I did a blog post about MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction, almost exactly a year ago. The title of that post was "MAD History" (see http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2016/08/mad-history.html). I wrote the post because it had become apparent to me that a lot of people were not familiar with what MAD was about and why it was important. The same thing has happened again.
A public figure about my age recently demonstrated little or no knowledge of what the "Nuclear Triad" is all about. Someone quite a bit younger than him would have some kind of excuse. Fear of a global nuclear war has justifiably receded in the minds of pretty much all of us. So the importance of this kind of thing for the younger generation has understandably diminished. But this person lived through fears of nuclear Armageddon, discussions of Global Winter, the Cold War, and the like. It should have gotten baked into his DNA to know all about these kinds of things. But it didn't. So apparently we have a problem here. I can solve it.
I actually spent a significant amount of time on the Nuclear Triad in my previous post. I am going to recapitulate to some extent. But I want to plow new ground for the most part in this post. So I will.
The Nuclear Triad consists of three classes of vehicles for delivering nuclear weapons. They are by airplane, by missile launched from a silo situated on land, and by missile launched from a silo housed in a submarine. The airplanes came first. Then the land launched and sea launched missiles arrived at close to the same time. The sea launch system is a little newer. And here I digress into history. (I go into more detail here than I did in my previous post.)
The B-17 "heavy bomber" airplane was developed by Boeing in the run up to World War II. The great depression was still on so cost was definitely a factor. Once the War was well and truly under way Boeing developed the B-29. It was more capable in every way. It was bigger, slightly faster, could carry more bombs further, and flew a lot higher. And, of course, it was a lot more expensive.
The main defense used by bombers at the time was to fly high. The B-17 couldn't fly that high so it was pretty vulnerable both to Anti-Aircraft artillery firing "flak" and to fighter airplanes. You can fly up to about 12,000 feet without supplemental oxygen. The B-17 could barely operate much higher than this and tended to spend most of its time at a low enough altitude that the crew could forgo using their masks.. The B-29 could fly much higher so it was much more immune to flak and you had to have a much more capable (more expensive, harder to build) fighter to reach it. The B-29 was the plane that was used to deliver the two nuclear bombs dropped on Japan.
The B-17 and B-29 were "prop jobs". They used propellers to move them through the air. That made it hard for them to fly really fast. It is hard to make a propeller plane go more than about 350 MPH because to achieve higher speeds the tips of the propellers end up needing to go supersonic. But the Germans introduced jet planes in a small way (luckily) during the War. And jets were the future because, among other things, they didn't have the supersonic propeller tip problem. So various jets were developed after the war.
They could go much faster. They could also fly higher. In several steps this culminated in the B-52. It is bigger and better (and much more expensive) than a B-29 in every way. But to a great extent it relied on the same defenses. It flew high and fast. (A number of "countermeasures" had been added to them at onetime or another but the foundation of their "survivability" was this traditional "high and fast" approach.) The last B-52 was built in the mid '60s, roughly 50 years ago.
The Germans also came up with the V-2 rocket during World War II. They didn't have much range. They weren't that accurate. And they could only carry a tiny bomb. But it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that they were the future. So a lot of money was poured into rocket development after the War.
The first thing that happened was a scramble for Nazi resources. Roughly speaking the Russians got most of the equipment but the US got most of the people. Remember, however, that at this time the US was spending a lot of time, money, and energy, on what became the SAC, the Air Force Strategic Air Command, and the B-52 bomber, a true technological marvel of its time. They were so marvelous that the US Air Force flies them to this day.
So the Russians got the jump on us on the rocket front and launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. As I noted before, if you can put a satellite into orbit you can put an ICBM warhead in your enemy's capitol. Or so the thinking of the time went. So the US played "catch up" but by the mid '60s they had the Minuteman ICBM. This was a rocket capable of delivering a large nuclear weapon pretty much any place we wanted it put. It wasn't all that accurate but then it didn't have to be.
It is not that hard to stop B-52s, the argument goes. And the Minuteman is vulnerable because you know where its silo is. If you can catch it before launch that's all she wrote. So we desperately need, the Navy argued, something that is not as vulnerable. By this time the capability existed to build a fairly large nuclear submarine. One of them was cut in half and a middle section was added. Into this middle section was place two rows of 8 silos. And into each silo an MRBM (Medium Range Ballistic Missile) was placed. And in a true feat of engineering magic a whole system was developed that allowed the missiles to be launched while the submarine was submerged.
The MRBMs did not have the range or payload of the ICBMs but the submarines could be positioned close enough to Russia for the whole thing to work. And at the time that was good enough. A second generation (the Ohio class) of submarines that could accommodate 24 silos and a bigger missile (the original missiles class was the "Polaris", the second generation missile was the "Poseidon") was eventually developed and deployed, starting in the mid '70s.
