What Comes After the American Century?

By Thomas Kando 

There is today a widespread sense that America is in decline. On the right, there is MAGA and the Trumpites. On the left, many young people and not-so-young people feel that America is doing everything wrong. Overseas our adversaries, like Putin, wishfully predict America’s downfall. And many people in countries friendly to us also talk about our (allegedly growing) weaknesses. Whether you care about America or not, pessimism about our country is widespread. 

What is one to make of all this? 

To me, it is not clear that America is in decline. I have heard this refrain my whole life. Over the decades, there have been many predictions of the imminent end of what has been called the American century. Each crisis has produced predictions of precipitous American decline. During the Vietnam war many people were convinced that the US was declining. In the sixties Nikita Khrushchev said “we shall bury you,” and many western intellectuals believed him. After 9/11 some European pundits said that America’s pre-eminent position in the world was coming to an end. 

When we hear the term “American century.” the implication is often that this is coming to an end. 

For the past eighty years, those of us of a certain age - including the baby boomers - have lived lives of stability, world peace, prosperity, progress and democracy. By and large anyway, and granted, mostly so in the western world. 

This can be attributed to the Pax Americana during that period of time. Thanks to American help, the American economy and American military might, the devastated world (including our former enemies) was rebuilt and kept free and prosperous. 

I’ll skip the debate as to whether the Pax Americana was self-serving for the US or altruistic. 

America’s dominance was enormous right after the end of World War Two, when its economy was half that of the world. This huge advantage was bound to decline, as the rest of the world rebuilt itself. Eventually the US settled at one fourth of the world’s economy, and this has pretty much remained so for many years. 

Time and again the prognoses of decline and retreat have failed to materialize. The pessimists have been wrong over and over again. 

Does this mean that the world is not changing? Not at all. 

For one thing, historical change is often gradual. We often separate epochs from each other, assigning demarcations between eras, but these separations are artificial. 

For example, It is possible to call the nineteenth century - the era starting after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815 and ending with America’s entry into World War One in 1917 - as the “European century.” That is when Europe completed the colonization of the world, while enjoying the absence of major internal wars for over a century. For better or worse, Europe was master of the world. Its power was unparalleled, as was its technological superiority. Keep in mind that I am merely identifying the dominant force in the world at a given time. I focus purely on power, not on morality. I am not lauding what Europe did in its colonies. 

Europe’s decline since World War One has only been relative, as its power became overshadowed by America’s. Were America in decline and retreat (and it is not clear that it is), its trajectory is likely to be similarly relative and gradual. 

Today, Americans are much more pessimistic than they ought to be. Populism and nationalism are on the rise and liberal democracy is under attack. However, this does not mean that America is in retreat. What it does mean is that the world is changing. It is more chaotic and multi-polar. New powers are on the rise, China most prominently. How will the 21st century (and beyond) be designated by historians? 

One possibility - utopian, to be sure - is the growth of world government, world unification. 

A recent book by Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity indicates why such a development may be vital for humankind: Montefiore offers a history of the world as a never-ending bloodbath, in which every leader’s sole goal is power, obtained through the mass murder of all his rivals and their supporting populations, their children, their parents, their siblings, and everyone else who is in the way. Montefiore’s book is an entertaining and sensationalist caricature. But it makes a disturbing point: The fundamental flaw in human nature is man’s desire to overpower his fellow humans and kill them if necessary to achieve more power. 

Our inherent murderous impulse can only be controlled by the social contract (see John Locke). Throughout history, the social contract has been embodied by governing nation-states. Now, it must become a united worldwide entity, or else individual states will destroy each other. 

The world took the first step towards World Federalism when it created the League of Nations in 1920, and the United Nations in 1945. The need for world government has become clearer since. The threat to humanity’s survival has increased. We are approaching the irreversible destruction of the environment, and the danger of nuclear war has grown. We are an existential threat to ourselves. We must create the institutions necessary to avoid human self-destruction. While the West (Europe and America) may no longer dominate the world, it must remain highly engaged, and continue to provide leadership. Change is inevitable. But values such as gender and racial equality, democracy, the absence of slavery, religious and political freedom, empirical science, progress towards more love and less violence are universal. The world system of the future will be different from what it is now. What will it be like? World federalism is one possibility, farfetched as it is. The behavior of the United Nations is not very promising thus far. But it is a better alternative than MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction. 970 leave comment here