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An Introduction to the American Age
Imagine that you were alive in the
summer of 1900, living in London, then the capital of the world.
Europe ruled the Eastern Hemisphere. There was hardly a place that, if not
ruled directly, was not indirectly controlled from a European capital..
Europe was at peace and enjoying unprecedented prosperity. Indeed,
European interdependence due to trade and investment was so great that
serious people were claiming that war had become impossible—and if not
impossible, would end within weeks of beginning—because global financial
markets couldn't withstand the strain. The future seemed fixed: a
peaceful, prosperous Europe would rule the
world.
Imagine yourself now
in the summer of 1920. Europe had been torn apart by an agonizing
war. The continent was in tatters. The Austro-Hungarian, Russian,
German, and Ottoman empires were gone and millions had died in a war
that lasted for years. The war ended when an American army of a million
men intervened—an army that came and then just as quickly left. Communism
dominated Russia, but it was not clear that it could survive. Countries
that had been on the periphery of European power, like the United
States
and
Japan, suddenly emerged as great powers. But one thing was certain—the
peace treaty that had been imposed on Germany guaranteed that it would not
soon reemerge.
Imagine the summer of 1940. Germany had not only reemerged but conquered
France and dominated
Europe.
Communism had survived and the Soviet Union now was allied with Nazi
Germany. Great Britain alone stood against Germany, and from the
point of view of most reasonable people, the war was over. If there was
not to be a thousand-year Reich, then certainly Europe's fate had been
decided for a century. Germany would dominate Europe and inherit its
empire.
Imagine now the summer of 1960. Germany had been crushed in the war, defeated less
than five years later. Europe was occupied, split down the middle by the
United States and the Soviet Union. The European empires were collapsing,
and the United States and Soviet Union were competing over who would be
their heir. The United States had the Soviet Union surrounded and, with an
overwhelming arsenal of nuclear weapons, could annihilate it in hours.
The
United States
had emerged as the global superpower. It dominated all of the world's
oceans, and with its nuclear force could dictate terms to anyone in the
world. Stalemate was the best the Soviets could hope for—unless the
Soviets invaded Germany and conquered Europe. That was the war everyone
was preparing for. And in the back of everyone's mind, the Maoist Chinese,
seen as fanatical, were the other danger.
Now imagine the summer of 1980. The United States had been defeated in a seven-year
war—not by the Soviet Union, but by communist North Vietnam. The nation
was seen, and saw itself, as being in retreat. Expelled from Vietnam,
it was then expelled from Iran as well, where the oil fields, which
it no longer controlled, seemed about to fall into the hands of the Soviet
Union. To contain the
Soviet Union,
the United States had formed an alliance with Maoist China—the
American president and the Chinese chairman holding an amiable meeting in
Beijing. Only this alliance seemed able to contain the powerful Soviet
Union, which appeared to be surging.
Imagine now the
summer of 2000. The Soviet Union had completely collapsed. China was
still communist in name but had become capitalist in practice. NATO had
advanced into Eastern Europe and even into the former Soviet Union. The
world was prosperous and peaceful. Everyone knew that geopolitical
considerations had become secondary to economic considerations, and the
only problems were regional ones in basket cases like Haiti or Kosovo.
Then came September 11, 2001, and the world turned on its head again. At a
certain level, when it comes to the future, the only thing one can be sure
of is that common sense will be wrong. There is no magic twenty-year
cycle; there is no simplistic force governing this pattern. It is simply
that the things that appear to be so permanent and dominant at any given
moment in history can change with stunning rapidity. Eras come and go. In
international relations, the way the world looks right now is not at all
how it will look in twenty years . . . or even less. The fall of the
Soviet Union was hard to imagine, and that is exactly the point.
Conventional political analysis suffers from a profound failure of
imagination. It imagines passing clouds to be permanent and is blind to
powerful, long- term shifts taking place in full view of the world.