And now for a small aside. What's with this "B for ballistic" business? Ballistic means unpowered. The classic example of a ballistic missile is a cannon ball. Once it leaves the barrel of the cannon it follows a "ballistic" trajectory. It goes where gravity and air friction decide. There are no other forces acting on it. When it comes to ballistic missiles the business of figuring out where it will end up is a little more complicated but the general idea is the same. The rocket motor burns for a relatively short period of time at the start of the flight. After that ballistics determines where it is going to come down.
It made sense to use a ballistic design for early rockets. It was the simplest approach. But it's not the best way to go. There is, for instance, FOBS - Fractional Orbital Ballistic Systems. You put the warhead into low earth orbit where for technical reasons it is harder to shoot down. Then after less than a full orbit (i.e. a fractional orbit) you have it re-enter the atmosphere and land where you want it to. And the orbit doesn't have to be fractional. The possibilities are nearly endless. But in one of those unwritten "gentleman's agreement" things the US, Russia, and as far as we can tell all the other nuclear powers, agreed to make all their nuclear missiles ballistic. Back to the main thread of this post.
We have had the triad in roughly the same configuration for 50 years now. But while a lot has changed in the rest of the world, the nuclear triad has changed little. This doesn't make sense, except perhaps in a MAD world. So what's going on? Let me address each leg separately starting with bombers.
The US has taken a couple of shots at upgrading its nuclear bombers. The B-1 was supposed to replace the B-52. The B-52 was subsonic. That's not exactly fast if there are supersonic planes around. So the idea was to do a supersonic bomber. The B-1 is a lot faster than the B-52 but it turned out to not work much better at the "penetration" part of "penetration bomber". By this time anti-aircraft missiles and radars and so forth had gotten much better. The new idea was not to go high but to go low, really low, as in a couple of hundred feet off the ground. This was literally "flying under the radar". The B-1 was really terrible at this because it couldn't maneuver worth shit. The Air Force ended up doing a major (and successful) refit to B-52s so they could hug the ground effectively. Oops!
So the next try was the B-2. By now "stealth" technology had come on to the fore. The B-2 was slow, probably slower than a B-52, but it was very maneuverable and was almost completely invisible to radar and other airplane detection technologies. But it turns out that the plane is wildly impractical. You have to almost repaint it after each mission to keep it stealthy. The Air Force has gotten some use out of the B-2 but not as a nuclear weapon carrier.
And then there is the whole "drone" thing. In many ways the cruise missile is an early variant on the drone. It is slow, very maneuverable, very hard to detect, and relatively cheap. The only un-drone-like thing about it is that it drives itself. And, as I indicated in my previous post, the early cruise missiles were nuclear capable. I think that in the same way the Aircraft Carrier obsoleted the battleship in World War II the drone/cruise missile has obsoleted the heavy bomber. But the Air Force is now in the process of spreading money around in an effort to come up with a B-3. Will it be fantastically expensive? Hell, yes. Will it be an improvement on the alternatives? I'm pretty sure the answer is going to turn out to be "no". And in a tremendous irony, the B-52 turns out to be a great launch platform for cruise missiles. Sheesh!
So how about ICBM's? All they have done is get more vulnerable. Both the US and Russia purposely built inaccuracies into their official maps at one time in an effort to effectively hide their missile silos. If you aim for where the map says it is, you are going to miss it. But GPS, cheap satellite imagery, etc. has put an end to that sort of thing. The Russians know where our silos are to plus or minus a few inches. We know the same about theirs.
The US took a stab at something called the MX missile system a number of decades ago. This involved railroads and tunnels and a lot of other stuff. The idea was to hide where the ICBMs were. But it was never implemented and is now illegal according to various arms treaties. So we have the same old missiles in the same old silos. The only significant change is that the missiles GPS so their navigation is now dead on.
I talked about MIRVing, putting multiple warheads on one missile in my previous post. Both US land and sea missiles were MIRVed. (I presume the Russian missiles were too.) But, also as I got into before, MIRVing is destabilizing and makes it difficult to stay within the limits of various treaties. So a lot of de-MIRVing has now happened.
This has affected the missiles in the submarines but the submarine itself is little changed. The Navy wants a new generation of submarine but I don't know how it will be much different. Except, of course, for the whole "not 50 years old and falling apart" thing. These new boats are bound to be expensive. If you build one boat and put one unMIRVed missile in it then it becomes fantastically expensive. So lots of missiles per boat and lots of MIRVing per missile makes sense as it reduces the cost per deliverable warhead. But the Navy won't be able to do that so it is in a pickle.
There is what at first appears to be an obvious solution. You can fit a nuclear capable cruise missile into the torpedo tube of a Los Angeles class "attack" submarine. (This class of submarines is designed to do the kinds of things a World War II submarine did but do it in the modern world against modern defenses.) But both the US and Russia have jumped through all kinds of hoops in order to make various nuclear weapon reduction treaties verifiable. The primary thing that has been done is to separate things out into "obviously nuclear" and "obviously non-nuclear". It must be easy to reliably categorize something as being "nuclear capable" or not. And the operating assumption is that "nuclear capable" means "actually nuclear".
