Karl Kaiser has played a crucial role as a link between Europe and America, explaining each to the other and helping to overcome inevitable frictions. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, he wanted both sides to understand that the US still had a crucial role to play in maintaining a liberal international order. But since then, we have seen the Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, the growth of Chinese power, the return of Russian revanchism, and the rise of populist nationalism on both sides of the Atlantic, and some may wonder if his statement is still true.
At the beginning of the 21st century, some predicted a division between the US and Europe. In my recent memoir, A Life in the American Century, I describe a meeting in Berlin in 2001 where a British politician argued that European federalism was “a French plot to create a nation to balance American power, but Germans such as Karsten Voigt and Karl Kaiser assured me that Germany did not see it that way” (p. 166). And that is still true. The transatlantic alliance remains crucial to a global order and American and European interests even if attention shifts to Asia.
The Cold War ended without the nuclear catastrophe that hung over our heads, but it was replaced by a period of hubris as the United States became the world’s sole superpower. That unipolar moment was soon replaced by fears of transnational terrorism and cyber wars. Analysts today speak about a new cold war with a rising China and fear of nuclear escalation following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Our mental maps of the world have changed dramatically over the past 30 years.
For eight decades, the world has experienced what the publisher Henry Luce, in March 1941, baptized “the American Century.” In the nineteenth century, the global balance of power was centered in Europe, which sent its imperial tentacles around the world. The United States was a bit player with a military not much larger than that of Chile. As the twentieth century began, the United States became the world’s largest industrial power, and accounted for nearly a quarter of the world economy (as it still does today measured at exchange rates). When Woodrow Wilson decided to send two million troops to Europe in 1917, the United States tipped the balance in World War I. But afterwards, the United States “returned to normal” and, in the 1930s, became strongly isolationist. The American century is the period since World War II during which time, for better or for worse, the United States has been the preeminent power in global affairs. Can it continue?
Much Will Depend on Maintaining Alliances
The United States remains the world’s strongest military power as well as the largest economy, but since the 2010s China has become a near-peer economic competitor. American primacy in this century will not look like the twentieth century. The greatest danger Americans face is not that China will surpass us, but that the diffusion of power will produce entropy, or the inability to get anything done. Much will depend on maintaining our alliances.
China has great strengths but also weaknesses. In assessing the overall balance of power, the United States has at least five long-term advantages. One is geography. The United States is surrounded by two oceans and two friendly neighbors, while China shares a border with fourteen other countries and is engaged in territorial disputes with several. The United States also has an energy advantage, whereas China depends on energy imports. Third, the United States derives power from its large transnational financial institutions and the international role of the dollar. A credible reserve currency depends on it being freely convertible, as well as on deep capital markets and the rule of law, which China lacks. The United States also has a relative demographic advantage as the only major developed country that is currently projected to hold its place (third) in the global population ranking. Seven of the world’s fifteen largest economies will have a shrinking work force over the next decade, but the US workforce is expected to increase, while China’s peaked in 2014. Finally, the United States has been at the forefront in important new technologies (bio, nano, and information). China, of course, is investing heavily in research and development and scores well in the numbers of patents, but by its own measures its research universities still rank behind those in the US.
What Domestic Change Could Do to US Soft Power
All told, the United States holds a strong hand in this great-power competition. But if Americans succumb to hysteria about China’s rise, they could play their cards poorly. Discarding high-value cards – including strong alliances and influence in international institutions – would be a serious mistake. China is not an existential threat to the United States unless US leaders make it one by blundering into a major war. The historical analogy that worries me is 1914, not 1941.
My greater concern, however, is about domestic change and what it could do to US “soft power.” Even if its external power remains dominant, a country can lose its internal virtue and attractiveness to others. The Roman empire lasted long after it lost its republican form of government. As Benjamin Franklin remarked about the form of American government created by the founders: “A republic, if you can keep it.” Political polarization is a problem, and civic life is becoming more complex. Technology is creating an enormous range of opportunities and risks related to artificial intelligence, big data, machine learning, deep fakes, and generative bots – to name but a few. And even larger challenges are approaching from the realms of biotechnology, not to mention coping with climate change.
Some historians have compared the flux of ideas and connections today to the turmoil of the Renaissance and Reformation five centuries ago, but on a much larger scale. And those eras were followed by the Thirty Years’ War, which killed a third of the population of Germany. Today, the world is richer and riskier than ever before. There is a case for pessimism and many see it in the results of the 2024 election. At the same time, Americans have survived worse periods in the 1890s, 1930s, and 1960s. For all its flaws, the United States is an innovative and resilient society that, in the past, has been able to recreate and reinvent itself. Karl Kaiser’s optimism of 1992 may still be correct.
This text is a chapter from the book “Paths to the Future: Perspectives on Foreign Policy: On the 90th Birthday of Karl Kaiser”. You can access the full version in the PDF above or via the e-book.
