The Temporary Decline and Non-Fall of the American Non-Empire

Niall Ferguson is at it again, predicting the "downfall of the American empire":

Niall Ferguson is candidly calling time on the American Empire, or at least pointing to the combination of factors that will soon lead to its demise, in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs.

Ferguson, who has become one of the leading intellectuals of the deficit hawk camp, theorizes that empires don't decline in the slow, cyclical process long assumed. Instead it is dramatic events that push them over the edge to oblivion.

After running through almost every major imperial collapse in history, Ferguson cites the financial position of the U.S. as a similar element with the others. He also says it is already impacting U.S. military engagements abroad, pointing to President Obama's planned eighteen month draw down in Afghanistan.

Ferguson claims that it will take a simple, but dramatic event to shake the belief in the American Empire.

Foreign Affairs: But one day, a seemingly random piece of bad news---perhaps a negative report by a rating agency---will make the headlines during an otherwise quiet news cycle. Suddenly, it will be not just a few policy wonks who worry about the sustainability of U.S. fiscal policy but also the public at large, not to mention investors abroad. It is this shift that is crucial: a complex adaptive system is in big trouble when its component parts lose faith in its viability.

I'm not surprised that Ferguson thinks this, because Ferguson is a historian who specializes in studying the fall of empires. But he gets many of his parallels wrong: America is not going to fall like Rome did, and here's why:

Reason 1: America is a nation-state, not an empire. Ancient superpowers - the Roman, British, Spanish, and Mongol Empires, for example - tended to rule over many populations who spoke the empire's tongue only as a second language, and who kept distinctive cultural traditions. America, by contrast, is a monolingual melting pot. Even if America's economy were to collapse and its power to dramatically weaken, America would be unlikely to split into pieces, because there would be no natural pieces into which to split.

Reason 2: America is territorially contiguous and has plenty of internal mobility. This was not true of most empires in the past. I suppose it's at least conceivable that the territory west of the Rockies could break off into a viable state, but otherwise we have basically no natural barriers dividing us into natural segments; another reason why we won't split up if we decline.

Reason 3: America has no threats to its borders. Most pre-modern empires - well, all, really - faced pressure from rival peoples or nations on their borders. Rome was menaced by Germanic tribes, the British by the Russians and Japanese and many others, etc. But America will never, ever be overrun by Mexico or Canada. It just will not happen.

Reason 4: America has plenty of natural resources and plenty of room. Empires like Britain and Japan were limited by the need to seek natural resources and living space outside the small, confined borders of their home territories; those limitations drove those empires into a series of dangerous, ultimately self-defeating wars. America, by contrast, has more natural resources (water, arable land, fossil fuels) per person than any other large modern nation-state. Our surfeit of living space will also allow us to grow our population without limit for some time to come.

Reason 5: America is comfortable with immigration. We live in the age of the Fertility Transition, where every rich country's fertility drops below the replacement rate as soon as it gets rich (or in China's case, before). Only America, with its willingness to accept large influxes of immigrants (and the natural resources to accommodate them) will be able to stay young and growing when every other great power is figuring out how to keep its pension funds solvent.

In other words, America may very well decline, but it will not fall. Our institutions may fall apart, our economy may collapse, and our power may wane, but we will remain a nation-state and we will simply rise again. A better parallel than Rome, Britain, Mongolia, or Spain might therefore be China; though China has declined many times in the past (and even split up and been conquered more than once), it always returns to a position of strength. This is the fourth time in history that China has been one of the 2 most powerful political entities on the planet. And just as China declined and rose again and again, so will America.

Which of course does not mean we should ignore the problems that really are driving us into decline - a federal government paralyzed by the filibuster, deep liberal-conservative division, and a broken economic model. But neither should we heed Niall Ferguson's warnings about the fall of the American Empire. After all, there's no such thing.