And it must be possible to use "national technical means" (satellites, etc.) to tell the two groups apart. That means you don't put a nuclear equipped cruise missile into a supposedly "not nuclear capable" attack submarine. Doing so would automatically put all attack submarines into the "nuclear capable" category. They would all then have to be counted as "nuclear delivery systems". And that means they would be counted against the "delivery systems" limit specified in the treaty. We have, relatively speaking, a lot of attack submarines. So we don't want them tangled up in nuclear weapons treaties. And that means you can't take the obvious path. And that makes things very complicated.
So to summarize: The Nuclear triad consists of three kinds of methods of delivery of nuclear weapons. They consist of bombers (airplanes), ICBMS (rockets in silos on land), and MRBMs (rockets in silos on submarines). All three legs of the nuclear triad have failed to keep up with the times.
Taking bombers first, Cruise Missiles, possibly launched from B-52s (or alternatively launched from a not very heavily modified and, therefore cheap by military standards, commercial airplanes like the 767) look like a big improvement. But instead of retiring nuclear capable bombers entirely, or taking the obvious alternate path of going with a modified commercial airplane, the Air Force is gearing up to spend a whole lot of money trying for the third time to come up with a viable alternative to the now more than 50 year old B-52.
The Navy's approach to their SLBM problem (the boats are old and break down frequently) is also to come up with a new version of the same old thing. The new submarine would have a missile load similar to the first generation design that the Ohio class replaced. The Ohio class boats were bigger and better. I don't know if there is any new stealth enhancements that would make the new boats harder to detect than the Ohio boats are. If such technology exists then it is going to cost a hell of a lot of money to move to it.
And then there is the math problem. A lot of boats with a lot of silos, each containing a highly MIRVed MRBM, is hard to fit under the caps in current arms reduction treaties. It will be almost impossible to do it if a new treaty lowers the limits. I can actually see Putin going for a treaty update that lowers the allowable counts. I can't see Trump going for it.
And the leg that has seen the least change has been the ICBM leg. They have been MIRVed and GPSed. But that's about it. And I can't really see a change that it makes sense to make other than the obvious one or retiring a bunch of silos and missiles.
To me it makes sense to reduce the allowed numbers of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. As I argued before (and I haven't changed my mind in the intervening year) going down to a number in the 200-400 range makes sense to me. You can credibly play the MAD game with 200 warheads. That will work for anything from North Korea to Russia or even China.
In this context a complete rethink of the whole "triad" thing, an artifact of history, politics, and technology, makes sense to me. Start with a clean sheet of paper. Figure out what makes sense in this new (modern technology and a limit of 200-400 warheads) environment. Then figure out how to get from here to there. Flexibility needs to be married to verifiability. And it wouldn't hurt to throw in cost (it should be possible to make the whole mess much cheaper both to build and also to maintain than the current system) and reliability.
To pull this off, however, requires a leader who is thoughtful, careful, and detail oriented. It will also be necessary for that leader to be committed to investing considerable effort and political capital in this sort of thing. Donald J. Trump represents pretty much the opposite. So it looks like our best option for the next few years is stasis. Change nothing and hope he pays no attention. Since he would likely to find the subject boring I think we have a good chance I will be being granted my wish..
Friday, July 28, 2017
Monday, July 10, 2017
Balance of Power
This post can be seen as a follow up or a continuation of a post I did about 18 months ago called "Game of Houses". Here's a link to that post: http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2016/01/game-of-houses.html. The connection is in the title. In that post I looked US Middle East policy. Implicit in that post was the US position as the one and only Superpower in the world. As such it was a matter of looking at how the US should or could approach the problem and how the rest of the world could, should, or would react to that. Here I am going to turn the telescope around and consider the rest of the world's view of the position of the US in the world.
The phrase "balance of power" is historically associated with a political and military strategy employed by a "Great Power", Britain, for example, to get on top or to stay on top. It is part of the "Game of Houses" game I discussed in the earlier post. But the name most commonly used for this game in the context of British actions is "The Great Game" because that is the name the British themselves most often used. But whatever the name it's all the same game.
The British deployed the strategy in two different contexts. In a colonial context, say in India, they used it to describe the system of propping up and/or tearing down various local factions in order to insure that there were various native factions vying for poser and that no one faction got to far ahead of or behind the rest. That way the British could play king-maker and control all of them.
The British also used the same strategy when dealing with other "Great Powers" residing on the European continent. They would form and break allegiances in order to prop up or tear down one faction or another. Here the plan was not to dominate them. As a group they were too powerful and there was too much history of relations between Britain and the various continental powers for them to stand that.
But by keeping a number of different powers in the game but at similar levels of power Britain was able to keep them all squabbling among themselves while the British grew their colonial network in the rest of the world. By the time the continental powers caught on Britain has a substantial lead. At one time "the sun never set on the British empire". The same could never be said of the empires of the French, Dutch, Italians, Germans, etc.
But after all that windup I am not going to use "Balance of Power" in that way. Instead I am going to use it in its simplest sense. What is the relative power of various countries around the world and what are the trends in the balance of power?
