Martin Jacques - 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] [20] Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (London: Allen Lane, 2008), Chapter 1. ven 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] [21] Adrian Wooldridge, ‘After Bush: A Special Report on America and the World’, The Economist , 29 March 2008, p. 10. 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] [22] George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, 29 January 2002. 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] [23] For a discussion of the US ’s current account deficit, see Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (London and New York: Allen Lane, 2004), Chapter 8. In future the American economy will find it increasingly difficult to support such a military commitment. [24] [24] Speech by Henry Hyde, chairman of the House International Relations Committee, 26 January, reprinted as ‘The Perils of the “Golden Theory”’, Strait Times , 21 February 2006. Paul Kennedy, ‘Who’s Hiding Under Our Umbrella? ’, International Herald Tribune , 31 January 2008. 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] [25] The US has even become a net importer of investment: the difference between the overseas assets owned by Americans and the American assets owned by foreigners fell from 8 per cent of GDP in the mid 1980s to a net liability of minus 22 per cent in 2006; Niall Ferguson, ‘Empire Falls’, October 2006, posted on www.vanityfair.com. 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] [26] Steven C. Johnson, ‘Dollar’s Decline Presents a Challenge to US Power’, International Herald Tribune , 28-9 April, 2007. 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] [27] ‘US’s Triple-A Credit Rating “Under Threat”’, Financial Times , 11 January 2008. 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] [28] There is no precedent for the extent of the militarization of the US economy both during the Cold War and subsequently; Eric Hobsbawm, Globalisation, Democracy, and Terrorism (London: Little, Brown, 2007), p. 160. 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] [29] For an interesting discussion of the economic cost to the United States of its military expenditure, see Chalmers Johnson, ‘Why the US Has Really Gone Broke’, Le Monde diplomatique , February 2008.

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.

Take globalization as an example. The dominant Western view has been that globalization is a process by which the rest of the world becomes — and should become — increasingly Westernized, with the adoption of free markets, the import of Western capital, privatization, the rule of law, human rights regimes and democratic norms. [30] [30] Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), pp. 309-22; Gerald Segal, ‘Globalisation Has Always Primarily Been a Process of Westernisation’, South China Morning Post , 17 November 1998. Much political effort, indeed, has been expended by the West towards this end. Competition, the market and technology, meanwhile, have been powerful and parallel pressures fostering the kind of convergence and homogeneity which is visible in many developing cities around the world in the form of high-rise buildings, expressways, mobile phones, and much else. There are, however, strong countervailing forces, rooted in the specific history and culture of each society, that serve to shape indigenous institutions like the family, the government and the company and which pull in exactly the opposite direction. [31] [31] For a discussion on the fundamental importance of cultural difference in the era of globalization, see Stuart Hall, ‘A Different Light’, Lecture to Prince Claus Fund Conference, Rotterdam, 12 December 2001. Furthermore, as countries grow more prosperous they become increasingly self-confident about their own culture and history, and thereby less inclined to ape the West. [32] [32] Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), Chapters 4–5. Far from being a one-way process, globalization is rather more complex: the United States may have been the single most influential player, exerting enormous power in successive rounds of global trade talks, for example, but the biggest winner has been East Asia and the greatest single beneficiary China. The process of globalization involves an unending tension between on the one hand the forces of convergence, including Western political pressure, and on the other hand the counter-trend towards divergence and indigenization.