The meaning of decline

Gideon Rachman, the Financial Times columnist, is visiting my hometown, College Station. While he's there, he's thinking long and hard about American decline:

The NIC report has made people sit up [and take notice, b]ut it is part of a broader intellectual trend in America: a “new declinism”. This mood marks a complete break with the aggressive confidence of the Bush years and the “unipolar moment”. Its starting assumption is that America, while still the most powerful country in the world, is in relative decline.

Three developments have fed the new declinism. First, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have underlined that US military supremacy does not automatically translate into political victory. Second, the rise of China and India suggest that America’s days as the world’s largest economy are numbered. Third, the financial crisis has fed the notion that the US is living beyond its means and that something is badly wrong with the American model...

This new awareness of the constraints on American power is reflected in a number of new books and articles. The most influential is probably Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World, which [reaches] the inescapable conclusion is that the Bush years marked the apogee of American power...Richard Haass, who as head of the Council of Foreign Relations is arguably the doyen of the foreign policy establishment, is another important voice arguing: “The United States’ unipolar moment is over.”

Now I've always felt like declinism can be a healthy thing. When a country recognizes early in the game that its position is slipping, it's more likely to take quick action to fix its problems and get back on track. And I think this has happened a few times in our past, as Rachman points out:

America has been through phases of declinism before. The current debate is reminiscent of the arguments unleashed by the publication in 1988 of Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers...[which] resonated in the US at a time when many were worried by Reagan-era budget deficits and Japan’s growing economic power...

Odd as it is to recall now, there were people during the early phases of the cold war who were also genuinely worried that the USSR might outperform the US. There was also a national crisis of confidence caused by the Vietnam war, when Richard Nixon warned his fellow countrymen they risked looking like a “pitiful, helpless giant”. In the 1980s, Japan became the new challenger to American supremacy. Now it is China.

But Rachman worries that this time will be different, and that the "challenger" will be too big and strong to overcome:

[T]here are still reasons for thinking that the new declinism may be more soundly based than its predecessors. China has a record of sustained and dynamic economic growth that the Soviet Union was never capable of. And China’s sheer size makes it a more plausible challenger than a relatively small nation, such as Japan.

An optimist like Fareed Zakaria might respond that relative decline doesn't mean absolute decline; after all, the British Empire reached its height in the early 20th century, after the U.S. had already become the world's most powerful nation.

But I think it's pretty clear that China and the U.S. in 2008 are not Britain and the U.S. in 1908. Where Britain and the U.S. shared similar styles of government and economy, China's system represents a huge challenge to the dominant model - state-directed capitalism versus regulated free markets, bureaucratic one-party authoritarianism versus multiparty democracy with minority rights. And the fact that China has twice the population of the U.S., Japan, and the EU combined means that the deck is massively stacked in favor of the China Model.

So in my opinion we do need to be worried about our decline, both in absolute terms and relative to China. The best thing we can do, though, is to clean our own house instead of trying to undermine China's rise. For decades now we have suffered the depredations of leaders, almost entirely in the Republican party, who tried to use domestic and foreign policy to snuff out liberalism instead of to advance American interests. That effort failed, and it wrecked a lot of American institutions in the process, and now the Republicans have left the responsible Democrats to clean up the mess.

And clean it up we had better, or China will indeed inherit the Earth, and soon.