The Only Thing That The US Has To Fear Is The US Itself

Title: Unrivaled

Rating: 5 Stars

I’m not sure if this is common across all countries, but it’s certainly true that the US spends a lot of time looking over its shoulder.

When I was growing up, the big threat was the Soviet Union. We were constantly being told how much better or stronger the Soviet Union was. They had smarter, better educated engineers. Their massive army was poised to sweep through Western Europe with little that we could do to stop them. They had significantly more and better nuclear weapons (the so-called missile gap that pretty much every aspiring Presidential candidate from Kennedy to Reagan swore to). Their planned economy could effectively direct resources so much better than our anarchic system. They were the dark force that the democratic nations were standing unsteadily against.

Of course we now know none of that was true. Their economy was a shambles. Their military equipment was insufficient and poorly maintained. Their soldiers were poorly trained. There never was a missile gap. They were barely able to manage the resources that they had, let alone indulge in dreams of world domination.

The Soviet Union wasn’t our only bugbear. In the 1970s, during the oil crisis, we quaked at the power of OPEC. We thought that Saudi Arabia would get fat on our imported oil addiction. With their big piles of money, they would just be able to buy and sell us.

Starting in the 1980s, we started fearing the rising sun of Japan. After we built them up from the ashes of WWII, they enthusiastically embraced US business practices. Within a couple of decades, they were better than us in business processes and in manufacturing. Their system of interlocking corporations (Keiretsu) seemed to be a Japanese cultural specific innovation that could render our businesses obsolete.

In the 1990s came the European Union. It appeared that WWI and WWII had cured the separate European nations of their dreams of continental conquest. They began to look for opportunities for integration. They created a common market. They eliminated border restrictions. They (at least most of them) even agreed upon a common currency. Now there was a 400 million strong union of highly educated Westerners with sophisticated economies that could knock the US off of its preeminent perch.

Guess what? None of that happened either. Have we learned our lesson? Has the boy cried wolf one too many times? Are we going to calmly perform a rational analysis of our future threats?

Um, no. One word. CHINA!!!!!!!! This time it’s real! The 21st century is going to the Chinese century! We’re doomed!

This is why I loved Unrivaled. It’s actually a slim book (around 150 pages). It doesn’t go in for histrionics. It’s a rational discussion of what actually makes a hegemon, a comparison of the relative power between the US (the current hegemon) and the latest contender China, and some comments regarding the future.

His thesis is that the US is in a position of nearly overwhelming power in comparison to the other prominent powers and will continue to be so (unless it does some pretty stupid things) for decades to come.

First of all, let’s discuss the term hegemon. A hegemon is a country that is unchallenged within its geographic region. In the last several hundred years, the only hegemons were the UK during Pax Brittanica, Japan during the years before being destroyed in WWII, and the United States since 1890. 

Let’s look at the current state of the US. Canada and Mexico are the only two countries that border it. Both are friendly and are comparatively weak militarily. Every other competing country has adversaries either on its border or within geographic proximity.

The US has extensive coast lines with both the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean. The US has more deep water ports than the rest of the world combined. This gives the US a unique position in global trade. The US has more navigable rivers than the rest of the world combined. This serves as a relatively cheap transportation infrastructure. Other countries have to build expensive roads and ship on expensive trucks to get the same network.

The US has extensive energy resources. It currently is the largest producer of both oil and natural gas. China is the largest coal producer. Even so, the US has more than twice the reserves of coal than China but has no need to maximize that production.

So, before you even start with a military comparison, it simply is a fact that the US has natural advantages that no other nation in the world can compare to.

So, what about China? China will inevitably surpass the US in GDP. Beckley’s thesis is that net GDP is the more important metric. In a typical GDP measurement, any economic activity, positive or negative, counts as a positive number. However, if you spend 80% of that GDP just feeding your people, then that does not leave much room for other productivity gains. As another example, China has taken out massive state loans to build ghost cities that will never be lived in. That is a waste of resources even though it counts under normal GDP calculations.

Military expenditures should also be considered similarly. China has a large military and a large budget. However, much of that budget and manpower is spent suppressing internal dissent. China has over fifteen countries that it shares borders with, including nations that it has recently fought wars with in fairly recent memory (eg India and Vietnam). Although it claims seas off its coast as its own, their claims are fiercely fought by such countries as Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, Philippines, and Malaysia. No matter what direction it looks, its hemmed in. On the other hand, the US military has no such limitations. It does not operate within US borders. It has hundreds of bases all around the world. It can move with impunity in the seas and in the sky.

China is also in a bad place demographically. Thanks to its now obviously misguided one child policy, it’s looking at a future where 1/3 of its population will be over 65 by 2050. Given that its economy is already slowing down, this is a recipe for disaster.

There are so many other dimensions to look at. Whether you look at education, health, productivity, pollution, patents, or any other number of indices, the numbers tell the same story. The US is simply in a dominant position relative to any other country in the world, but especially in comparison to China. 

So, here’s the thing. We need to chill. I’m not saying, don’t be vigilant. I am saying that if the US is going to go down, it’ll be our fault. Internal things can bring down a hegemon.

We can overextend our resources by say, I don’t know, spending twenty years fighting wars in Afghanistan and/or Iraq with no exit strategy. We need to stop thinking of every external problem as being a nail and the military is the hammer. We need to beef up the State Department and use diplomacy. 

We can, with no external threats, turn upon ourselves. We could end up in a state of permanent political gridlock (filibuster, anyone?). Our trust in our democratic institutions can be threatened (thank you Donald Trump). Over the last forty years (as I’ve written about in other blog reviews) our non-discretionary government expenditures (things like education, infrastructure, transportation, housing, energy, R&D) have plummeted as a percentage of the total budget. This makes our government look less capable to people that need these services and does not prepare us for future challenges.

Instead of just always looking outside at the scary ‘other’, we need to look within our country and deal with the challenges that truly threaten us.