The Superpower Conundrum - The Rise and Fall of Just
About Everything
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 07/03/2015 21:40 -0400
The rise and fall of great powers and their imperial
domains has been a central fact of history for centuries. It’s been a
sensible, repeatedly validated framework for thinking about the fate of the
planet. So it’s hardly surprising, when faced with a country once
regularly labeled the “sole superpower,” “the last superpower,” or even the
global “hyperpower” and now, curiously, called nothing whatsoever, that
the “decline” question should come up. Is the U.S. or isn’t it? Might it or
might it not now be on the downhill side of imperial greatness?
Take a slow train -- that is, any train -- anywhere in
America, as I did recently in the northeast, and then take a high-speed train
anywhere else on Earth, as I also did recently, and it’s not hard to imagine
the U.S. in decline. The greatest power in history, the “unipolar power,” can’t build a single mile of high-speed rail? Really? And its
Congress is now mired in an argument about whether funds can even be raised to keep
America’s highways more or less pothole-free.
Sometimes, I imagine myself talking to my long-dead
parents because I know how such things would have astonished two people who
lived through the Great Depression, World War II, and a can-do post-war era in
which the staggering wealth and power of this country were indisputable.
What if I could tell them how the crucial infrastructure of such a
still-wealthy nation -- bridges, pipelines, roads, and the like -- is now
grossly underfunded, in an increasing state of disrepair, and beginning to crumble? That would
definitely shock them.
And what would they think upon learning that, with the
Soviet Union a quarter-century in the trash bin of history, the U.S., alone in
triumph, has been incapable of applying its overwhelming military and economic
power effectively? I’m sure they would be dumbstruck to discover that,
since the moment the Soviet Union imploded, the U.S. has been at war
continuously with another country (three conflicts and endless strife); that I
was talking about, of all places, Iraq; and that the mission there was never faintly
accomplished. How improbable is that? And what would they think if
I mentioned that the other great conflicts of the post-Cold-War era were with
Afghanistan (two wars with a decade off in-between) and the relatively small
groups of non-state actors we now call terrorists? And how would they
react on discovering that the results were: failure in Iraq, failure in
Afghanistan, and the proliferation of terror groups across much of the Greater
Middle East (including the establishment of an actual terror caliphate) and
increasing parts of Africa?
They would, I think, conclude that the U.S. was over
the hill and set on the sort of decline that, sooner or later, has been the
fate of every great power. And what if I told them that, in this new century,
not a single action of the military that U.S. presidents now call “the finest fighting force the world has ever
known” has, in the end, been anything but a dismal failure? Or
that presidents, presidential candidates, and politicians in Washington are
required to insist on something no one would have had to say in their day: that
the United States is both an “exceptional” and an “indispensible” nation? Or that they would also have to endlessly thankour troops (as would the citizenry) for... well...
never success, but just being there and getting maimed, physically or mentally,
or dying while we went about our lives? Or that those soldiers must always be
referred to as “heroes.”
In their day, when the obligation to serve in a
citizens' army was a given, none of this would have made much sense, while the
endless defensive insistence on American greatness would have stood out like a
sore thumb. Today, its repetitive presence marks the moment of doubt. Are we
really so “exceptional”? Is this country truly “indispensible” to the rest of
the planet and if so, in what way exactly? Are those troops genuinely our
heroes and if so, just what was it they did that we’re so darn proud of?
Return my amazed parents to their graves, put all of
this together, and you have the beginnings of a description of a uniquely great
power in decline. It’s a classic vision, but one with a problem.
A God-Like Power to Destroy
Who today recalls the ads from my 1950s childhood for,
if I remember correctly, drawing lessons, which always had a tagline that went
something like: What’s wrong with this picture? (You were supposed to
notice the five-legged cows floating through the clouds.) So what’s wrong
with this picture of the obvious signs of decline: the greatest power in
history, with hundreds of
garrisons scattered
across the planet, can’t seem to apply its power effectively no matter where it
sends its military or bring countries like Iran or a weakened post-Soviet
Russia to heel by a full range of threats, sanctions, and the like, or suppress
a modestly armed terror-movement-cum-state in the Middle East?
