Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 52, no. 4, August–September 2010, pp. 215-227
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Is the United States a nation in decline? For over five decades this has been a recurring question in American political discourse. The subject is sensitive and unsettling, and continues to raise discordant and inflammatory questions. If America is in decline, is that decline inevitable? If it is not inevitable, who is to blame for it? Have successive leaders been wrongheaded or otherwise incompetent? Is national power being undermined by unfriendly critics? Or is policy befuddled by unrealistic visions?
There are, of course, basic analytical issues. How do we measure decline? To what extent should the indicators be economic or military? Still more basic, what do we mean by decline? Do we mean absolute decline, where power is lessening in comparison with some earlier measure? Or do we mean relative decline, where power, even if robust by past standards, is diminishing in relation to the power of others – perhaps countries catching up from a lower base? And decline often connotes something beyond relative or absolute decline: decline as a disease where some pathological syndrome drains a nation of its vitality, perhaps as the consequence of prolonged bad habits or mistaken policies. This form of decline might be called morbid decline. The notion of a morbid economy is not directly linked to an economy’s changing size. It refers less to the economy’s rate of growth than to the essential character of that growth; above all, whether or not it is sustainable without damaging the organism itself. In effect, morbid decline, like the ancient concept of the body politic, borrows its imagery from the organic world of medicine. In this model, growth may be good or bad, depending on the overall consequences for the entire organism.
Since, by economic measurements, the United States has been confronting a rather severe relative decline, the question of whether that relative decline (or growth) is also morbid grows increasingly salient. It is perhaps most easily approached through economic indicators. Taking a long view, stretching back to the Second World War, it seems indisputable that America’s relative economic position has declined. An obvious indicator is its diminishing share of the world’s gross output.
In 1960, US GDP was 40% of the world’s total economic output. By 2008, it was around 23%. Over the same period, the European states have been transforming themselves into an economic and political bloc. By now there is the European Union and a still more closely integrated eurozone. The United States and the eurozone each comprise about the same proportion of the world economy. The combined GDP of all the countries of the EU considered as a unit is around 30% of the world’s total. From this perspective, then, the United States is no longer the world’s biggest economy. Europe had in fact already reached rough parity with America by the early 1980s. Since then the United States has, broadly speaking, stopped declining vis-à-vis the eurozone economies. Instead both the United States and the European bloc have been declining vis-à-vis the Asian ...
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David P. Calleo is a University Professor at Johns Hopkins University and Dean Acheson Professor and Director of European Studies at its Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He has recently published Follies of Power: America’s Unipolar Fantasy with Cambridge University Press and is a Survival Contributing Editor.
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