In the early sixties when I first took a look around at this sort of thing the power of the US was at its peak. It represented 50% of the world GNP (Gross National Product - technically different from the more accurate GDP - Gross Domestic Product that we now use but the differences are not material for this discussion.) And the US ran surpluses in both its balance of trade and balance of payments. The US was in a real sense "king of the world" at that point. But this was in a substantial way due to some unique circumstances.
There were theoretically a number of competitors. But Japan had been reduced to rubble by World War II. It was recovering but it was not recovered. The same was true for the traditional European powers like Britain, France, Germany, etc. The US was unique among the major industrialized countries in having been spared bombing or other damage to its industrial base. It also had lost relatively few men of prime working age so its labor force was intact. Britain, France, Germany, and Japan had suffered the loss due to death or major injury of a substantial part of their prime workforce.
I have left out Russia, then the USSR, but the story is much the same. The western parts of Russia were heavily damaged by the War and they lost a substantial part of their prime workforce due to death or major injury. There were some differences.
In the years immediately following the War they had stripped a lot of the industrial base of "Eastern Europe" and relocated it to Russia. That meant that their industrial base bounced back much more quickly than it otherwise would have. But Eastern Europe was now under Russian control and it had suffered the same kind of loss of prime workforce. And it was subject to the devastation of bombing and other damage. And it had suffered when Russia stripped much of its manufacturing base and moved it east. So Eastern Europe was actually a drain on Russia. Finally, Russia suffered under the inefficient "communist" economic system. So Russia was in bad shape too.
By the sixties Russia had sacrificed much to develop an advanced military capability consisting of a large inventory of nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them over long distances. This matched a similar US capability. So at the time the balance of power rankings were considered to have four tiers. There were the two "Superpowers", the US and Russia. There were several second tier "Great Powers" like Britain France, etc. Then there were the "Developed Countries", most of which were in Europe. Finally there was the lowest tier, the "Third World", those countries with little economic and/or political power. Most of the countries in the world fell into this Third World tier.
But a lot of this was a result of World War II. As I indicated above, the US suffered little damage. And its industrial base was built up as it manufactured most of the material used by the "Allied" side. So at the end of the War it had an intact population and a pumped up industrial base. Meanwhile large parts of the rest of the world had been devastated by the effects of the War. So the US had been able to "sit astride the world like a colossus" for roughly 20 years by this time (the mid '60s).
But the situation couldn't last. The parts of the world that had been devastated by the War got rebuilt. And their was a population boom that replaced the losses from the War. By the middle sixties lots of men of prime working age were reaching their adulthood and were ready and able to contribute to the economy. And under the "Pax Americana" banner their countries could concentrate on economic growth without having to spend a lot of time, energy, or money on military so they quickly recovered their traditional positions in the economic pecking order. This inevitably meant that relatively speaking (and it's all and always relative) the US was going to lose position to some extent. And they have.
The US represents about 5% of the world, population-wise. We also represent a similar percentage of land area. The US might have slightly more physical resources, things like Oil, Iron Ore, good agricultural land, etc. but here too the percentage of these kinds of resources that the US represents are perhaps 10% at most. Why does this matter? Because the foundation of political power is economic power. The reason the US was so powerful in the '60s was because at that time it produced half the economic output of the world. This let us buy favor through things like foreign aid. It also allowed us to impose our will by using the large military establishment we could afford to maintain.
Some more history. In his famous farewell address President Washington warned of the evils of "foreign entanglement". The US engaged in a foreign adventure shortly after he left office called "the War of 1812" in US textbooks (and no where else). Domestically it was viewed as a disaster so a strong isolationist movement developed and held power over foreign affairs for a long time. Then World War I came along. The US very reluctantly got involved. And again the result was judged to be less than a complete success. So again the isolationist position was reinforced.
But Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and Germany declared War on us a few days later. The lesson of World War II was we would inevitably get entangled in world affairs so we might as well get involved and stay involved in the hope that we could steer things in a beneficial direction. And it looked like this new "engagement" strategy was working pretty well when viewed from the perspective of the '60s. It didn't hurt that by this time the Russians had ICBM rockets that could use a nuclear warhead to wipe out Omaha Nebraska and the rest of the historically isolationist heartland. Engagement looked like a necessity whether we liked it or not.
But that was then. Some deterioration in our position was inevitable. But it certainly looked like the US could maintain a position of "first among equals" and also be seen as "necessary to the process", whatever the process was, for an indefinite period of time. But the US percentage of world GDP continued to shrink. And the costs of being "policeman to the world" continued to grow, especially as a percentage of US GDP.
By the '90s Russia had imploded so the US was seen as the sole Superpower. But rather than turning out to be a benefit it made things worse. There was now no reason in the eyes of the rest of the world that the US shouldn't be involved in everything. And, since we were the sole Superpower and everyone else was a lesser power, the rest of the world thought it only fair that we carry a larger and large portion of the load. So the cost/benefit calculation kept looking less and less favorable to the US.