If we were at the
beginning of the twentieth century, it would be impossible to forecast the
particular events I've just listed. But there are some things that could
have been—and, in fact, were—forecast. For example, it was obvious that
Germany, having united in 1871, was a major power in an insecure position
(trapped between Russia and France) and wanted to redefine the European
and global systems. Most of the conflicts in the first half of the
twentieth century were about Germany's status in Europe. While the times
and places of wars couldn't be forecast, the probability that there
would be a war could be and was forecast by many Europeans.
The harder part of
this equation would be forecasting that the wars would be so devastating
and that after the first and second world wars were over, Europe would
lose its empire. But there were those, particularly after the invention of
dynamite, who predicted that war would now be catastrophic. If the
forecasting on technology had been combined with the forecasting on
geopolitics, the shattering of Europe might well have been predicted.
Certainly the rise of the United States and Russia was predicted in the
nineteenth century. Both Alexis de Tocqueville and Friedrich Nietzsche
forecast the preeminence of these two countries. So, standing at the
beginning of the twentieth century, it would have been possible to
forecast its general outlines, with discipline and some luck.
The Twenty-First Century
Standing at the
beginning of the twenty-first century, we need to identify the
single pivotal event for this century, the equivalent of German
unification for the twentieth century. After the debris of the European
empire is cleared away, as well as what's left of the Soviet Union, one
power remains standing and overwhelmingly powerful. That power is the
United States. Certainly, as is usually the case, the United States
currently appears to be making a mess of things around the world. But
it's important not to be confused by the passing chaos. The United States
is economically, militarily, and politically the most powerful country in
the world, and there is no real challenger to that power. Like the
Spanish-American War, a hundred years from now the war between the United
States and the radical Islamists will be little remembered regardless of
the prevailing sentiment of this time.
Ever since the Civil
War, the United States has been on an extraordinary economic surge. It has
turned from a marginal developing nation into an economy bigger than the
next four countries combined. Militarily, it has gone from being an
insignificant force to dominating the globe. Politically, the United
States touches virtually everything, sometimes intentionally and sometimes
simply because of its presence.
This is not only due
to American power. It also has to do with a fundamental shift in the way
the world works. For the past five hundred years, Europe was the center of
the international system, its
empires creating a single global system for the first time in human
history. The main highway to Europe was the North
Atlantic. Whoever controlled the North Atlantic controlled access to
Europe—and Europe's access to the world. The basic geography of global
politics was locked into place.
Then, in the early 1980s, something remarkable
happened. For the first time in history, transpacific trade equaled
transatlantic trade. With Europe reduced to a
collection of secondary powers after World War II, and the shift in trade
patterns, the North Atlantic was no longer the single key to anything. Now
whatever country controlled both the North Atlantic and the Pacific could
control, if it wished, the world's trading system, and therefore the
global economy. In the twenty-first century, any nation located on both
oceans has a tremendous advantage.
Given the cost of building naval power and the huge cost
of deploying it around the world, the power native to both oceans became
the preeminent actor in the international system for the same reason that
Britain dominated the nineteenth century: it lived on the sea it had to
control. In this way, North America has
replaced Europe as the center of gravity in the world, and whoever
dominates North America is virtually assured of being the dominant global
power. For the twenty-first century at least, that will be the United
States.
The inherent power of the United States coupled
with its geographic position makes the United States the pivotal actor of
the twenty-first century. That certainly doesn't make it loved. On the
contrary, its power makes it feared. The history of the twenty-first
century, therefore, particularly the first half, will revolve around two
opposing struggles. One will be secondary powers forming coalitions to try
to contain and control the United States. The second will be the United
States acting
preemptively to prevent an effective coalition from forming.
