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Thursday, January 31, 2008
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Hegemonic decline, revisited
I see that both Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias liked Parag Khanna's "Waving Goodbye to Hegemony" argument a lot more than I did. Both Kevin and Matt like the fact that, "it's a useful article if only because it's so rare to see foreign policy pieces in the mainstream media that aren't almost completely America-centric." Fair enough. But if that's their interest, I would recommend "A World Without the West," by Naazneen Barma, Ely Ratner and Steve Weber in May/June 2007 issue of The National Interest -- which was followed up by a lively debate on TNI online. Furthermore, as an adjunct to Khanna's essay, it would be good to read Michael Lind's cover story in the February issue of Prospect magazine. Lind's argument: America does, of course, have many problems, such as spiralling healthcare costs and a decline in social mobility. Yet the truth is that apart from the temporary frictions caused by current immigration from Latin America, the US is more integrated than ever. Racial and cultural diversity is in long-term decline, as a result of the success of the melting pot in merging groups through assimilation and intermarriage—and many of the country's infamous social pathologies, from violent crime to teenage drug use, are also seeing improvements. Americans are far more religious than Europeans, but the "religious right" is concentrated among white southern Protestants. And there is no genuine long-term entitlement problem in the US. The US suffers from healthcare cost inflation, a problem that will be solved one way or another in the near future, long before it cripples the economy as a whole. And the long-term costs of social security, America's public pension programme, could be met by moderate benefit cuts or a moderate growth in the US government share of GDP. With a linguistically united, increasingly racially mixed supermajority and a solvent system of middle-class entitlements, the US will remain first among equals for generations to come, even in a multipolar world with several great powers.Another, small cavilabout Matt's post. He writes: [T]he big thing to keep in mind when considering any particular "declinist" thesis about American hegemony is that we've actually been on the decline for a good long while. In 1945-46 the U.S. economy completely dominated the world, contributing some absurdly high share of total output. Every other significant country on earth had been completely destroyed by war, and we had a monopoly on nuclear weapons. Over time, this dominant position unraveled and Robert Keohane's After Hegemony, a study of America's efforts to forge a diplomatic system to continue to get bye in this new world actually came out decades ago. The collapse of the Soviet Union created a kind of illusion of a return to hegemony since international politics had been organized as "USA or USSR" for so long, but all along throughout the postwar period other countries have been gaining in importance.Well, sort of. Yglesias is completely correct that the U.S. had nowhere to go but down after 1945 -- a year in which we had the nuclear monopoly and were responsible for 50% of global economic output. Nevertheless, the U.S. resurgence in the nineties was not an illusion. The simple fact is that all of the potential peer competitors to the United States -- Germany, Japan and the USSR -- either stagnated or broke apart. At the same time, U.S. GDP and productivity growth surged. The revival of U.S. relative power was not a mirage. posted by Dan on 01.31.08 at 07:40 PM Comments: Following Dan's thought, though, the decline of relative American power after World War II was something American policy deliberately sought. The reconstruction of Europe and Japan was seen as essential to America's material interests as well as to its ideological strategy in the Cold War. The decline of relative American power after the mid-1990s was quite different -- not planned at all, and barely recognized until after it was very far along. This is testimony to the very different caliber of people at senior levels of the American government in modern times compared to 60 years ago. posted by: Zathras on 01.31.08 at 07:40 PM [permalink]I must take exception with one comment alleging that there's no entitlement problem, only a healthcare inflation problem. While it is certainly true that the unfunded libilities of a healthcare entitlement such as Medicare pose a much greater problem than a strictly retirement-related one such as Social Security, most objective studies conducted by the CBO, GAO, and nonpartisan organisations like the Concord Coalition conclude that unfunded retirement programs also present a serious problem. The regressive Social Security payroll tax is already the largest tax half of all Americans face (accounting for the downward shift in the tax burden, not tax cuts for the "rich"), and absent reforms designed to make Social Security a truly funded system as was originally intended, it will result in most future Americans paying more into it than they receive back in benefits--hardly a "fair" solution. As to the belief that only sweeping healthcare reform involving both the private and public sectors can resolve the problems of federal programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, this contention ignores the impact that they have on medical spending in general. Changes in them can have a beneficial effect on the cost structure of healthcare in general. The insistence that no reforms be undertaken until all of health care is restructured is simply an excuse to do nothing--something that will only lead to greater problems down the road. posted by: Mactavish on 01.31.08 at 07:40 PM [permalink]I must take exception with one comment alleging that there's no entitlement problem, only a healthcare inflation problem. While it is certainly true that the unfunded libilities of a healthcare entitlement such as Medicare pose a much greater problem than a strictly retirement-related one such as Social Security, most objective studies conducted by the CBO, GAO, and nonpartisan organisations like the Concord Coalition conclude that unfunded retirement programs also present a serious problem. The regressive Social Security payroll tax is already the largest tax half of all Americans face (accounting for the downward shift in the tax burden, not tax cuts for the "rich"), and absent reforms designed to make Social Security a truly funded system as was originally intended, it will result in most future Americans paying more into it than they receive back in benefits--hardly a "fair" solution. As to the belief that only sweeping healthcare reform involving both the private and public sectors can resolve the problems of federal programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, this contention ignores the impact that they have on medical spending in general. Changes in them can have a beneficial effect on the cost structure of healthcare in general. The insistence that no reforms be undertaken until all of health care is restructured is simply an excuse to do nothing--something that will only lead to greater problems down the road. posted by: Mactavish on 01.31.08 at 07:40 PM [permalink]Post a Comment: |
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