TOO ORDINARY A PEOPLE TO ENJOY HYPERPOWER (via Pepys):

Rising Declinists: Is US Influence Waning? (Alan W. Dowd, 10 May 2006, Tech Central Station)

Consider America's ebbing power in the aftermath of World War II. As historian Derek Leebaert writes in The Fifty-Year Wound, just a year after the end of the war, the Army had just 12 battle-ready tanks in Germany. US forces in the Pacific were equally under-equipped and under-prepared, as Leebaert details: Each division of the Eighth Army was a thousand rifles short, the Fifth Air Force still had no jet fighters in 1949, and there were just 500 US soldiers based in Korea. Thus, as world war gave way to cold war, "The United States neither looked nor felt ready to contain anybody," as Leebaert observes.

Worries about America's decline mushroomed as the Cold War began in earnest, when "we lost China," when communist forces rolled through Korea, when Chinese "volunteers" pushed MacArthur's troops back across the 38th Parallel. Indeed, the bloody interplay between the US and communist China throughout the second half of the 20th century calls into question the notion that America has ever had any "moral influence" over the People's Republic.

As the 1950s wore on, Sputnik rocketed into orbit and Moscow bludgeoned Hungary into submission. The US had no answer for either.

It was in those halcyon days of the New Frontier, as Leebaert reminds us, that The New York Times predicted Soviet industrial output would exceed America's by the end of the 20th century. In fact, the CIA surmised that the Soviet economy would be three times larger than America's by 2000. (Today, the doomsayers and declinists substitute the PRC for the USSR.)

Even during Kennedy's Camelot, it looked as if the US had fallen fast and hard from its World War II perch. What else could be said of a superpower that couldn't oust a petty Third World dictator 90 miles off its coast?

A decade later, the world witnessed what historian Paul Johnson calls "America's suicide attempt" in Vietnam. After the war, the United States appeared to be in a geopolitical freefall. While Washington retracted and retreated, Moscow's proxies descended across the Third World. Coming on the heels of Vietnam, détente itself was arguably an expression of American weakness. It's no wonder that a 1976 survey unearthed by Leebaert reveals that Americans wanted "to be Number One once more."

Not long after Iran's unchallenged takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran, Paul Kennedy was laying out in grim detail how the United States was tumbling inexorably toward an inevitable collapse. He explained how "the American share of world power has been declining relatively faster than Russia's over the past few decades;" predicted that US defense outlays and commitments were unsustainable and were pushing the United States toward the same "imperial overstretch" that undid earlier powers; and concluded that America's capacity to carry its postwar "burdens is obviously less than it was several decades ago."

Of course, it was the Soviet Union that soon collapsed under the weight of empire.

Even in the 1990s, America's footing was uncertain. For all its power, Washington was growing increasingly allergic to post-Cold War challenges.

Isn't the problem today the opposite, that we feel we have too much power and ample temptation to use it, which makes people nervous? Folks are likely to feel much better as we withdraw from Iraq and cut defense spending in half again in the coming years.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 10, 2006 8:57 PM