8 January 2014

The Myth of America's Triumph

Published on The National Interest (http://nationalinterest.org)
January 8, 2014


IN THE The Myth of America’s Decline, Josef Joffe offers a book-length version of what, by now, is a familiar line of argument—the antideclinist polemic. Joffe, the American-educated publisher of the German weekly Die Zeit, has been closely associated with neoconservative foreign-policy thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic for a generation. An engaging and entertaining writer, widely read in history and current events, Joffe scores many hits against his targets. But he goes too far in trying to counter the errors of declinism with a defense of American triumphalism. Instead of dispelling myths about America, he creates his own.

The terms “declinism” and “neoconservatism” have been the sibling rivals of American foreign policy. Both terms originated and passed into popular usage around the same time, during the latter stages of the Cold War. And both terms originated as insults. After the socialist thinker and leader Michael Harrington sought to stigmatize liberal and social-democratic opponents of the New Left by calling them “neoconservatives,” Irving Kristol and others adopted what was intended as an insult as the name of their movement, though some intellectuals such as Daniel Bell and Sidney Hook continued to insist that they remained on the left, not the right. “Declinism,” another insult masquerading as a description, was popularized by the late Samuel P. Huntington, a neoconservative Democrat, in a 1988 article for Foreign Affairs. In the piece, he criticized Paul Kennedy (among others) for underestimating America’s power and potential, most notably in Kennedy’s 1987 surprise best seller The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Unlike neoconservatism, however, declinism has not been adopted as a proud label by any individual or school of thought.

Ever since Huntington’s essay, neoconservatism and declinism have been closely linked—if only because thinkers and writers of the neoconservative school have specialized in denouncing those who do not share their optimistic vision of America’s potential power and influence as “declinists.” An all-purpose term of abuse, “declinism” allows neoconservatives to denounce their rivals across the political spectrum, from paleoconservative and libertarian isolationists who have always supported a minimalist foreign policy to anti-interventionist liberals who insist on “nation building at home” and realists who propose a U.S. foreign policy of “offshore balancing.”

Much of The Myth of America’s Decline is, in effect, a restatement, updating and expansion of Huntington’s 1988 article, “The U.S.—Decline or Renewal?” In it, Huntington declared:

In 1988 the United States reached the zenith of its fifth wave of declinism since the 1950s. The roots of this phenomenon lie in the political economy literature of the early 1980s that analyzed the fading American economic hegemony and attempted to identify the consequences of its disappearance. These themes were picked up in more popular and policy-oriented writings, and the combination of the budget and trade deficits plus the October 1987 stock market crash produced the environment for the spectacular success of Paul Kennedy’s scholarly historical analysis in early 1988 [The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers]. Decline has been on everyone’s mind, and the arguments of the declinists have stimulated lively public debate.

Huntington offered “three core propositions” of the alleged declinist school:

First, the United States is declining economically. . . . Second, economic power is the central element of a nation’s strength, and hence a decline in economic power eventually affects the other dimensions of national power. Third, the relative economic decline of the United States is caused primarily by its spending too much for military purposes, which in turn is the result, in Kennedy’s words, of “imperial overstretch,” of attempting to maintain commitments abroad that the country can no longer afford.

He concluded:

Declinist literature sets forth images of a nation winding down economically, living beyond its means, losing its competitive edge to more dynamic peoples, sagging under the burdens of empire, and suffering from a variety of intensifying social, economic and political ills. It follows that American leadership must recognize and acquiesce in these conditions and accept the “need to ‘manage’ affairs so that the relative erosion of the United States’ position takes place slowly and smoothly, and is not accelerated by policies which bring merely short-term advantage but longer-term disadvantage.”

Joffe follows Huntington in describing several waves of declinism. In Joffe’s version of the schema, Decline 1.0 in the late 1950s and the early 1960s was associated with the shock of Sputnik and the fear that the United States was losing the arms race and the space race to a dynamic Soviet Union. Decline 2.0 came with the “malaise” (to use Jimmy Carter’s term) that afflicted the American national psyche in the 1970s, when U.S. failure in Vietnam, out-of-control inflation and two oil-price shocks created a depressed and defensive national mood.

A third wave of declinism, according to Joffe, took place in the 1980s, when Americans feared economic eclipse by a rapidly growing Japan and perhaps Western Europe. In the fourth and fifth waves, American decline has been attributed by some to a rising China or a broken economy, symbolized by the U.S.-centered financial crisis that triggered the Great Recession.