These trends became apparent to me in the '90s. I could see that the world of the '90s was a much different place than the world of the '60s had been. And that meant that strategies and policies had to be updated. I felt that it was still advantageous to the US to maintain its position of "first in the world" and "indispensable participant". It gave the US greater leverage with which to influence events to its advantage. But in this changed environment I concluded that to be successful the US needed to be more clever and careful as its position was much weaker than it had been in the '60s.
China has been one of the preeminent powers in the world for millennia. But they fell on hard times and were reduced to being a basket case by 1900. They did not significantly improve their situation until well into the second half of the twentieth century (i.e. after the '60s). They have seen tremendous growth in their economic ability for about 50 years now and their economy is the second most powerful one in the world now.
India took a long time to get going after they gained independence in 1948. Pre-48 they had been a collection of small feuding duchies. But one of the things the British gifted them was a united country. It took them some time to get their act together but they have now been growing in economic power for roughly as long as the Chinese have. Economically they are now one of the Great Powers.
Most of the rest of Asia was a satellite of China. Later it was the satellite of one or another European power. Japan was the first country to get out of this trap and grow substantially in economic power. But several other countries, most notably South Korea, have been able to generate substantial economic growth. This group consisting of Asian countries less China, Japan, and India, is now, when taken as a group, a substantial economic power. And I note that since about 1980 the growth rate of the economies of all these countries has been much faster than that of the US. So their economic position relative to the US is tremendously improved. And that means that the economic position of the US in world terms, but especially relative to these counties, is considerably diminished.
So what about the traditional powers? Russia's post-WW II economic growth was mostly powered by the relocation of all that industrial economic equipment after the WAR. Once that had played itself out their economy has grown poorly. For the last several decades they are best seen as a resource extraction play. They looked good for a while because Oil prices were high and they had Oil. But once Oil prices dropped as a result of Fracking their economy has declined.
The European countries and Britain experienced substantial growth as their economies got rebuilt. Since about 1970, however, growth has slowed. It has been relatively steady (unlike Russia) but it has been modest. The same has been true for a long time in the US. It used to be that if GDP growth was below 3.8% the incumbents got thrown out in Presidential Elections. Economic growth in the US in the last couple of decades has been problematic. The "dot com bomb" in the early '00s and the Wall Street created crash of '08 have created significant dips. Even absent these problems growth during this period has been anemic. The Obama era has seen growth of about 2% per year. Trump promised a "return to the good old days" of growth at 3% per year. That's not exactly setting the world on fire.
In the '50s and '60s the US was a willing and active participant in all kinds of international and multilateral activities. We used to have an active Foreign Aid program that was primarily aimed at humanitarian activities rather than being tied tightly to political and military activities. But the humanitarian component of our Foreign Aid has withered to almost nothing and the rest of the world has taken note.
And our Foreign Policy has become almost entirely a military endeavor. We've been fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for over ten years now. If there was a purely military solution to either we would have won a long time ago. Out military capability in both areas is second to none. But both conflicts have a substantial non-military component. And a concerted effort has been successful in blocking any tilt away from a purely military approach and toward one that also includes substantial political and humanitarian components. So both conflicts drag on and on with no end in sight. And the rest of the world takes note.
So our relative economic power continues to diminish. And this "all military all the time" approach to all international problems is widely seen as stupid. We spend more on our military than the next eight countries combined. But lacking a multipronged strategy this high level of military spending has proved ineffective in maintaining our position in the world order. And out support for things that are not seen as directly promoting our own interests is seen as having dropped off to almost nothing. So our position as "the shining beacon on the hill" is no longer taken seriously. So it is now about raw power. And we are seen as doing a piss poor job of deploying what power we have in Afghanistan and Iraq.
So the question is "can we be ignored"? Can the rest of the world go its own way without paying due deference to us? Economic power always underpins everything. But you can be smart and "punch above your weight" as Britain did for about a century. Or you can be stupid and fritter away the options great economic power gives you. I always expected that at some point the fundamental effect of the US's eroding economic position, at least in relative terms, would slowly and inevitably change the answer to the above questions to "yes", at least some of the time. If, however, we were smart about it I expected that time could be pushed a long way out into the future. I assumed, in other words, that we would be smart. But I was wrong.
When it comes to Foreign Policy, Donald J. Trump is the most inept President we have had at least since World War II. He might be the most inept President ever. It's hard to tell if he is the most inept ever because many potential candidates for "Bungler in Chief" presided over periods when the US was completely isolationist so they had little opportunity to bungle in any important way.
As I write this the latest G-20 meeting has just wrapped up. The group is now more accurately described as the G-19 with the US being the member who is no longer relevant. The G-20 governments have only been interacting with the Trump Administration for a few months. But that has been long enough for them to figure out that rather than exerting leadership or at least being an active, willing, and reliable participant, the Trump Administration can be counted for nothing beyond presiding over photo opportunities. The G-19 threw us a couple of fig leaves so we could pretend we were an active and significant participant. But that's all they were, fig leaves.
