America's Allies and the Decline of US Hegemony

Justin Massie, Jonathan Paquin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367201982
• eBook ISBN: 9780429535741
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How do America's democratic allies perceive and respond to a relative decline in US power and influence and the simultaneous rise of China? Using the case-studies of Europe, the UK, Australia, Canada, Japan and South East Asian countries, this book offers a broad assessment of the perceptions of threat and the strategies used by these allies to cope with the relative decline of America's hegemonic power, the rise of China and the transforming world order.

In answering these central questions, contributors focus on two complementary analytical approaches. The first examines the perceptions of systemic changes by America's allies: how are US allies framing this issue and what kind of political discourse is emerging with regards to it? The second approach focuses on the concrete foreign policy and defence strategies put forward by these allies. The book explores the extent to which US allies are willing to support US hegemony and considers the democratic allies' understanding of the international structure, their relations to the United States, and their own aspirations in this changing world order.

This book will be of interest to general readers as well as scholars and students of US foreign policy, foreign policy analysis and International Relations.

Part I

Debating U.S. decline and power transition

1 American decline

Destined, chosen, or contingent?

Robert J. Lieber

A quarter of a century ago, in the aftermath of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with no other country in sight as a likely peer competitor, the United States appeared to be the sole great power and uniquely dominant in a unipolar world. Moreover, not only did the United States possess overwhelming superiority in military strength, power projection capacity, and military technology, that is, hard power, but its economic strength and cultural influence seemed predominant as well. Within a dozen years, however, that primacy would be called into question. The 9/11 terrorist attacks, costly and prolonged military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, international challenges to the legitimacy of American actions, domestic dissensus, the 2007–2009 financial crisis, and the rise of China as an economic power and assertive geopolitical actor has led to increasing speculation about American decline.¹

In an earlier work, I argued that notions about American decline had been exaggerated and that in terms of almost all indicators by which power is measured, the United States still possessed a substantial lead over other countries including China (Lieber 2012). In addition, a long national history of overcoming serious adversity suggested deeply imbedded sociopolitical and institutional resilience. While decline in relative or even absolute terms could not be ruled out, America’s future was not foreordained, but rested on a strong foundation while also depending on leadership beliefs, policy choices, and public support. In sum, the continuation of primacy remained entirely feasible and even likely.

However, since the time of that assessment the case for it has weakened. Despite an impressive economic recovery in the aftermath of the financial crisis, the United States now faces significant long-term budgetary and financial constraints due to its annual budget deficits and mounting national debt. Meanwhile the American military, asked to do more with less, has become overstretched. At the same time, domestic political polarization has intensified and the public has shown greater reluctance toward foreign interventions, even while challenges from revisionist powers, especially China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, have grown.

In response, two successive presidents have sought to reduce US commitments abroad. The Obama administration pursued policies of retrenchment, seeking to conciliate revisionist states and to shift burdens to other actors and international institutions. In turn, the Trump administration, though in selected cases following more traditional policies and more willing to assert US military power, has disparaged its allies, courted major adversaries, and has sought to diminish the costs of global leadership. In doing so, it has pursued U.S. national interests more narrowly, opposed trade and climate agreements, distanced itself from international organizations, and generated skepticism about the reliability and credibility of its alliance leadership and foreign policy commitments (Stephens 2018; Kagan 2018).

In these circumstances, a great deal of foreign policy discourse at home and abroad treats the United States as a declining hegemon and looks toward a power transition with a rising China, accompanied by increased risks of conflict and war (Allison 2017). In turn America’s allies have displayed growing uneasiness. For example, in reaction to President Donald Trump’s June 2018 withdrawal of the United States from the July 2015 Iran nuclear agreement (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA), the president of the European Council warned, “With friends like that, who needs enemies” (Specia 2018). In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel proclaimed, “We have experienced a break in German-American, in European-American relations” (Birnbaum 2018). Other German leaders, including foreign minister Heiki Maas, have been even more vocal in their calls for Europe to take on a far more independent stance in world affairs, to turn away from Washington’s leadership, and to break with its dependence on the United States (Maas 2018). And a leading German defense and security expert, Christian Hacke, posits that Germany can no longer rely on the protection of the United States and that as a result it must become a nuclear power (Hacke 2018).

These and other assumptions about America rest in part on the belief that decline in its domestic strength and international predominance is largely inevitable, that is, destined, or else an irreversible result of policy decisions (i.e., chosen). Neither assumption is without foundation, but the purpose of this chapter is to ask whether decline in the American future remains far less inevitable and much more contingent than most analyses have assumed. In view of the post-1945 role of the United States in sustaining a relatively benign international order and the absence of any another country or institution with the capacity or will to do so, the importance of this question has implications well beyond the status of the United States itself, especially for America’s allies.

In order to address these questions, this chapter examines the most relevant indicators by which decline can be measured. It then offers a cautionary reminder about previous epochs in which warnings of American decline had proved to be incorrect. Nonetheless, might this time be different. Here, I assess the areas in which there has been some attrition of America’s material power. Despite these changes, the more important consideration remains that of relative power, in comparing the overall array of America’s strengths with those of peer competitors, most importantly China. In this regard, I argue that the United States maintains a significant advantage and is likely to do so for at least the medium-term. The chapter concludes with an emphasis on the continuing indispensability of America’s international role. Despite the allies’ characteristic uneasiness about American leadership and commitment, they lack the capacity and the will to provide a viable alternative. Continued American engagement thus remains a critical necessity for allied security and interests as well as those of the United States itself.