Joffe notes that each time that the perception of American decline has become part of the conventional wisdom, the foreign challenger has failed and the United States has enjoyed, at least temporarily, an economic and military comeback. Thus, the Soviet Union that seemed unstoppable at the time of Sputnik stagnated in the 1970s and 1980s and disintegrated in the 1990s. Japan’s remarkable industrial boom gave way to decades of stagnation following the crash of the early 1990s. China’s rapid economic takeoff, like Japan’s, cannot be sustained over time. And thanks to shale gas and other factors, the United States, where the Great Recession originated, may find it easier to recover than China, Japan and Germany find it to rebalance their economies away from excessive dependence on export markets.

Joffe provides a thorough and often-amusing history of alarmist prophecies culled from the public debates of the last half century, from misguided alarm about the “missile gap” in the Kennedy years to Ezra Vogel’s 1979 work Japan as Number One. And he makes a shrewd observation about the popularity of the jeremiad as a genre in America. Arguments that the United States is about to lose its place in the world, Joffe observes, often have been deployed to persuade Americans to undertake reforms that are desirable for other reasons.

A good example of this tendency is provided by Joffe in the case of American education reform. Again and again, the proponents of reforms in schooling (justifiable on their own merits) have felt the need to justify them in terms of America’s geopolitical competition with the Soviets or America’s geoeconomic competition with the Japanese or the Chinese—“Sputnik moments.” After the National Academies issued an alarmist report claiming that America graduated only seventy thousand engineers in a year, compared to 350,000 in India and more than six hundred thousand in China, subsequent reports slashed the Chinese and Indian numbers, which included many students who would be considered lower-level technicians in the United States.

When Shanghai led the United States in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings, former Reagan education official Chester E. Finn Jr. managed a declinist “twofer” by declaring: “Wow, I’m kind of stunned, I’m thinking Sputnik.” As Joffe rightly observes:


Comparing the richest, best-educated, and privileged city of China with a broad sample of U.S. and European schools is like matching a choice apple against the entire harvest. Pitting Shanghai against Cambridge, Palo Alto, and Bethesda with their “tiger mothers” and “Volvo dads” would have yielded a different tally.

As Joffe points out, when America’s disproportionately poor and less educated immigrant population is factored out, the United States rises from the middle of PISA rankings to near the top. In this case, declinism is bipartisan; misleading claims that America’s relatively successful educational system is a failure allows the Left to justify higher spending on public schools even as it allows the Right to argue for charter schools or complete privatization of K-12 education.

IF JOFFE HAD limited The Myth of America’s Decline to observations like these, he would have produced a slight but persuasive study of the perils of linear extrapolation in geopolitics and the abuse by American reformers of the jeremiad as a genre. Unfortunately, he defends a version of American “triumphalism” that is as unbalanced as the very declinism he scorns. It is not enough for Joffe to declare that the United States is not doomed to relative decadence and decline; he must insist that Europe and Asia are themselves doomed to decadence and decline relative to the United States. Among other things, this inverted declinism makes Joffe an unreliable guide to the subjects of economic growth, demography and the welfare state.

Consider his views on capitalism. Joffe contrasts state-directed, “modernitarian” capitalism like that of Japan, the “little tigers” and now China with the “liberal capitalism” exemplified most by Britain and the United States. To maintain his dichotomy between modernitarianism and liberalism, Joffe must rewrite British and American history, to minimize the significant “modernitarian” or state-capitalist and mercantilist periods. Joffe says that free trade was “an early American idea that defied the mercantilist spirit of the times.” He adds:


As the nineteenth century progressed, the United States, like all developing nations, became a high-tariff country. The average peaked at 45 percent in 1870; today it is 1.3 percent. Still, Jeffersonian idealism, though conveniently framed by self-interest, made for a commercial policy quite different from France’s in the eighteenth or China’s in the twenty-first century.

Not so fast. The commercial policy of France influenced the early United States by several channels. Alexander Hamilton, whose “Report on Manufactures” laid out the case for American import-substitution protectionism, learned much of his economics from Malachy Postlethwayt’s mid-eighteenth-century English translation of the Dictionnaire universel de commerce. It was written by the sons of the French merchant Jacques Savary, who codified French commercial law for Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the great architect of French economic reform. Hamilton’s most important successor in the early nineteenth century, Kentucky senator Henry Clay, explained to Congress that his “American System” of protectionism, infrastructure and manufacturing was inspired in part by Napoleon’s autarkic “Continental System.” As for Thomas Jefferson, he introduced a French military system for the mass production of guns to the United States, where the imported French technique helped lay the basis for America’s later industrial miracle. By 1816, Jefferson had renounced his earlier support for free trade and become reconciled to protectionism: “He . . . who is now against domestic manufacture, must be for reducing us either to dependence on that foreign nation [Britain], or to be clothed in skins, and to live like wild beasts in dens and caverns.” He continued, “I am not one of these; experience has taught me that manufactures are now as necessary to our independence as to our comfort.”