The G-20 meeting demonstrated in stark terms that the US is no longer the top tear "Superpower" that it was. It may not even be a second tier "Great Power" in terms of our ability to influence other countries. Out "bluster, bluff, and then move on" approach to Foreign Policy means countries don't even need to fear us. Our ability to effectively punish other countries that do things we don't like depends on our ability to implement a consistent coherent plan. That seems to be beyond the capability of the current administration. And if other countries neither admire us nor fear us why should they pay any attention to us. And that makes us a third tier "Developed Country".
I expected to see the US drop down from Superpower to Great Power sometime in my lifetime. I figured that we could stave this drop off for a considerable period of time. But it was inevitable as China, India, etc. continued to grow in economic power. If we had focused on maintaining our standing in the world and on maintaining sustained economic growth that time could have been pushed down the road a goodly distance.
But the Iraq Invasion bungle (along with others) by the George W. Bush Administration (his dad's handling of Foreign Policy was actually pretty good as was that of the Reagan, Clinton, and Obama Administrations) coupled with the breathtaking bungling of the Trump Administration have accelerated our decline. And they have done what I would have heretofore said was impossible. Not only have we dropped from the Superpower tier but we dropped all the way to the Developed Country tier. And instead of the process taking decades they have managed to pull this feat off in a matter of months.
Europe and Japan are creating an alliance without consulting us or taking out interests into consideration. The G-19 reaffirmed the Paris Accord and pledged to keep working on implementing it. Here they will have to work around the US but they seem ready, willing and able to do so. There are various deals in the works in Asia. None of them involve the US or US interests. Absent the US the big dog is China and Asian countries are starting to modify their behavior accordingly.
Before World War II it was routine for the world to conduct much of its affairs without consulting with or including the US. I could imagine that sort of thing happening at some point in the far distant future. But the future is now.
The phrase "balance of power" is historically associated with a political and military strategy employed by a "Great Power", Britain, for example, to get on top or to stay on top. It is part of the "Game of Houses" game I discussed in the earlier post. But the name most commonly used for this game in the context of British actions is "The Great Game" because that is the name the British themselves most often used. But whatever the name it's all the same game.
The British deployed the strategy in two different contexts. In a colonial context, say in India, they used it to describe the system of propping up and/or tearing down various local factions in order to insure that there were various native factions vying for poser and that no one faction got to far ahead of or behind the rest. That way the British could play king-maker and control all of them.
The British also used the same strategy when dealing with other "Great Powers" residing on the European continent. They would form and break allegiances in order to prop up or tear down one faction or another. Here the plan was not to dominate them. As a group they were too powerful and there was too much history of relations between Britain and the various continental powers for them to stand that.
But by keeping a number of different powers in the game but at similar levels of power Britain was able to keep them all squabbling among themselves while the British grew their colonial network in the rest of the world. By the time the continental powers caught on Britain has a substantial lead. At one time "the sun never set on the British empire". The same could never be said of the empires of the French, Dutch, Italians, Germans, etc.
But after all that windup I am not going to use "Balance of Power" in that way. Instead I am going to use it in its simplest sense. What is the relative power of various countries around the world and what are the trends in the balance of power?
In the early sixties when I first took a look around at this sort of thing the power of the US was at its peak. It represented 50% of the world GNP (Gross National Product - technically different from the more accurate GDP - Gross Domestic Product that we now use but the differences are not material for this discussion.) And the US ran surpluses in both its balance of trade and balance of payments. The US was in a real sense "king of the world" at that point. But this was in a substantial way due to some unique circumstances.
There were theoretically a number of competitors. But Japan had been reduced to rubble by World War II. It was recovering but it was not recovered. The same was true for the traditional European powers like Britain, France, Germany, etc. The US was unique among the major industrialized countries in having been spared bombing or other damage to its industrial base. It also had lost relatively few men of prime working age so its labor force was intact. Britain, France, Germany, and Japan had suffered the loss due to death or major injury of a substantial part of their prime workforce.
I have left out Russia, then the USSR, but the story is much the same. The western parts of Russia were heavily damaged by the War and they lost a substantial part of their prime workforce due to death or major injury. There were some differences.
In the years immediately following the War they had stripped a lot of the industrial base of "Eastern Europe" and relocated it to Russia. That meant that their industrial base bounced back much more quickly than it otherwise would have. But Eastern Europe was now under Russian control and it had suffered the same kind of loss of prime workforce. And it was subject to the devastation of bombing and other damage. And it had suffered when Russia stripped much of its manufacturing base and moved it east. So Eastern Europe was actually a drain on Russia. Finally, Russia suffered under the inefficient "communist" economic system. So Russia was in bad shape too.
By the sixties Russia had sacrificed much to develop an advanced military capability consisting of a large inventory of nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them over long distances. This matched a similar US capability. So at the time the balance of power rankings were considered to have four tiers. There were the two "Superpowers", the US and Russia. There were several second tier "Great Powers" like Britain France, etc. Then there were the "Developed Countries", most of which were in Europe. Finally there was the lowest tier, the "Third World", those countries with little economic and/or political power. Most of the countries in the world fell into this Third World tier.
