The end of the America’s unipolar primacy? Not so fast
So argues Eric Edelman, a career United States Foreign Service Officer, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy in the second Bush term, and now Distinguished Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA).
In Understanding America’s Contested Primacy, a new report he wrote for CSBA, Edelman argues that for all of the significant challenges the United States faces over the medium term, no other power or alliance of powers is likely to displace the United States from its perch. Nor, according to Edelman, is a multipolar world likely to arrive anytime soon, a world which would find the United States one of several equals competing for political power while defending clashing spheres of influence. After thoroughly analyzing the positions and prospects of the United States and other competing powers, Edelman concludes that for all of America’s problems, all of the other pretenders to the throne have it even worse. Thus, although the U.S. will never again have it as easy as it did in the 1990s, neither is the world slipping back to another unstable multipolar pre-1914 era.
Edelman was inspired to write this report as a response to the National Intelligence Council’s 2008 Global Trends 2025 project, which forecast a sharp decline in the relative influence of the United States and the arrival of an increasingly chaotic multipolar world. Contributing to this hypothesis was the investment firm Goldman Sachs with its BRIC label of supposedly rising economic and political powers (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). Edelman also notes that at the end of every decade since World War II, a new theory has arrived to explain why the United States will soon drop off the top position on the podium.
After reviewing the history of the “declinism” literature, Edelman turns to an analysis of the BRIC countries, Europe, Japan, and the United States itself. Edelman discusses the looming social and economic challenges many of these countries will face, in most cases the result of damaging demographic imbalances (by comparison, a relatively minor problem for the U.S.). Edelman grants that Brazil, India, and China will gain in relative power. But he concludes that they and the others will at best be regional players and will not likely gain the economic, military, diplomatic, or “soft” power to become global poles of influence challenging the global position of the United States.
Edelman’s report overstates the linkage of demographics to national power. It is no longer 1815 or 1944; national military power no longer correlates with the number of military aged males. And the size of the working age population is only one factor determining economic output and the size of the tax base. Wide variations in worker productivity will do as much or more to determine economic and social clout, along with a country’s generation of globally-influential “soft power.”
Also largely missing from Edelman’s report is much discussion of non-state actors and what the possible decline in the authority of nation-states relative to self-organized groups may mean. Non-state actors are not likely to be contenders for global primacy any time soon. But their disruptive second- and third-order effects merit discussion.
As a challenge to the declinist conventional wisdom, Edelman’s report is a welcome addition to the discussion of grand strategy. I recommend reading it.