Joffe concedes that the United States pursued protectionist policies from the 1790s to the 1940s—that is, for 70 percent of its history under the Constitution. Behind their tariffs, the United States and Germany flourished at the expense of free-trading Britain, which finally abandoned free trade too late to rescue its ravaged industrial base in the 1920s. As Britain had done in the 1840s, the United States in the 1940s adopted free trade only when its national industries, developed behind tariff walls, no longer needed protection and expected to dominate foreign markets—not because of some harmony between America’s liberal political principles and free trade. If China were to achieve uncontested manufacturing dominance, it too could be expected to drop mercantilism and preach free trade to other nations, for the same selfish reasons that Britain and the United States did.

In addition to downplaying the contribution of generations of protectionism to U.S. industrial supremacy, Joffe minimizes the role of America’s native version of state capitalism in American innovation. According to Joffe, “Top-down, modernitarian states are not good at fabricating the intellectual explosives that crack old molds and break new paths.” He concedes that the U.S. federal government contributed to technological innovation through massive subsidies of higher education and research and development beginning in World War II—but he does not fully acknowledge the role of the government and large corporations in the founding of Silicon Valley, while exaggerating the role of venture capitalists and independent inventors.

As Joffe says:


Present at the creation was an academic entrepreneur—nay, a buccaneer—by the name of Frederick Terman. The engineering professor, who would later become provost, was obsessed with building “steeples of excellence” at the Farm [owned by Stanford]. As a by-product, he launched Silicon Valley, which would grow in symbiosis with Stanford, each nourishing the other. The unwitting founding act occurred in 1939 when Terman prodded two of his students, David Packard and William Hewlett, to start a little electronics company, now a very big one, in a Palo Alto garage. . . . The empire builder Terman then lured back William Shockley. The inventor of the transistor set up Shockley Semiconductors, a prototypical start-up. . . . The Shockley renegades went off to found Fairchild Semiconductors with a $1.5 million investment from New York’s Fairchild Camera, the first of the venture capitalists or “angels” who populate Sandhill Road on Stanford’s northern border today.

Note what is left out of Joffe’s rather conventional account of the tech revolution as the product of audacious inventors in garages and visionary venture capital. The U.S. military was a client of Terman’s Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard during World War II, and it remained the chief customer for most early computer technology for decades. In addition, giant corporations, many of them defense contractors like Lockheed, were early tenants of Stanford’s Industrial Park. Joffe neglects to tell his readers that Shockley, before founding Shockley Semiconductors, worked from 1936 to 1955 at Bell Labs, where he coinvented the transistor in 1947. Elsewhere he mentions the telephone company, only to disparage it: “Recall ‘Ma Bell’ in twentieth-century America, a government-sponsored monopoly that could hold back on new technology and keep long-distance rates sky-high.” But however laggard Bell might have been in switching to wireless a few decades ago, its prolonged status as a government-sponsored monopoly, by letting it recycle profits into Bell Labs’ research and development, allowed Bell to support the development of the transistor, among much other modern technology. In the same way, the near-monopoly status of the Western Union Telegraph Company helped it bankroll some of the early experiments of Thomas Edison. From the 1940s to the 1980s, staid, corporate IBM led the evolution of the computer industry, making the careers of later entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs possible.

Why are these details important? To the extent that the American-bred IT revolution depended on procurement and research by big government and big corporations, and not only on geniuses in garages and venture capitalists, the contrast drawn by Joffe between the uncreative state capitalism of Japan and China and the creative, individualistic liberal capitalism of the United States is undermined. As Joseph Schumpeter observed in the middle of the twentieth century, the site of invention has moved from the labs of individual geniuses to corporate and government laboratories. Research in subjects from DNA to subatomic particles requires enormous up-front investments in equipment and teams of researchers.

