Vice president Joe Biden was wrong when he said, at last year’s Democratic Convention, “It’s never been a good bet to bet against the American people.” In fact, claiming that America is going to hell in a handbasket has been among the more reliable routes to both the Oval Office and the best-seller lists. Josef Joffe, the publisher-editor of the German weekly Die Zeit, points out in his new book, “The Myth of America’s Decline,” that the United States has been dogged for much of its history as a superpower by warnings of doom.
These warnings have mostly proved groundless. When, in 1960, John F. Kennedy told his fellow citizens that they were on the wrong end of a “missile gap,” the United States actually had thousands of nuclear missiles while the Soviet Union may have had as few as four. In the 1980s, Paul Samuelson’s canonical textbook, “Economics,” still assumed that the Soviet economy would outstrip America’s, and in 1987 the Yale historian Paul Kennedy warned of American “imperial overstretch” — yet it was the Soviet empire that soon collapsed. As the 1990s approached, the Asia expert Clyde Prestowitz predicted that Japan would surpass America; Japan soon began a two-decade economic nose-dive.
Such half-forgotten political controversies are important, as Joffe sees it, because arguments for America’s decline are being made once again. The late economist Robert Fogel, the consultant Kishore Mahbubani and the journalists Martin Jacques, Parag Khanna and Fareed Zakaria — these and others see the United States losing ground to China, to China and India, or to “the rest” more generally. Still, Joffe’s real target is not particular individuals but a certain genre of book about the “rise of” this or that Asian nation, the think-tank studies that support such views and the development models they tend to extol, with their reliance on peasant migration to factories, currency manipulation, protectionism and state-sponsored “tsunamis of cheap capital.”
Joffe, an eager neologist, calls these models “modernitarianism.” He grants that China has advantages that Japan and earlier “tiger” economies lacked. Its reserve army of labor is bigger. And it has a large military. But Joffe is not impressed. Demographically, China is at risk of stagnation, with ever more dependent retirees and ever fewer people of working age. And the United States, with a war budget of around $700 billion (excluding spending on veterans), still accounts for over 40 percent of world military spending. Even if we assume a doubling of China’s $100 billion military budget, slow demographic growth “will not soon enable the Middle Kingdom to unseat the greatest military power the world has ever seen.”
Nor can China match the United States in education. It can send its promising young scientists to top American universities. But most foreigners who get Ph.D.’s in science and engineering in this country tend to stay at least five years, Joffe says, including 92 percent of Chinese and 81 percent of Indians (a striking statistic that helps explain this book’s strong pro-immigration bias). Whether you measure by entrepreneurship or by research and development, China has been unable to develop a free-standing tech culture. Contrary to predictions of government-led innovation being a “way station” on the road to a free-­market economy, the share of state enterprises in the Chinese economy has grown in recent decades. Meanwhile, the share of Chinese-built parts in the high-tech products it assembles and exports has fallen.
The attentive reader will notice we are half a world away from Joffe’s ostensible subject. Joffe never really gets around to disproving, or even addressing, the case that the United States is in decline, as most of his readers will understand the word. What concerns him is strategic decline, relative to America’s economic and military competitors. As such, he scarcely touches upon America as a society — and thus has little time for those theories of decline that stress decadence, deindustrialization and malaise. Once he knows the final score, he’s not so interested in reading an account of the game, or an assessment of whether there is dissension in the clubhouse.
He does mention our “dysfunctional government, polarized parties, inequality of incomes and wealth, ballooning entitlements, pork and patronage, strained infrastructures.” But this observation comes too late — more than 200 pages into a short book — to sound like anything other than a perfunctory “to be sure” clause. And Joffe often seems more intent on the mote in China’s eye than the beam in America’s, adding that “a one-party regime faces problems of a different magnitude.” In the closing paragraphs of the book, Joffe paraphrases a presentation by a Chinese scholar who is impressed with America’s intellectual, cultural and military power, but sees the country as being in political, economic and social crisis. For Joffe, the remarks show America is “the Decathlon power . . . ahead in most, but not all, disciplines.”
In a way, this book belongs to the very declinist genre it aims to debunk — except that its skepticism is directed at Asia. Its perky prose style demonstrates that it is possible to wear one’s erudition a bit too lightly. Joffe never lingers long enough on a point to do more than drop a few wisecracks. Antic language and exuberant mixed metaphors (“Britain’s American heir is keeping a larger bundle of arrows in the quiver, ranging from longstanding alliances via à la carte commitments to over-the-horizon balancing with mobile forces”) leave the impression that he is writing for people who need to be cajoled into reading.
Joffe gives no indication that he thinks the recent economic and political crises require us to re-examine assumptions about America’s position in the world. He writes, for instance, that one cause of today’s difficulties “is cyclical, the trillion-dollar toll levied on the economy since the Crash of 2008, the birth of Decline 5.0.” That this crisis is an ordinary “cyclical” one is open to debate. And if it is not cyclical, then to mock the pessimists is to speak too soon. In mentioning the historian Edward Luttwak’s lament that a run-down United States was “acquiring the necessary third-world traits of fatalistic detachment,” Joffe writes, “This was in 1992, on the cusp of America’s longest boom, which extended all the way to 2007.” Similarly, when citing the philosopher John Gray’s warning in 1994 that inter­ethnic strife was leading to “ungovernability” and a “spectacle of American decline,” he notes that this was “two years into the longest American expansion.”
Dismissing Luttwak ought to require figuring out whether what we experienced between 1992 and now actually was genuine prosperity, or whether it was something carried out with accounting tricks, borrowed money and legal chicanery, as well as by two unrepeatable demographic windfalls that exaggerated the economy’s true productivity (first, the baby boom passing through its productive years; second, mass immigration). And before writing off Gray, Joffe, who sees irresponsible deficit financing as one of the most ominous signs for America’s future, ought to consider that one of the things deficits purchase is social peace.
“Only the United States can do in the United States,” Joffe writes. He is right, certainly. But not all countries with the means to thrive have the wisdom to do so. As Adam Smith said in 1777, “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” But probably not so much as Joffe thinks.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and a columnist for The Financial Times.