Europe and Japan undermined that, leading to a period of "late summer glow" in US power until 9/11 in 2001, in which its two primary foreign policy goals were to prevent the emergence of a politically independent European entity (including Russia) and to maintain the US military edge by restricting the spread of nuclear weapons in the South.
We have now entered a new stage, stretching to 2025 or 2050, "one of anarchy which the US cannot control". While the neoconservative hawks agree with him about relative decline, their policy to reverse it by force would only hasten the process, he believes.
This story of relative weakness and decline seems counter-intuitive, given the undoubted military predominance of the US and, indeed, the extraordinary resurrection of imperial analogies to describe it.
Wallerstein says such hubris is typical of imperial decay, rhetorically and economically. He gives as an example a report in the New York Times last year that a Japanese laboratory had built the world's fastest computer, so powerful that it matches the raw processing power of the fastest 20 American ones combined.
The machine was developed to analyse climate change after the Kyoto agreement, whereas the US ones are built to simulate weapons.
As he puts it, "This contrast embodies the oldest story in the history of hegemonic powers. The dominant power concentrates (to its detriment) on the military; the candidate for successor concentrates on the economy. The latter has always paid off, handsomely. It did for the United States. Why should it not pay off for Japan as well, perhaps in alliance with China?"
In the light of this approach it is interesting to note an important development this week, when President Putin of Russia prevaricated once again on the Kyoto Protocol at a conference in Moscow, just after he met President Bush last week. If Russia refuses to go along with Kyoto it will be a real setback for the Europeans and could alter the balance of the world environmental argument. This is the way such policies work in practice.
Immanuel or Emmanuel means "God with us" in Hebrew, and was the phrase used as the symbolic name of the child by Isaiah. Intriguingly, another prophet of US decline is the French historian and demographer Emmanuel Todd, whose book Après l'Empire, essaie sur la décomposition du système Americain, published last year, has been a bestseller in France and is about to be published in English.
His argument overlaps with Wallerstein's in several respects, including the long view of economic achievement and military overstretch. It is well to be aware of their arguments in such an uncertain world.
The "theatrical military activism against inconsequential rogue states that we are currently witnessing plays out against this backdrop. It is a sign of weakness, not of strength.
"But weakness makes for unpredictability. The US is about to become a problem for the world, where we have previously been accustomed to seeing a solution in them."
Todd draws parallels with imperial Spain in the 17th century, when gold flooded in from the New World, productivity declined and the country fell into economic and technological arrears.
He, too, says the US is falling dramatically behind in the core industrial sphere. Its trade in advanced technology went into deficit in the 1990s, filling out its overall annual $500 billion deficit funded by overseas investment.
It is far behind in mobile communications technology, including satellites. Airbus is about to surpass Boeing, European railway systems are far ahead.
"The only remaining superiority is military. This is classic for a crumbling system. The fall of the Soviet Union took place in an identical context" when it embarked on military adventures, including Afghanistan, to forget their economic shortcomings.
"There is an immense risk in engaging in a war on the opposite side of the globe while fettered by a $500 billion trade deficit, a weak dollar and supported only by friends who are unwilling to share the costs."
Todd speaks with some authority here, since a book he published in 1976, based on similar analysis of long-term technological, economic, demographic and political trends, predicted the fall of the Soviet Union.
He is struck by the failure to swing the Germans to the US position on Iraq and by the emerging renewed Franco-German axis within the EU, which he thinks will be the core of a developing and much stronger EU on the world stage.