So it remains today. “China trounces US in Top500 supercomputer race” was the headline of a June 17, 2013, piece in Computerworld. The author of the piece, Joab Jackson, claimed:


The supercomputing arms race is heating up again between the United States and China, as China retakes the top spot in the 41st Top500 listing of the world’s most powerful supercomputers with Tianhe-2, an updated system that was able to execute 33.86 petaflops, or 33.86 thousand trillion floating point operations per second.

According to Joffe, the Chinese can never replicate American creativity. Jackson disagrees:


Besides challenging the U.S. dominance of the Top500, the Tianhe-2 system is also notable for its use of technologies developed in China. “Most of the features of the system were developed in China, and they are only using Intel for the main compute part. The interconnect, operating system, front-end processors and software are mainly Chinese,” said Top500 editor Jack Dongarra in a statement.

Oh, well. Let “modernitarians” relying on state capitalism and national-champion corporations build supercomputers; the “liberal” United States can specialize in social-media software like Facebook.

Mid-twentieth-century Britain was extremely innovative, contributing to the development of computer technology, radar, the jet engine and television. But the lack of a modernized industrial base, large and successful industrial corporations, and government procurement on a sufficient scale doomed Britain to fall behind the United States, Germany, Japan and other rivals. Today’s deindustrialized Britain makes a mockery of Joffe’s paean to the genius of Anglo-American liberal capitalism, while providing the United States with an example of a fate it should try to avoid.

NOR IS JOFFE any more persuasive when it comes to the contentious issue of American demography. On this issue, Joffe reflects the conventional wisdom of the transatlantic elite that circulates among Aspen, Davos and the Clinton Global Initiative and opines in the prestige press. According to this conventional wisdom, America’s immigration policy gives the United States a demographic advantage over its rivals, by providing the American economy with foreign-born talent and higher fertility. But this conflates skilled and unskilled immigration. The foreign-born skilled immigrants, largely Asian and European, contribute next to nothing to American fertility rates, while the unskilled immigrants who contribute to relatively high U.S. fertility and relative youth, largely Latin American, tend to lower America’s overall educational levels and, in some cases, depress wages for low-income workers.

Indeed, as a proportion of its immigrant population, the United States gets far fewer educated immigrants than do other Western countries. The majority of American immigrants come to the United States under the “family reunification” program, which disproportionately brings in less educated Mexicans and Central Americans compared to their native-born peers. In contrast, Canada, with its “point system” that assigns points for higher education, English proficiency and other factors, tends to get more educated immigrants from many of the same countries in the Western Hemisphere that send immigrants to the United States.

Another claim of the demographic-exceptionalist wing of American triumphalism is that a never-ending stream of youthful immigrants with high birthrates will expand the U.S. labor force while reducing budgetary pressure on entitlements for the elderly for generations to come—even as European and Japanese populations shrink, followed by low-fertility, aging China. Joffe quotes the demographer Nicholas Eberstadt: “By 2025, under current UN and Census Bureau projections, China would account for less than a fifth of the world’s population but almost a fourth of the world’s senior citizens [emphasis added by Joffe].”

The reality is hardly as apocalyptic as Joffe makes it sound. A chart that he reproduces—“Graying China, Youthful America, Young India”—actually undermines his argument. In 2050, according to the graph, about 21 percent of the U.S. population and about 25 percent of the Chinese population will be over sixty-five—compared to only about 13 percent in India. Surely a better description of this scenario would be: “Graying China and Graying America, Youthful India.” Will China really be crippled by having 4–5 percent more of its population over the age of sixty-five than the United States half a century from now?

Demography is neither as favorable for the United States nor as dire for China as Eberstadt and Joffe suggest. In the case of the United States, immigration (legal and illegal) and birthrates plummeted during the Great Recession, as they did during the Great Depression of the 1930s. They might resume, with a strong, prolonged economic recovery. But if the United States, like other advanced industrial economies, endures decades of weak demand and slow growth, then recent forecasts of an immigration-driven population explosion in the United States in the twenty-first century may turn out to have been mistakes, caused by a one-generation boom in Latin American immigration attracted by an unsustainable, debt-driven bubble economy.

LIKE MANY ON the political right, Joffe believes that modern, Western-style welfare states crowd out investment capital: “Another reason for slowing growth is the enormous welfare burden, with transfer spending eating up about one-third of Western Europe’s GDP, leaving correspondingly less for investment, which is a down payment on tomorrow’s growth.” This is confused in three ways.

