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.