But a lot of this was a result of World War II. As I indicated above, the US suffered little damage. And its industrial base was built up as it manufactured most of the material used by the "Allied" side. So at the end of the War it had an intact population and a pumped up industrial base. Meanwhile large parts of the rest of the world had been devastated by the effects of the War. So the US had been able to "sit astride the world like a colossus" for roughly 20 years by this time (the mid '60s).
But the situation couldn't last. The parts of the world that had been devastated by the War got rebuilt. And their was a population boom that replaced the losses from the War. By the middle sixties lots of men of prime working age were reaching their adulthood and were ready and able to contribute to the economy. And under the "Pax Americana" banner their countries could concentrate on economic growth without having to spend a lot of time, energy, or money on military so they quickly recovered their traditional positions in the economic pecking order. This inevitably meant that relatively speaking (and it's all and always relative) the US was going to lose position to some extent. And they have.
The US represents about 5% of the world, population-wise. We also represent a similar percentage of land area. The US might have slightly more physical resources, things like Oil, Iron Ore, good agricultural land, etc. but here too the percentage of these kinds of resources that the US represents are perhaps 10% at most. Why does this matter? Because the foundation of political power is economic power. The reason the US was so powerful in the '60s was because at that time it produced half the economic output of the world. This let us buy favor through things like foreign aid. It also allowed us to impose our will by using the large military establishment we could afford to maintain.
Some more history. In his famous farewell address President Washington warned of the evils of "foreign entanglement". The US engaged in a foreign adventure shortly after he left office called "the War of 1812" in US textbooks (and no where else). Domestically it was viewed as a disaster so a strong isolationist movement developed and held power over foreign affairs for a long time. Then World War I came along. The US very reluctantly got involved. And again the result was judged to be less than a complete success. So again the isolationist position was reinforced.
But Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and Germany declared War on us a few days later. The lesson of World War II was we would inevitably get entangled in world affairs so we might as well get involved and stay involved in the hope that we could steer things in a beneficial direction. And it looked like this new "engagement" strategy was working pretty well when viewed from the perspective of the '60s. It didn't hurt that by this time the Russians had ICBM rockets that could use a nuclear warhead to wipe out Omaha Nebraska and the rest of the historically isolationist heartland. Engagement looked like a necessity whether we liked it or not.
But that was then. Some deterioration in our position was inevitable. But it certainly looked like the US could maintain a position of "first among equals" and also be seen as "necessary to the process", whatever the process was, for an indefinite period of time. But the US percentage of world GDP continued to shrink. And the costs of being "policeman to the world" continued to grow, especially as a percentage of US GDP.
By the '90s Russia had imploded so the US was seen as the sole Superpower. But rather than turning out to be a benefit it made things worse. There was now no reason in the eyes of the rest of the world that the US shouldn't be involved in everything. And, since we were the sole Superpower and everyone else was a lesser power, the rest of the world thought it only fair that we carry a larger and large portion of the load. So the cost/benefit calculation kept looking less and less favorable to the US.
These trends became apparent to me in the '90s. I could see that the world of the '90s was a much different place than the world of the '60s had been. And that meant that strategies and policies had to be updated. I felt that it was still advantageous to the US to maintain its position of "first in the world" and "indispensable participant". It gave the US greater leverage with which to influence events to its advantage. But in this changed environment I concluded that to be successful the US needed to be more clever and careful as its position was much weaker than it had been in the '60s.
China has been one of the preeminent powers in the world for millennia. But they fell on hard times and were reduced to being a basket case by 1900. They did not significantly improve their situation until well into the second half of the twentieth century (i.e. after the '60s). They have seen tremendous growth in their economic ability for about 50 years now and their economy is the second most powerful one in the world now.
India took a long time to get going after they gained independence in 1948. Pre-48 they had been a collection of small feuding duchies. But one of the things the British gifted them was a united country. It took them some time to get their act together but they have now been growing in economic power for roughly as long as the Chinese have. Economically they are now one of the Great Powers.
Most of the rest of Asia was a satellite of China. Later it was the satellite of one or another European power. Japan was the first country to get out of this trap and grow substantially in economic power. But several other countries, most notably South Korea, have been able to generate substantial economic growth. This group consisting of Asian countries less China, Japan, and India, is now, when taken as a group, a substantial economic power. And I note that since about 1980 the growth rate of the economies of all these countries has been much faster than that of the US. So their economic position relative to the US is tremendously improved. And that means that the economic position of the US in world terms, but especially relative to these counties, is considerably diminished.
So what about the traditional powers? Russia's post-WW II economic growth was mostly powered by the relocation of all that industrial economic equipment after the WAR. Once that had played itself out their economy has grown poorly. For the last several decades they are best seen as a resource extraction play. They looked good for a while because Oil prices were high and they had Oil. But once Oil prices dropped as a result of Fracking their economy has declined.