First, as noted above, in the particular case of China, reducing overinvestment and boosting consumption—including consumption by the elderly—would be a good thing. Second, the world for the foreseeable future is likely to be awash in private and sovereign-wealth-fund capital which cannot find adequate investment opportunities, notwithstanding high levels of spending on the elderly in the United States, Europe and Japan. Third, and most important, the main constraint on global growth is not the competition of overly generous welfare states with productive industry for money, but rather the toxic interaction of glut-inducing overinvestment in heavy industries by China and other mercantilist economies with inadequate global consumer demand.

Inadequate global consumer demand, in turn, has a short-term cause—the collapse in spending by households that are “deleveraging” or reducing their indebtedness, in the aftermath of housing and stock-market bubbles—and a long-term cause: the refusal of economic elites, including both the kleptocratic Communist Party princes of China and America’s increasingly plutocratic investors and managers, to share the gains from economic growth equitably with most of their workers in their own nations. In such an environment, slashing entitlements for the elderly would not significantly increase investment, while it would contract demand further, by suppressing spending both by the elderly and the younger relatives who would have to support them more directly.

Echoing Robert Kagan’s thesis that “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus,” Joffe warns Americans against surrendering their martial virtue to the lotus-eater comfort of a European-style welfare state. He writes:


For the great democracies of Europe and Japan, the load [of the welfare state] is not as weighty as it is for the United States. The former are not in the business of world order; in fact, they have been steadily shifting from warfare to welfare. Twenty-first century America is straggling, but moving in the same direction.

Apart from a small group of neoconservative Republicans, there is no constituency in the United States for expanding military spending while cutting Social Security and Medicare. It is hardly a sign of decadence, however, that many Americans prefer “nation building at home” to debacles like those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. Nor is there necessarily a trade-off between military preparedness and a generous social safety net. The fact that Americans spend a larger percentage of their economy than do Europeans on health care, for comparable or worse results, suggests that reforming America’s dysfunctional medical-industrial complex could free resources for more butter and more guns, if more guns really were needed.

CONNECTING ALL OF Joffe’s critiques of declinism is a largely implicit but partly articulated theory of history that blends both American and liberal triumphalism, a theory of a kind familiar among contemporary neoconservative and neoliberal thinkers. Nowhere does he set forth his version of triumphalism systematically; he is writing a polemic, not a treatise. Nevertheless, a more or less coherent account of world history and America’s role in it can be pieced together from the incidental comments he makes while attacking declinism.

Like Francis Fukuyama and the Whig historians of yesteryear, Joffe evidently believes that liberal capitalism and democracy are destined to supersede other ways of organizing modern industrial societies. Democracy is a more or less inevitable spin-off of the economic growth produced by industrial capitalism: “The historical correlation is perfect. Growth favors democratization, and as democracy expands, growth shrinks” as “the empowered masses will demand more for themselves and grant less to the state.” According to Joffe:


The benign historical experience of the West—from wealth to liberty, though with murderous totalitarian lapses—has jelled into a kind of economic determinism: with development comes democracy. . . . This deterministic blend of Karl Marx and John Locke does hold for the West, as well as for East Asia’s first risers, where it happened much faster.

Thus, today’s authoritarian China will be pressured to choose democracy by the very economic success that it has enjoyed recently under authoritarian rule.

The view that world history is moving in one direction, toward free markets and multiparty democracy, has become the conventional wisdom among Atlantic elites since the end of the Cold War. A more plausible minority view is that set forth by the Israeli scholar Azar Gat and others: the survival and diffusion of liberal capitalism and democracy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been a historical accident, contingent on the geopolitical triumph of the United States over illiberal great powers.

The fascist model of modernity found supporters from Latin America to the Middle East and Asia and was discredited only by the military defeat of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and fascist Italy in World War II. Suppose that the United States had stayed out of World War II and that the world beyond the Americas had been divided among totalitarian empires. Is it really the case that economic growth in a victorious Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan would have led to successful demands for democratizing those authoritarian, state-capitalist regimes? Would the “murderous totalitarian lapses” in Germany and Japan have been mere temporary blips in “the benign historical experience of the West” on the road to liberal, capitalist democracy, absent the pulverization and occupation of Germany and Japan by the United States and its allies?