If we view the
beginning of the twenty-first century as the dawn of the American Age
(superseding the European Age), we see that it began with a group of
Muslims seeking to re- create the Caliphate—the great Islamic empire that
once ran from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Inevitably, they had to strike
at the United States in an attempt to draw the world's primary power into
war, trying to demonstrate its weakness in order to trigger an Islamic
uprising. The United States responded by invading the Islamic world. But
its goal wasn't victory. It wasn't even clear what victory would mean. Its
goal was simply to disrupt the Islamic world and set it against itself, so
that an Islamic empire could not emerge.
The United States
doesn't need to win wars. It needs to simply disrupt things so the other
side can't build up sufficient strength to challenge it. On one level,
the twenty-first century will see a series of confrontations involving
lesser powers trying to build coalitions to control American behavior and
the United States' mounting military operations to disrupt them. The
twenty-first century will see even more war than the twentieth century,
but the wars will be much less catastrophic, because of both technological
changes and the nature of the geopolitical challenge.
As we've seen, the
changes that lead to the next era are always shockingly unexpected, and
the first twenty years of this new century will be no exception. The
U.S.–Islamist war is already ending and the next conflict is in sight. Russia is
re-creating its old sphere of influence, and that sphere of influence will
inevitably challenge the United States.
The Russians will be moving westward on the great northern European plain. As Russia reconstructs its power, it will encounter the U.S.-dominated
NATO in the three Baltic countries—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—as well
as in Poland. There will be other points of friction in the early
twenty-first century, but this new cold war will supply the flash points
after the U.S.–Islamist war dies down.
The Russians can't avoid trying to reassert power, and the United States
can't avoid trying to resist.
But in the end
Russia can't win. Its deep internal problems, massively declining
population, and poor infrastructure ultimately make Russia's long- term
survival prospects bleak. And the second cold war, less frightening and
much less global than the first, will end as the first did, with the
collapse of Russia.
There are many who
predict that China is the next challenger to the United States, not
Russia. I don't agree with that view for three reasons. First, when you
look at a map of China closely, you see that it is really a very isolated
country physically. With Siberia in the north, the Himalayas and jungles
to the south, and most of China's population in the eastern part of the
country, the Chinese aren't going to easily expand. Second, China has not
been a major naval power for centuries, and building a navy requires a
long time not only to build ships but to create well-trained and
experienced sailors.
Third, there is a
deeper reason for not worrying about China. China is inherently unstable.
Whenever it opens its borders to the outside world, the coastal region
becomes prosperous, but the vast majority of Chinese in the interior
remain impoverished. This leads to tension, conflict, and instability. It
also leads to economic decisions made for political reasons, resulting in
inefficiency and corruption. This is not the first time that China has
opened itself to foreign trade, and it will not be the last time that it
becomes unstable as a result. Nor will it be the last time that a figure
like Mao emerges to close the country off from the outside, equalize the
wealth—or poverty—and begin the cycle anew. There are some who believe
that the trends of the last thirty years will continue indefinitely. I
believe the Chinese cycle will move to its next and inevitable phase in
the coming decade. Far from being a challenger, China is a country the
United States will be trying to bolster and hold together as a
counterweight to the Russians. Current Chinese economic dynamism does not
translate into long-term success.
In the middle of the
century, other powers will emerge, countries that aren't thought of as
great powers today, but that I expect will become more powerful and
assertive over the next few decades. Three stand out in particular. The
first is Japan. It's the second- largest economy in the world and
the most vulnerable, being highly dependent on the importation of raw
materials, since it has almost none of its own. With a history of
militarism, Japan will not remain the marginal pacifistic power it has
been. It cannot. Its own deep population problems and abhorrence of large-
scale immigration will force it to look for new workers in other
countries. Japan's vulnerabilities, which I've written about in the past
and which the Japanese have managed better than I've expected up until
this point, in the end will force a shift in policy.
Then there is
Turkey, currently the seventeenth-largest economy in the world.
