US Power: Past and Prologue (original) (raw)
2013, The Future of US Global Power
Evidence for US primacy used to be less contestable. Financial and strategic support from the US notwithstanding, Europe and Japan required decades to rebound from the devastation of World War II. Their later economic "challenge" eventually would succumb to the US revolution in information and communication technology (ICT), in the one case, and a protracted economic stagnation in the other. While sleeping giants India and China had self-selected out of global capitalism, US-headquartered transnational corporations roamed the world uncontested even as US manufacturing exports boomed. Systemic defects spelled, first, implosion, then dissolution, for the US's main strategic rival, the former Soviet Union. As long as a looming threat from Islamist extremism remained beneath the radar, the Western state-centered international system appeared unassailable. The US seemed to straddle this world like a colossus-militarily, economically, politically and culturally. Yet the world, and the US's position within it, looks rather different today compared to 1950, 1991 and 2001. Do recent shifts in the global system's tectonic plates augur secular decline for the world's preeminent power? The rest of this chapter is organized as follows. To help situate the perspective advanced in this book, the section "The popular literature on 'decline' " provides an overview of today's controversy over US decline. The section "Globalization and global power" discusses the relationship between global power and globalization, and its implications for the nature and scope of US power today. Against this analytical and historical backdrop, the section "Maintaining primacy in a turbulent era" introduces the basic contours of the argument advanced in the book. The section "Structure of the book" concludes with a brief overview of the remaining chapters. The popular literature on US "decline" National "decline" for a preeminent global power refers to a (composite) reduction in economic dynamism, military prowess, political-cumdiplomatic clout and cultural impact. 1 Influencing the argument in this 11