The European countries and Britain experienced substantial growth as their economies got rebuilt. Since about 1970, however, growth has slowed. It has been relatively steady (unlike Russia) but it has been modest. The same has been true for a long time in the US. It used to be that if GDP growth was below 3.8% the incumbents got thrown out in Presidential Elections. Economic growth in the US in the last couple of decades has been problematic. The "dot com bomb" in the early '00s and the Wall Street created crash of '08 have created significant dips. Even absent these problems growth during this period has been anemic. The Obama era has seen growth of about 2% per year. Trump promised a "return to the good old days" of growth at 3% per year. That's not exactly setting the world on fire.
In the '50s and '60s the US was a willing and active participant in all kinds of international and multilateral activities. We used to have an active Foreign Aid program that was primarily aimed at humanitarian activities rather than being tied tightly to political and military activities. But the humanitarian component of our Foreign Aid has withered to almost nothing and the rest of the world has taken note.
And our Foreign Policy has become almost entirely a military endeavor. We've been fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for over ten years now. If there was a purely military solution to either we would have won a long time ago. Out military capability in both areas is second to none. But both conflicts have a substantial non-military component. And a concerted effort has been successful in blocking any tilt away from a purely military approach and toward one that also includes substantial political and humanitarian components. So both conflicts drag on and on with no end in sight. And the rest of the world takes note.
So our relative economic power continues to diminish. And this "all military all the time" approach to all international problems is widely seen as stupid. We spend more on our military than the next eight countries combined. But lacking a multipronged strategy this high level of military spending has proved ineffective in maintaining our position in the world order. And out support for things that are not seen as directly promoting our own interests is seen as having dropped off to almost nothing. So our position as "the shining beacon on the hill" is no longer taken seriously. So it is now about raw power. And we are seen as doing a piss poor job of deploying what power we have in Afghanistan and Iraq.
So the question is "can we be ignored"? Can the rest of the world go its own way without paying due deference to us? Economic power always underpins everything. But you can be smart and "punch above your weight" as Britain did for about a century. Or you can be stupid and fritter away the options great economic power gives you. I always expected that at some point the fundamental effect of the US's eroding economic position, at least in relative terms, would slowly and inevitably change the answer to the above questions to "yes", at least some of the time. If, however, we were smart about it I expected that time could be pushed a long way out into the future. I assumed, in other words, that we would be smart. But I was wrong.
When it comes to Foreign Policy, Donald J. Trump is the most inept President we have had at least since World War II. He might be the most inept President ever. It's hard to tell if he is the most inept ever because many potential candidates for "Bungler in Chief" presided over periods when the US was completely isolationist so they had little opportunity to bungle in any important way.
As I write this the latest G-20 meeting has just wrapped up. The group is now more accurately described as the G-19 with the US being the member who is no longer relevant. The G-20 governments have only been interacting with the Trump Administration for a few months. But that has been long enough for them to figure out that rather than exerting leadership or at least being an active, willing, and reliable participant, the Trump Administration can be counted for nothing beyond presiding over photo opportunities. The G-19 threw us a couple of fig leaves so we could pretend we were an active and significant participant. But that's all they were, fig leaves.
The G-20 meeting demonstrated in stark terms that the US is no longer the top tear "Superpower" that it was. It may not even be a second tier "Great Power" in terms of our ability to influence other countries. Out "bluster, bluff, and then move on" approach to Foreign Policy means countries don't even need to fear us. Our ability to effectively punish other countries that do things we don't like depends on our ability to implement a consistent coherent plan. That seems to be beyond the capability of the current administration. And if other countries neither admire us nor fear us why should they pay any attention to us. And that makes us a third tier "Developed Country".
I expected to see the US drop down from Superpower to Great Power sometime in my lifetime. I figured that we could stave this drop off for a considerable period of time. But it was inevitable as China, India, etc. continued to grow in economic power. If we had focused on maintaining our standing in the world and on maintaining sustained economic growth that time could have been pushed down the road a goodly distance.
But the Iraq Invasion bungle (along with others) by the George W. Bush Administration (his dad's handling of Foreign Policy was actually pretty good as was that of the Reagan, Clinton, and Obama Administrations) coupled with the breathtaking bungling of the Trump Administration have accelerated our decline. And they have done what I would have heretofore said was impossible. Not only have we dropped from the Superpower tier but we dropped all the way to the Developed Country tier. And instead of the process taking decades they have managed to pull this feat off in a matter of months.
Europe and Japan are creating an alliance without consulting us or taking out interests into consideration. The G-19 reaffirmed the Paris Accord and pledged to keep working on implementing it. Here they will have to work around the US but they seem ready, willing and able to do so. There are various deals in the works in Asia. None of them involve the US or US interests. Absent the US the big dog is China and Asian countries are starting to modify their behavior accordingly.
Before World War II it was routine for the world to conduct much of its affairs without consulting with or including the US. I could imagine that sort of thing happening at some point in the far distant future. But the future is now.
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