Historically, when a major Islamic empire has emerged, it has been
dominated by the Turks. The Ottomans collapsed at the end of World War I,
leaving modern Turkey in its wake. But Turkey is a stable platform in
the midst of chaos. The Balkans, the Caucasus, and the Arab world to
the south are all unstable. As Turkey's power grows—and its economy and
military are already the most powerful in the region—so will Turkish
influence.
Finally there is
Poland. Poland hasn't been a great power since the sixteenth century.
But it once was—and, I think, will be again. Two factors make this
possible. First will be the decline of Germany. Its economy is large and
still growing, but it has lost the dynamism it has had for two centuries.
In addition, its population is going to fall dramatically in the next
fifty years, further undermining its economic power. Second, as the
Russians press on the Poles from the east, the Germans won't have an
appetite for a third war with Russia. The United States, however, will
back Poland, providing it with massive economic and technical support.
Wars—when your country isn't destroyed—stimulate economic growth, and
Poland will become the leading power in a coalition of states facing the
Russians.
Japan, Turkey,
and Poland will each be facing a United States even more confident than it
was after the second fall of the Soviet Union.
That will be an explosive situation. The relationships among these four
countries will greatly affect the twenty-first century, leading,
ultimately, to the next global war. This war will be fought differently
from any in history—with weapons that are today in the realm of science
fiction. But as I will try to outline, this mid-twenty-first century
conflict will grow out of the dynamic forces born in the early part of the
new century.
Tremendous
technical advances will come out of this war, as they did out of World War
II [Tainter],
and one of them will be especially critical. All sides will be looking for
new forms of energy to substitute for hydrocarbons, for many obvious
reasons. Solar power is theoretically the most efficient energy
source on earth, but solar power requires massive arrays of receivers.
Those receivers take up a lot of space on the earth's surface and have
many negative environmental impacts—not to mention being subject to the
disruptive cycles of night and day. During the coming global war, however, concepts developed prior to the war for space- based electrical
generation, beamed to earth in the form of microwave radiation, will be
rapidly translated from prototype to reality. Getting a free ride on
the back of military space launch capability, the new energy source will
be underwritten in much the same way as the Internet or the railroads
were, by government support. And that will kick off a massive economic
boom.
But underlying all
of this will be the single most important fact of the twenty-first
century: the end of the population explosion. By 2050, advanced
industrial countries will be losing population at a dramatic rate. By
2100, even the most underdeveloped countries will have reached birthrates
that will stabilize their populations. The entire global system has been
built since 1750 on the expectation of continually expanding populations.
More workers, more consumers, more soldiers—this was always the
expectation. In the twenty-first century, however, that will cease to be
true. The entire system of production will shift. The shift will force the
world into a greater dependence on technology—particularly robots that
will substitute for human labor, and intensified genetic research (not so
much for the purpose of extending life but to make people productive
longer).
What will be the
more immediate result of a shrinking world population? Quite simply, in
the first half of the century, the population bust will create a major
labor shortage in advanced industrial countries. Today, developed
countries see the problem as keeping immigrants out. Later in the first
half of the twenty-first century, the problem will be persuading them to
come. Countries will go so far as to pay people to move there. This will
include the United States, which will be competing for increasingly scarce
immigrants and will be doing everything it can to induce Mexicans to come
to the United States—an ironic but inevitable shift.
These changes will
lead to the final crisis of the twenty-first century.
Mexico currently
is the fifteenth-largest economy in the world. As the Europeans slip out,
the Mexicans, like the Turks, will rise in the rankings until by the late
twenty-first century they will be one of the major economic powers in the
world. During the great migration north encouraged by the United States,
the population balance in the old Mexican Cession (that is, the areas of
the United States taken from Mexico in the nineteenth century) will shift
dramatically until much of the region is predominantly Mexican.
The social reality
will be viewed by the Mexican government simply as rectification of
historical defeats. By 2080 I expect there to be a serious confrontation
between the United States and an increasingly powerful and assertive
Mexico. That confrontation may well have unforeseen consequences for the
United States, and will likely not end by 2100.