For one thing, look around and tell me that the United
States doesn’t still seem like a unipolar power. I mean, where exactly
are its rivals? Since the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, when the first
wooden ships mounted with cannons broke out of their European backwater and
began to gobble up the globe, there have always been rival great powers --
three, four, five, or more. And what of today? The other
three candidates of the moment would assumedly be the European Union (EU),
Russia, and China.
Economically, the EU is indeed a powerhouse, but in
any other way it’s a second-rate conglomeration of states that still slavishly
follow the U.S. and an entity threatening to come apart at the seams. Russia looms ever larger in Washington these days, but remains a rickety
power in search of greatness in its former imperial borderlands. It’s a
country almost as dependent on its energy industry as Saudi Arabia and nothing
like a potential future superpower. As for China, it’s obviously the
rising power of the moment and now officially has the number one economy on Planet Earth. Still, it remains
in many ways a poor country whose leaders fear any kind of future economic
implosion (which could happen). Like the Russians, like any aspiring
great power, it wants to make its weight felt in its neighborhood -- at the moment the East
and South China Seas. And like Vladimir
Putin’s Russia, the
Chinese leadership is indeed upgrading its military. But the urge in both cases is to emerge as a
regional power to contend with, not a superpower or a genuine rival of the U.S.
Whatever may be happening to American power, there
really are no potential rivals to shoulder the blame. Yet,
uniquely unrivaled, the U.S. has proven curiously incapable of translating its
unipolar power and a military that, on paper, trumps every other one on the planet into its
desires. This was not
the normal experience of past reigning great powers. Or put another way,
whether or not the U.S. is in decline, the rise-and-fall narrative seems,
half-a-millennium later, to have reached some kind of largely uncommented upon
and unexamined dead end.
In looking for an explanation, consider a related
narrative involving military power. Why, in this new century, does the
U.S. seem so incapable of achieving victory or transforming crucial regions
into places that can at least be controlled? Military power is by
definition destructive, but in the past such force often cleared the ground for
the building of local, regional, or even global structures, however grim or
oppressive they might have been. If force always was meant to break
things, it sometimes achieved other ends as well. Now, it seems as if
breaking is all it can do, or how to explain the fact that, in this century,
the planet’s sole superpower has specialized -- see Iraq, Yemen, Libya,
Afghanistan, and elsewhere -- in fracturing, not building nations.
Empires may have risen and fallen in those 500 years,
but weaponry only rose. Over
those centuries in which so many rivals engaged each other, carved out their
imperial domains, fought their wars, and sooner or later fell, the destructive
power of the weaponry they were wielding only ratcheted up exponentially: from
the crossbow to the musket, the cannon, the Colt revolver, the repeating rifle,
the Gatling gun, the machine gun, the dreadnaught, modern artillery, the tank,
poison gas, the zeppelin, the plane, the bomb, the aircraft carrier, the
missile, and at the end of the line, the “victory weapon” of World War II, the
nuclear bomb that would turn the rulers of the greatest powers, and later even
lesser powers, into the equivalent of gods.
For the first time, representatives of humanity had in
their hands the power to destroy anything on the planet in a fashion once
imagined possible only by some deity or set of deities. It was now possible to create our own end
times. And yet here was the odd thing: the weaponry that brought the
power of the gods down to Earth somehow offered no practical power at all to
national leaders. In the post-Hiroshima-Nagasaki world, those nuclear
weapons would prove unusable. Once they were loosed on the planet, there
would be no more rises, no more falls. (Today, we know that even a
limited nuclear exchange among lesser powers could, thanks to thenuclear-winter
effect, devastate the
planet.)
Weapons Development in an Era of Limited War
In a sense, World War II could be considered the
ultimate moment for both the narratives of empire and the weapon. It would be the last “great” war in which major
powers could bring all the weaponry available to them to bear in search of
ultimate victory and the ultimate shaping of the globe. It resulted in
unprecedented destruction across vast swathes of the planet, the killing of
tens of millions, the turning of great cities into rubble and of countless
people into refugees, the creation of an industrial structure for genocide, and
finally the building of those weapons of ultimate destruction and of the first
missiles that would someday be their crucial delivery systems. And out of
that war came the final rivals of the modern age -- and then there were two --
the “superpowers.”
