Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 52, no. 4, August–September 2010, pp. 177-182
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The End of Influence: What Happens When Other Countries Have the Money
Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong. London: Basic Books, 2010. £12.99/$22.00. 208 pp.
Arguments, like films, tend to be repeated in regular cycles. The argument about the decline of American power is no exception. By my count we are in at least the third iteration. The first came in the 1970s with writers like David
Calleo and Robert Gilpin. The second came in the 1980s when Mancur Olson and Paul Kennedy reignited the debate. We got to skip the 1990s and much of the 2000s. Now, however, American decline is back with a vengeance.
In its current iteration, the declinist argument runs along the lines of the 1983 movie Scarface. In that movie, protagonist Tony Montana was attracted to the United States because of its seductive culture: ‘I watch the guys like Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney. They, they teach me to talk. I like those guys. I always know one day I’m comin’ here, United States.’ Once inside the borders, it did not take Montana long to figure out the rules of the game. ‘In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power.’ Unfortunately, Montana failed to appreciate the true well-springs of American prosperity. Instead, his image of the country was an exaggerated no-holds-barred sort of capitalism. Suffice it to say that the world of Scarface was unsustainable and so inevitably came crashing down around him. The film is a cautionary tale about what happens in a market without rules. It also suggests a question that most viewers in the early 1980s would not have considered: what happens when other countries have the money?
This is the question Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong pose in The End of Influence. Their answer begins by reiterating the lessons of Scarface.American power at the end of the Second World War was rooted to a largeextent in the attractiveness of its culture and the wealth of its society. Othercountries were willing to follow the United States because they wantedto be like the United States. Unfortunately, however, Americans themselves began to drift towards ever moreextreme forms of free-market competition. This extremeneo-liberal view was at odds with the planning andindustry that made America wealthy in the first place. Asthey embraced an increasingly unregulated market, the neo-liberals in America put their country on an unsustainable trajectory and became increasingly addicted tothe combination of cheap manufactured goods and easy credit that other countries were willing to offer. The other countries got the money, and with it, the power. But this does not mean that the United States will godown in a hail of gunfire: ‘The United States will continue to be a world leader – perhaps even the leader. But it will no longer be the boss’ (p. 14, emphasis in original).
The Cohen and DeLong argument is declinism for a new century, grounded ...
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Erik Jones is Professor of European Studies at the SAIS Bologna Center and a Contributing Editor to Survival.
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