The idea that the
twenty-first century will culminate in a confrontation between Mexico and
the United States is certainly hard to imagine in 2009, as is a powerful
Turkey or Poland. But go back to the beginning of this chapter, when I
described how the world looked at twenty-year intervals during the
twentieth century, and you can see what I'm driving at: common sense is
the one thing that will certainly be wrong. Obviously, the more granular
the description, the less reliable it gets. It is impossible to forecast
precise details of a coming century—apart from the fact that I'll be long
dead by then and won't know what mistakes I made.
But it's my
contention that it is indeed possible to see the broad outlines of what is
going to happen, and to try to give it some definition, however
speculative that definition might be. That's what this book is about.
Forecasting a Hundred Years Ahead
Before I delve into
any details of global wars, population trends, or technological shifts, it
is important that I address my method—that is, precisely how I can
forecast what I do. I don't intend to be taken seriously on the details of
the war in 2050 that I forecast. But I do want to be taken seriously in
terms of how wars will be fought then, about the centrality of American
power, about the likelihood of other countries challenging that power, and
about some of the countries I think will—and won't—challenge that power.
And doing that takes
some justification. The idea of a U.S.–Mexican confrontation and even war
will leave most reasonable people dubious, but I would like to demonstrate
why and how these assertions can be made. One point I've already made is
that reasonable people are incapable of anticipating the future. The old
New Left slogan "Be Practical, Demand the Impossible" needs to be changed:
"Be Practical, Expect the Impossible." This idea is at the heart of my
method. From another, more substantial perspective, this is called
geopolitics.
Geopolitics is not
simply a pretentious way of saying "international relations." It is a
method for thinking about the world and forecasting what will happen down
the road. Economists talk about an invisible hand, in which the
self-interested, short-term activities of people lead to what Adam Smith
called "the wealth of nations." Geopolitics applies the concept of the
invisible hand to the behavior of nations and other international actors.
The pursuit of short-term self-interest by nations and by their leaders
leads, if not to the wealth of nations, then at least to predictable
behavior and, therefore, the ability to forecast the shape of the future
international system.
Geopolitics and
economics both assume that the players are rational, at least in the sense
of knowing their own short-term self-interest. As rational actors, reality
provides them with limited choices. It is assumed that, on the whole,
people and nations will pursue their self-interest, if not flawlessly,
then at least not randomly. Think of a chess game. On the surface, it
appears that each player has twenty potential opening moves. In fact,
there are many fewer because most of these moves are so bad that they
quickly lead to defeat. The better you are at chess, the more clearly you
see your options, and the fewer moves there actually are available. The
better the player, the more predictable the moves. The grandmaster plays
with absolute predictable precision—until that one brilliant, unexpected
stroke.
Nations behave the
same way. The millions or hundreds of millions of people who make up a
nation are constrained by reality. They generate leaders who would not
become leaders if they were irrational. Climbing to the top of millions of
people is not something fools often do. Leaders understand their menu of
next moves and execute them, if not flawlessly, then at least pretty well.
An occasional master will come along with a stunningly unexpected and
successful move, but for the most part, the act of governance is simply
executing the necessary and logical next step. When politicians run a
country's foreign policy, they operate the same way. If a leader dies and
is replaced, another emerges and more likely than not continues what the
first one was doing.
I am not arguing
that political leaders are geniuses, scholars, or even gentlemen and
ladies. Simply, political leaders know how to be leaders or they
wouldn't have emerged as such. It is the delight of all societies to
belittle their political leaders, and leaders surely do make mistakes. But
the mistakes they make, when carefully examined, are rarely stupid. More
likely, mistakes are forced on them by circumstance. We would all like to
believe that we— or our favorite candidate—would never have acted so
stupidly. It is rarely true. Geopolitics therefore does not take the
individual leader very seriously, any more than economics takes the
individual businessman too seriously. Both are players who know how to
manage a process but are not free to break the very rigid rules of their
professions.