That very word, superpower, had much of the end of the
story embedded in it. Think of it as a marker for a new age, for the fact
that the world of the “great powers” had been left for something almost
inexpressible. Everyone sensed it. We were now in the realm of
“great” squared or force raised in some exponential fashion, of “super” (as in,
say, “superhuman”) power. What made those powers truly super was obvious
enough: the nuclear arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union -- their
potential ability, that is, to destroy in a fashion that had no precedent and
from which there might be no coming back. It wasn’t a happenstance that
the scientists creating the H-bomb sometimes referred to it in awestruck terms as a “super bomb,” or
simply “the super.”
The unimaginable had happened. It turned out that there was such a thing as too
much power. What in World War II came to be called “total war,” the full
application of the power of a great state to the destruction of others, was no
longer conceivable. The Cold War gained its name for a reason. A
hot war between the U.S. and the USSR could not be fought, nor could another
global war, a reality driven home by the Cuban missile
crisis. Their power
could only be expressed “in the shadows” or in localized conflicts on the
“peripheries.” Power now found itself unexpectedly bound hand and foot.
This would soon be reflected in the terminology of
American warfare. In
the wake of the frustrating stalemate that was Korea (1950-1953), a war in
which the U.S. found itself unable to use its greatest weapon, Washington took
a new language into Vietnam. The conflict there was to be a “limited war.” And that meant one thing: nuclear power would
be taken off the table.
For the first time, it seemed, the world was facing
some kind of power glut. It’s at least reasonable to assume that, in the
years after the Cold War standoff ended, that reality somehow seeped from the
nuclear arena into the rest of warfare. In the process, great power war
would be limited in new ways, while somehow being reduced only to its
destructive aspect and nothing more. It suddenly seemed to hold no other
possibilities within it -- or so the evidence of the sole superpower in these
years suggests.
War and conflict are hardly at an end in the
twenty-first century, but something has removed war's normal efficacy. Weapons development has hardly ceased either,
but the newest highest-tech weapons of our age are proving strangely
ineffective as well. In this context, the urge in our time to produce
“precision weaponry” -- no longer the carpet-bombing of the B-52, but the
“surgical” strike capacity of a joint direct attack munition, or JDAM -- should be thought of as the arrival of
“limited war” in the world of weapons development.
The drone, one of those precision weapons, is a striking
example. Despite its penchant for producing “collateral damage,” it is not a World
War II-style weapon of indiscriminate slaughter. It has, in fact, been
used relatively effectively to play whack-a-mole with the leadership of
terrorist groups, killing off one leader or lieutenant after another.
And yet all of the movements it has been directed against have only proliferated, gaining strength (and brutality) in these same
years. It has, in other words, proven an effective weapon of bloodlust
and revenge, but not of policy. If war is, in fact, politics by other
means (as Carl von Clausewitz claimed), revenge is not. No one should
then be surprised that the drone has produced not an effective war on terror,
but a war that seems to promote terror.
One other factor should be added in here: that global
power glut has grown exponentially in another fashion as well. In these
years, the destructive power of the gods has descended on humanity a second
time as well -- via the seemingly most peaceable of activities, the burning of
fossil fuels. Climate change now promises a slow-motion
version of nuclear
Armageddon, increasing both the pressure on and the fragmentation of societies,
while introducing a new form of destruction to our lives.
Can I make sense of all this? Hardly. I’m just doing my best to report
on the obvious: that military power no longer seems to act as it once did on
Planet Earth. Under distinctly apocalyptic pressures, something seems to
be breaking down, something seems to be fragmenting, and with that the familiar
stories, familiar frameworks, for thinking about how our world works are losing
their efficacy.
Decline may be in the American future, but on a planet
pushed to extremes, don’t count on it taking place within the usual tale of the
rise and fall of great powers or even superpowers. Something else is happening
on Planet Earth. Be prepared.
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