In Super Sad True Love Story, the novelist Gary Shteyngart imagines a not-very-remote future in which the United States, having giddily spent itself into bankruptcy, falls into the hands of Chinese bankers, who call in their T-bills, precipitating armed warfare and state collapse. The comic apocalypse conjured by Shteyngart, a wry connoisseur of baroque states of decline, induces in the reader a peculiar sense of queasiness: Is that not, in fact, what lies ahead? In a recent column titled "Too Many Hamburgers?" the New York Times' Thomas Friedman offered a particularly stomach-wrenching version of the Spenglerian nightmare, in which America is personified by an overweight and overconfident boy who loses a footrace to a fiercely competitive Chinese kid. Declinism has begun to settle into our bones.
Nothing is foretold, of course. But you wouldn't want to bet the house, or even a sofa set, that the United States will overcome the rampant triviality of its culture, the self-righteousness of its national psyche, or the ideological paralysis of its politics in order to deal with the lack of critical investment, the decline of human capital, the looming tidal wave of entitlement spending, and the like. Another generation of this squandering of national assets, and Americans may find themselves clamoring for Shteyngart's "yuan-pegged dollars."
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The United States remains unmatched in economic and military might. It leads because no other country -- and certainly not China -- aspires to the job, much less has the capacity for it. But the United States no longer enjoys the deference paid it only a decade or two ago. And the country has begun to run up against the limits of its resources as international commitments become increasingly mismatched with capacities. American hegemony has thus slipped both in relative and in absolute terms. Less than a decade ago, works like Walter Russell Mead's Power, Terror, Peace, and War celebrated the triumph of "millennial capitalism" and thus of American supremacy; henceforth we will be wallowing in the literature of decline. We should, of course, be as skeptical of this new narrative as we ought to have been of the triumphalist canon that preceded it.
The scholar Michael Mandelbaum has been first out of the gate with The Frugal Superpower: America's Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Age. Mandelbaum argues that the United States suffers not from "imperial overstretch" but from "entitlement overstretch" -- too many promised hamburgers without the ability to pay for them. Leaders will have to impose a foreign-policy diet, cutting out the gratifications of the past couple of decades of reckless abundance. The humanitarian interventions of Somalia and the Balkans "will not be repeated." The same is true of interventions designed to bring democracy to authoritarian states. Even peaceful intervention will come to be seen as an unaffordable luxury: "The enterprise of state-building ... will disappear from the foreign-policy agenda of the United States."
Mandelbaum holds the odd view that from World War II through the end of the Cold War, the United States deployed force to defend itself, and since then has done so in support of "worthy causes all over the planet," whether stopping genocide or promoting democracy in the Middle East. But a cash-strapped leviathan must return to being a status quo power rather than a "philanthropic" one. Here at Foreign Policy, Stephen Walt argues, I think with more plausibility, that the United States has "chosen to do a few things that are very difficult" and has failed, while China has enjoyed the advantage of pursuing self-interest in the most narrow and straightforward fashion. Walt suggests that America stick to what it does best: "deterring large-scale aggression," "brokering peace deals," and "encouraging intelligent liberalization of the world economy."
Post-hegemonic America really sounds like a downer, even if the country doesn't get divvied up among sovereign wealth funds as Shteyngart imagines. Of course, American global deterrence prevented the Cold War from turning into World War III and still provides allies with crucial reassurance. But what the United States also does best is provide the kind of global public goods that status quo powers tend to shrug at: building multilateral institutions, championing liberal norms, and corralling states into collective action on global problems like nuclear nonproliferation. Are these, too, the unaffordable luxuries of our halcyon days?
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