Politicians are
therefore rarely free actors. Their actions are determined by
circumstances, and public policy is a response to reality. Within narrow
margins, political decisions can matter. But the most brilliant leader
of
Iceland
will never turn it into a world power, while the stupidest leader of Rome
at its height could not undermine Rome's fundamental power.
Geopolitics is not about the right and wrong of things, it is not about
the virtues or vices of politicians, and it is not about foreign policy
debates. Geopolitics is about broad impersonal forces that constrain
nations and human beings and compel them to act in certain ways.
The key to
understanding economics is accepting that there are always unintended
consequences. Actions people take for their own good reasons have
results they don't envision or intend. The same is true with geopolitics.
It is doubtful that the village of Rome, when it started its expansion in
the seventh century BC, had a master plan for conquering the Mediterranean
world five hundred years later. But the first action its inhabitants took
against neighboring villages set in motion a process that was both
constrained by reality and filled with unintended consequences. Rome
wasn't planned, and neither did it just happen.
Geopolitical
forecasting, therefore, doesn't assume that everything is predetermined.
It does mean that what people think they are doing, what they hope to
achieve, and what the final outcome is are not the same things. Nations
and politicians pursue their immediate ends, as constrained by reality
as a grandmaster is constrained by the chessboard, the pieces, and the
rules. Sometimes they increase the power of the nation. Sometimes they
lead the nation to catastrophe. It is rare that the final outcome will be
what they initially intended to achieve.
Geopolitics assumes
two things. First, it assumes that humans organize themselves into units
larger than families, and that by doing this, they must engage in
politics. It also assumes that humans have a natural loyalty to the things
they were born into, the people and the places. Loyalty to a tribe, a
city, or a nation is natural to people. In our time, national identity
matters a great deal. Geopolitics teaches that the relationship between
these nations is a vital dimension of human life, and that means that war
is ubiquitous. Second, geopolitics assumes that the character of a nation
is determined to a great extent by geography, as is the relationship
between nations. We use the term geography broadly. It includes the
physical characteristics of a location, but it goes beyond that to look at
the effects of a place on individuals and communities. In antiquity, the
difference between Sparta and Athens was the difference between a
landlocked city and a maritime empire. Athens was wealthy and
cosmopolitan, while Sparta was poor, provincial, and very tough. A Spartan
was very different from an Athenian in both culture and politics.
If you understand
those assumptions, then it is possible to think about large numbers of
human beings, linked together through natural human bonds, constrained by
geography, acting in certain ways. The United States is the United States
and therefore must behave in a certain way. The same goes for Japan or
Turkey or Mexico. When you drill down and see the forces that are shaping
nations, you can see that the menu from which they choose is limited.
The twenty-first
century will be like all other centuries. There will be wars, there will
be poverty, there will be triumphs and defeats. There will be tragedy and
good luck. People will go to work, make money, have children, fall in
love, and come to hate. That is the one thing that is not cyclical. It is
the permanent human condition. But the twenty-first century will be
extraordinary in two senses: it will be the beginning of a new age, and it
will see a new global power astride the world. That doesn't happen very
often. We are now in an America-centric age. To understand this age, we
must understand the United States, not only because it is so powerful but
because its culture will permeate the world and define it. Just as French
culture and British culture were definitive during their times of power,
so American culture, as young and barbaric as it is, will define the way
the world thinks and lives. So studying the twenty-first century means
studying the United States.
If there were only one argument I could make about the twenty-first
century [and I think the author is right] , it would be that the European
Age has ended and that the North American Age has not, and that North
America will be dominated by the United States for the next hundred years.
The events of the twenty-first century will pivot around the United
States. That doesn't guarantee that the United States is necessarily a
just or moral regime. It certainly does not mean that America has yet
developed a mature civilization. It does mean that in many ways the
history of the United States will be the history of the twenty-first
century.
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