Think Again: Power

The United States may boast a massive economy and whopping defense budget, but wielding true global power takes more than just greenbacks and green berets. These days the tools for projecting power are more varied and dispersed than ever. And as the clout of terrorist networks, diplomatic alliances, and international financiers seems to expand, lasting global supremacy may hinge on the skillful deployment of an increasingly elusive resource: moral authority.

BY NIALL FERGUSON | JANUARY 1, 2003

"Military Dominance Makes the United States the World's Greatest Power"

Yes, but military dominance depends on other factors. The German thinker Max Weber once characterized the modern state as claiming a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Although such a monopoly is impossible in the global arena, international power sometimes seems to depend on monopolizing the most sophisticated means of perpetrating violence. Today, the United States enjoys a technological edge enjoyed (briefly) by a few West European powers in the 19th century, when their possession of ironclad steamboats and Maxim machine guns put the world at their mercy.

Just consider the sheer size of the U.S. defense budget. Yale University historian Paul Kennedy used to worry about U.S. overstretch. No longer: "The Pentagon's budget is equal to the combined military budgets of the next 12 or 15 nations," he wrote last September in the Financial Times. "In other words, the US accounts for 40–45 per cent of all the defence spending of the world's 189 states." The European Union's (EU) member states collectively spend around $170 billion annually on defense, but the United States spends more than $300 billion per year and could comfortably increase that figure by 60 percent without exceeding 5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) -- once seen by Kennedy as the overstretch threshold.

Indeed, dollars alone understate the extent of the United States' military lead. The most compelling evidence was revealed to the world's television viewers in 1999 in Kosovo and in 2001 in Afghanistan. In both conflicts, the technical superiority of U.S. forces allowed them to annihilate enemy troops, weaponry, and other military "assets" while sustaining minimal casualties.

Yet there are two caveats. The first is that one can easily underestimate the speed with which such technological gaps have closed in the past. The British launch of the Dreadnought in 1906 rendered all other battleships obsolete. But within a few years, all the great powers had them. The United States' monopoly on the atomic bomb was equally ephemeral. Today, a great deal of the accuracy of U.S. fighters and bombers depends on the software that assists pilots in their split-second decision making -- software that could soon replace pilots altogether. Anyone familiar with the civilian software business will know that it is extremely hard to monopolize a software breakthrough for long. And technologies are transferred especially quickly when national survival is at stake.

Second, U.S. military superiority has been facilitated by the United States' extraordinary economic growth of the 1990s, which made substantial defense expenditures suddenly seem insignificant in relative terms. And in turn, that economic growth could only be harnessed because the United States' political institutions have been remarkably successful, at least since World War I, in convincing voters to pay taxes or approve government borrowing to maintain and improve national defense. So power is not just military power; or rather, military power depends on economic growth and political institutions.

 SUBJECTS: SECURITY
 

Niall Ferguson is Herzog professor of history at New York University's Stern School of Business and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His latest book is Colossus: The Price of America's Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004)