Indicators of decline

Nothing lasts forever and it is well worth asking whether the end of the long post-1945 era of American leadership and predominance is finally in sight. Indeed, both the material and the ideational bases of that hegemonic status do appear to be eroding. Measuring this, however, is not an easy task and can involve arbitrary assumptions. Among the most useful historical assessments of hegemonic decline and power transition is that of Robert Gilpin in his seminal work, War and Change in World Politics (1981). Gilpin draws upon the cases of ancient Athens, Imperial Rome, the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States to identify three broad causes of great-power decline.

The first of these indicators concerns the cost of maintaining hegemonic leadership. Authors such as Samuel Huntington and Paul Kennedy have identified a similar phenomenon as imperial overstretch (Huntington 1988; Kennedy 1987). Collective action dilemmas and the burdens of alliance maintenance mean that the strongest state typically pays a disproportionate price to maintain existing power relationships. Here the American complaint about allies failing to meet the agreed upon thresholds for national defense spending is one of long-standing and has become more strident under President Trump. This is not just a matter of member countries failing to reach the 2 percent threshold, but a chronic complaint dating back to the latter decades of the Cold War and the then–3 percent target. Indeed, this imbalance has become even more pronounced in recent years, with only four other members of NATO (Britain, Poland, Estonia, and Greece) meeting the recommended benchmark. Germany, with Europe’s largest and most important economy, devotes only 1.24 percent of its GDP to defense and it projects increasing this amount to only 1.5 percent by the year 2024 (McCarthy 2018).

Beyond Europe, America’s defense spending in Asia imposes a substantial burden too, not just in comparison with allies but also in terms of the need to maintain costly power projection capabilities involving extensive naval and air deployments. Added to these burdens are those of America’s long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In recent years, American defense spending amounted to 5 percent of GDP in 2011 and has since declined to 3.6 percent. Compared with the Cold War era, in which the defense budget reached more than 10 percent in the 1950s and 6 to 8 percent in subsequent decades, military burdens might seem quite manageable. The difference, however, lies in America’s current and long-term fiscal deficits, which create an altogether different set of constraints.²

Here, a second long-term cause of hegemonic decline comes into play, the internal tendency toward rising domestic consumption. In this respect, the patterns of the modern consumer society are at issue, especially after the overarching threats of World War II and the Cold War have long since disappeared. Meanwhile, an aging population and the steadily increasing burden of entitlement payments for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and veterans’ benefits, along with increasing budget deficits and national debt, imply serious constraints on America’s capacity to sustain the costs of power projection. This is not only a matter of spending on defense and foreign policy, but on funding the many other key elements of national power including education, infrastructure, science, technology, foreign aid, and numerous core government functions, as well as on the ability to cope with any future economic recession or financial crisis.

In part, this is a matter of policy preference, with both Republican and Democratic administrations and congressional majorities having been unwilling or unable to undertake serious budget reform. Compared with other Western countries, U.S. federal tax revenues are relatively lower, averaging 17.4 percent of annual GDP during the 50-year period from 1968 to 2017.³ However, entitlement spending has grown from 5.5 percent of GDP in 1968 to 10.4 percent in 2008 and 13 percent in 2018 and is projected to continue increasing, thus widening the budget deficit. The most important underlying cause here is demographic. Half a century earlier, there were five people in the workforce for each person receiving Social Security and Medicare benefits. That ratio has shrunk to three workers for every beneficiary and will continue to tighten as the baby boomer generation retires (Levin and Capretta 2018). In contrast to the growth in these entitlement programs, discretionary federal spending, which includes both defense and non-defense expenditures, represents only 6.3 percent of GDP, compared with 7.7 percent a decade ago. Current budget projections show federal deficits soon to reach $1 trillion per year, despite strong economic growth and historically low levels of unemployment.⁴

A third cause of great-power decline concerns the diffusion of technology. Late modernizers, such as Japan after 1864 and again in the 1960s and ’70s as well as China after 1978 can move quite quickly up the technology curve as once cutting-edge ideas and scientific breakthroughs become widely shared. In the post-World War II era, the Soviets quickly matched U.S. achievements in nuclear weapons, aircraft, missiles, and electronics, and in more recent decades, China and others have adopted advances in high-speed computing, precision weapons, and advanced technology of all kinds. While many of China’s recent advances have been accelerated by intellectual piracy and via technology transfer extorted from foreign firms wanting to invest in China, Beijing’s massive investments in science and technology have also become a factor in both military and civilian fields, and its total spending on scientific research in 2018 is for the first time estimated to equal or possibly exceed that of the United States (Guarino, Rauhala, and Wan 2018). For example, China and Russia are ambitiously pursuing research and development of advanced weapons such as hypersonic missiles, a technology in which the United States is thought to be lagging (Davenport 2018). A lesser example comes from the military use of drone technology. Once the near monopoly of the United States and Israel, this has now spread so widely that Iran and even a terrorist group such as Hezbollah have acquired the capacity to produce and deploy these weapons.

The importance of technology diffusion in undercutting America’s advantages can be seen in contrast to what Barry Posen previously termed “command of the commons” (2003).⁵ Posen’s 2003 assessment, published at the height of America’s post-Cold War power, identified unique U.S. military advantages in the air, space, at sea, and under the sea. The implication was that with such an overwhelming advantage at that time, the United States could readily afford to reduce its overseas deployments, as its strategic predominance remained assured.

Technological diffusion in the civilian sphere is also pronounced and has been increasing over the past half century. Massive expansion of trade, globalization, the role of multinational corporations, and the rapid spread of scientific and technological knowledge have all played a role. Here, too, there is evidence of how hegemonic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: America’s allies coping with U.S. relative decline
• PART I: Debating U.S. decline and power transition
• PART II: Perceptions and strategies of Asia-Pacific allies
• PART III: Perceptions and strategies of European allies
• Index