Yankees doing dandy
The darkened skies of the American Empire are more likely to have been caused by the passing clouds than a setting sun.
America’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan has been a singularly unifying moment. Hand-wringing neoconservatives and liberal interventionists sing in harmony with salivating anti-American leftists and woke activists that the end of the American Empire is nigh. Their opinion columns and blue-tick tweets point confidently to the horizon, where the sun is setting on the American Century even as the brightly burning stars of China ascend. We are told that Pax Americana, which once took the torch from Pax Britannia, has been mortally wounded by the humiliation of Kabul, and will soon be supplanted by Pax Sina. Even the excellent Unherd columnist Aris Roussinos joined in, Tweeting on Sunday: “I think it's wrong to see Kabul as America's Suez; it's still just their Singapore: their Suez is still yet to come”
In fact, the withdrawal from Afghanistan means little to the global dominance of the United States. Insofar as it as any effect at all, withdrawing from a strategically irrelevant theatre and ending an unwinnable war will marginally help the United States cement its dominance.
On 11 December 1941, HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse were sunk near Singapore by a force of Japanese bombers and torpedo aeroplanes in a battle that lasted barely ninety minutes. This stunning defeat was an unmistakable demonstration that Britain no longer had the capacity to defend its imperial possessions East and South of Suez. Yet this was already clear. By the end of the nineteenth Century and early twentieth Century, Britain was being challenged by great continental nations (the United States, Germany and Russia), whose populations and industrial, mineral and agricultural potential far outmatched Britain’s. The deleterious costs of the First World War were Britain’s death knell as an imperial power. Singapore, and the broader Second World War, was merely the coup de gras.
This is nothing like the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Britain was straining every sinew to defend itself when the Japanese took Singapore. The US chose to leave Afghanistan. It could defeat the Taliban by the end of this year if it wanted to – without resorting to nuclear weapons and without switching to a full war economy.
The strength of America’s strategic position is hugely underestimated. The continental United States is invulnerable to invasion: it has the pacific and militarily weak Canada to the North, the chaotic and militarily even weaker Mexico to the South, a giant ocean to the East and an even bigger one to the West (both of which it controls with the most powerful navy in history). Meanwhile, no other nation has anything close to the economic breadth and depth the US enjoys: its self-sufficiency in food and energy, and its awesome industrial, technological, educational, mineral, consumer and financial power, mean that America, uniquely, could disengage entirely from the world and go it alone.
Finally, its military dominance is undisputed. The US Navy alone has more airpower than the entire airforces of even other militarily formidable nations (including Britain). Its expeditionary land forces are larger than Britain’s entire army. The US Air Force is also the most powerful in the world. If anything, its dominance of space is even greater.
China, on the other hand, finds itself in a far weaker strategic position. Almost all its industrial capacity is on its Eastern Seaboard, or at least relies on the ports there. Yet access to the Pacific from China’s east coast is blocked by the ‘First Island Chain’, a barrier that starts with Japan, and moves southward through Taiwan, the Philippines and Borneo to Sumatra. To export goods, or import food, energy or manufacturing inputs, China must send them through one of the chokepoints between those islands, which the US Navy could block any time it wished to make a concerted effort to do so.
Internally, China’s crushingly poor interior and its rich coastal areas have frequently led to revolutionary ruptures. It has been easy to conquer from the inside (the Mongols, various emperors, and Mao Zedong), but less easy to hold together, as regional differences and wealth disparities apply potent centrifugal forces. Historically, it has therefore oscillated between authoritarian central control and atomisation. Less than ninety years ago, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou and most other major coastal trading cities owed fealty to foreign powers, not to the Chinese state, while the rest of the country was controlled by ferociously competing warlords. It seems likely that President Xi Jinping’s nationalism and iron grip on the levers of state are at least in part rooted in his understanding of these deep forces – just as the Belt and Road Initiative is an effort to address China’s aforementioned geostrategic limitations.
China is also economically weaker than it looks. To be sure, it has made startling economic progress since Deng Xiaoping began his economic reforms in the late seventies. Its wise investment in STEM education, science, engineering, and technology will continue to offer healthy returns for decades to come. Nevertheless, its economy remains grotesquely imbalanced, dominated by an inefficient public sector and addicted to investment (especially into real estate) and exports. Meanwhile, President Xi has recently initiated an almost Maoist crackdown on the productive and entrepreneurial private sector, which is sure to have long-term consequences for innovation and development, and for external investment, which is of paramount importance for companies who wish to raise the funds needed to reach the scale required to compete globally. Furthermore, it has still not attained self-sufficiency in a range of inputs that are crucial for the twenty-first century economy, such as the latest generations of semiconductor wafers.
Demographics are also a problem. China’s workforce is already shrinking by three million people a year, and its fertility rate is now down to 1.3, well below the 1.5 that is the international standard warning level. It is entirely possible that China will turn grey before it gets rich. Meanwhile, it appears that the US will cut off China from the global technology, and capital and money markets, before it reaches self-sufficiency launch speed. America is also in the process of building an alliance network with China’s neighbours, all of whom fear the expansionary, increasingly aggressive dragon in the Western Pacific room.
In 1973, the US signed the Paris Peace Accords that saw its troops withdraw from Vietnam in ignominy. US politics at the time appeared to be irrevocably broken, racked by left wing terror attacks, and culminating in the resignation of Richard Nixon a year later after the Watergate Scandal. The country had withdrawn from the gold standard, the oil price shock led to queues at petrol stations, and stagflation gripped the economy. In 1975, the last helicopter from the rooftop of America’s Saigon embassy seemed emblematic of a country in retreat: politically, economically and militarily, it appeared finished. Yet within fifteen years, it bestrode the world as undisputed global hegemon.
History doesn’t repeat, but it has a tendency to rhyme. The darkened skies of the American Empire are more likely to have been caused by the passing clouds than a setting sun.