Similarly, the discrediting of Marxism-Leninism and the wave of democratization and marketization that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall can be viewed more as a case of opportunistic emulation of the triumphant superpower than as a vindication of a “deterministic blend of Karl Marx and John Locke.” The rapidity with which the nostrums of the New Left of the era of Khrushchev and Mao gave way within the global intelligentsia to paeans to markets and democracy in the 1990s suggests tides of fashion, not deep, underlying currents of history. From this perspective, the collapse of the Soviet threat in the 1980s removed the rationale by which anti-Communist military regimes around the globe had justified their rule, both to their own populations and to their U.S. ally. If the Soviet bloc had remained intact and if the Cold War had persisted to the present, is there any reason to believe that the United States would have pressured its authoritarian allies to democratize? The absence of Soviet-American competition is one reason that the United States today can afford to be relatively relaxed about the overthrow of friendly autocracies like Hosni Mubarak’s in Egypt as part of the Arab Spring.

There would seem to be a contradiction between Joffe’s expression of confidence in the long-term triumph of liberal-democratic principles and his concern, expressed elsewhere in the book, that liberalism and democracy in the world depend on American military and economic power. “A rules-based world requires a caretaker. . . . How would the world fare if the global commons were run by China or Russia, illiberal giants both? Or even by democratic India, Japan, or Europe, which cannot take care of their own back yards?” Joffe’s list of dangerous powers that only the United States can stand up to is the familiar neoconservative most-wanted list:


Pushing against the fences, revisionists like China and Russia threaten to break into the global commons. . . . Others like revolutionary Iran or Terror International, which respect neither fences nor rules, must be defanged, a task that demands collective action and hence a leader who harnesses and maintains the coalition.

It is particularly ironic that someone long associated with neoconservatism like Joffe should endorse a complacent view of history that makes Lockean liberal democracy a quasi-Marxist epiphenomenon of capitalism, including initially successful authoritarian state capitalism. After all, the neoconservative school has been defined by its opposition to “appeasement” and its emphasis on the willpower of nations and alliances rather than on material resources and constraints. If economic growth would have inevitably produced liberalism and democracy anyway, and if “totalitarian lapses” were temporary deviations from “benign historical experience,” then perhaps Americans could have saved much blood and treasure by forgoing participation in the world wars and the Cold War and waiting patiently for prosperous, confident consumers to take to the streets demanding multiparty democracy and civil rights from the mellowing heirs of Hitler, Tojo, Mussolini, Stalin and Mao.

JOFFE IS largely right in his critique of what might be called “premature declinists.” However, from the fact that earlier prophecies of American decline were followed by American resurgences, it does not follow that Joffe’s Decline 5.0 will necessarily be succeeded by a new, Reaganesque “Morning in America.” Chicken Little was wrong to claim that the sky was falling. But in Aesop’s fable about the boy who cried wolf, it should be recalled, a genuine wolf eventually showed up. What if this time things really are different?

All of America’s previous would-be “peer competitors”—Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and the Soviet Union—had economies smaller than that of the United States and succumbed, directly or indirectly, to American strategies of economic attrition. Depending on whether one prefers purchasing-power parity or other comparisons, Chinese GDP will surpass U.S. GDP in the near- or medium-term future. Even if, as seems likely, Chinese economic growth slows, a world in which the United States has the second-biggest economy after China (if disunited Europe is not treated as a single power) presents challenges which are fundamentally different from those of the twentieth century.

And while it is true that the United States has been the only great power with global reach since the end of the Cold War, that global reach may be a wasting asset. To cut the United States down to size, regional great powers like China need not develop global navies and air forces of their own. They need merely overmatch the United States in their own regions by means of what the U.S. military calls “antiaccess” forces, converting the United States from a truly global superpower to a less exalted regional or multiregional power.

Even then, the United States would remain part of the great-power club. All other things being equal, a First World country with a large population will be more powerful and influential than less developed large-population nations and less populous developed nations. Even if its long-term population growth is lower than expected, because of less immigration or lower fertility or both, the United States, along with China and India, will be one of the most populous nation-states in the world.

But it is not clear that immigration-driven population growth creates more opportunities than it solves. Nor is it clear that the United States—the most unequal society in the Western world, with the lowest rates of intergenerational mobility—is capable, in the twenty-first century, of providing rapid assimilation and mobility for low-skilled immigrants, now that the frontier is closed and good wages for unskilled and semiskilled jobs are a thing of the past.

Joffe’s affection for America is plain, but it has misled him into becoming its cheerleader at a moment when the flaws in the American model are increasingly visible. His mistake is to present excessive optimism about America’s relative standing in the world as the alternative to excessive pessimism. There is an alternative to both declinism and triumphalism: realism.

Michael Lind is cofounder of the New America Foundation and author of Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States (Harper, 2012).

Image [6]:U.S. Department of Defense/Flickr.


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