These two issues are often conflated but, in reality, they are very different. Whether the United States is declining is debatable but the fate of the US world order is less so. As Joschka Fischer, Germany’s former foreign minister, recently wrote: ‘Looking back 26 years, we should admit that the disintegration of the Soviet Union — and with it, the end of the Cold War — was not the end of history, but rather the beginning of the Western liberal order’s denouement’.
Where does that leave the issue of US primacy? It depends on how one defines the term. Joseph Nye defines primacy as the measurable share of three kinds of power: military, economic, and soft. On that basis, he concludes that the United States will retain its primacy through at least the first half of the present century.
But whether the United States can continue to lead in these forms of power is questionable. China by some measures is set to overtake the United States as the world’s leading economic power. A recent estimate in Bloomberg shows that in 2001, the GDP of the United States (US$10.6 trillion) was eight times that of China’s. By 2015, GDP was only 1.6 times China’s — US$18 trillion to China’s US$11.4 trillion.
The United States will continue to be the world’s leading military power. But China’s growing anti-access/area denial (ACAD) capabilities cuts the US edge at least in the East Asian region. The United States’ lead in soft power — which is much harder to measure — is facing its most serious challenge today, ironically not from outside but from within the United States itself. How attractive can the United States be to the rest of the world in an era of rising domestic nationalism, protectionism and possibly Donald Trump?
I view primacy mainly in terms of order, rather than power. US primacy rests not on its national power resources but on its ability to manage international order, especially through the institutions it created after World War II to legitimise its primacy. But this multilateral system is fragmenting and being replaced by a complex patchwork of bilateral, regional and plurilateral arrangements.
Some are parallel institutions established by BRICS, others are partnerships between governments, corporations and social movements. Many of these are neither the result of US initiatives nor under its control. Some challenge the authority of the big multilaterals created by the United States after World War Two.
The principal challenge to US primacy comes not from multipolarity, or the rise of new powers, but from the rise of new threats. Despite their hype, BRICS countries are not a cohesive lot. India and China are pursuing conflicting regional and global objectives and threatening each other in the process. The BRICS face major economic and political uncertainty. They seem more effective in frustrating US interests and approaches than providing solutions to world problems.
But the threats to US interests today are much more complex and challenging now than ever before. As Leslie Gelb points out, ‘Terrorists and civil wars are much more elusive military targets than troops fighting in battalions’. They could be the real reason why American primacy is under challenge in today’s world.
Multipolarity, as derived from past European experience, implies an international system in which a number of great powers enjoy primacy in both challenging and managing international order.
The emerging world is better described as a multiplex world. A world of multiple actors, culturally and politically diverse but economically interdependent, facing complex global threats and featuring a messy multitude of institutions and networks, large and small, public and private. As in a multiplex cinema, the world today has multiple actors, plots, producers and directors — no single power dominates across all three indices of power.
How can the United States cope in a multiplex world? To start, it must replace the old-fashioned notion of primacy and embrace shared leadership. In his West Point speech in 2014, President Obama declared, ‘America must always lead on the world stage. If we don’t, no one else will’. Such hyperbole is unrealistic for the United States and unhelpful for world order. It stokes a free-riding mentality even among America’s capable allies. Not only does the United States lack the interest and resources, it also lacks the domestic support to lead in diverse areas where collective action is needed.
A multiplex world requires more attention to regional orders. Henry Kissinger argues that, ‘The contemporary quest for world order will require a coherent strategy to establish a concept of order within the various regions and to relate these regional orders to one another’. The United States needs to decentre, prioritise and regionalise its grand strategy. This may encourage middle powers, regional powers and regional organisations to step up, as many share the US’s strategic goals if not its means.
This would mean going beyond its traditional alliances and like-minded groups such as G7, the TPP and TTIP. Supporting and working through inclusive regional institutions, such as ASEAN and the African Union, will be critical in managing regional issues.
The multiplex world will not be entirely peaceful. But absolute peace is illusory. The goal should be relative stability, preventing major power war, genocide, and managing regional conflicts resulting in acute human suffering. Strategic decentring, shared leadership and consensual reform of global governance will go a long way in realising that goal.
Amitav Acharya is the Boeing Chair in International Relations at the Schwarzman Scholars Program, Tsinghua University and Distinguished Professor of International Relations, American University, Washington D.C.
A version of this article was first published here in The National Interest.
Professor Acharya makes two significant points regarding strategic insecurity roiling East Asia or, as the increasingly popular phrase has it, the Indo-Pacific region. The USA, he points out, is unlikely to lose its ‘primacy’ anytime soon; however, he also notes that this does not automatically translate into a continuing ability to order the global inter-state relational dynamics (I’m paraphrasing here). These are notable observations for those engaged in geostrategic discourse.
I agree with him, with one niggling caveat. Primacy means first or pre-eminent, and there is little doubt that in terms of economic, military and ‘soft-power’ attributes, the USA will certainly exercise ‘primacy’ for several more decades. However, whether the sum total of these aforesaid attributes, ‘primacy’, actually allows or enables America to ‘do anything meaningfully’ is, I posit, more uncertain today than was the case, say, prior to the onset of the ‘Great Recession’.
To the extent that ‘power’ is the capacity to act (by commission or omission) to effect preferred changes to the strategic environment, and/or prevent unhelpful or harmful changes from taking place, America will almost certainly appear to remain the top-dog in the planetary hierarchy for years. Whether this would allow Washington to coerce, compel or constrain other actors from pursuing what their ruling-elites consider ‘core’ national interests, without having to pay inordinate costs in blood and treasure, is quite unclear.
Some evidence: America’s ‘greatest armed forces in the world’s history’ have been fighting troglodyte al-Qaeda militants and sandals-shod ragtag bands of Taliban militias for exactly 15 years now. In this substantial enterprise, Washington has extracted direct deployment of forces from at least two dozen allies, and help from such ‘adversaries’ as Russia and China. And yet, after spilling the blood of tens of thousands, mostly Afghans and ‘foreign-jihadis’, and spending billions of dollars, the ‘Primate’ has not been able to defeat its adversaries. America’s experience in post-2003 Iraq, and its more recent ventures in Libya and Syria, suggest a similar pattern: easy, early victories against poorly-organised and -armed natives, followed by years of brutal warfare in which neither side overwhelms the other’s willingness or ability to fight, and mounting losses among noncombatants caught in the middle. What does that say about ‘Primacy’? Not very much, one would suspect.
In so far as America’s ‘exorbitant privilege’ of being the home of the dollar is concerned, this blessing is unlikely to protect the US economy from shocks like Lehman Brothers, or the various ponzi schemes that became apparent once the money-machine on Wall Street unravelled. That system has been repaired and is humming again roughly the same tune, Bernie Sanders’ short-lived popular insurgency notwithstanding. The only folks who have not fully recovered are the ones who lost their ‘sub-prime’ mortgages, homes and jobs. That substantial underbelly will likely persist within the ‘shining city on the hill’ irrespective of whether the Republicans or the Democrats win the White House on 8/9th November.
In short, although I agree with most of what Professor Acharya writes, the foregoing suggests America will persevere as a ‘sub-prime primate’ while the rest of us experience reverberations from the turbulence born of the anxiety bred by uncertainty unleashed by systemic transitional fluidity.
US ‘primacy’, as he defines it, may outlast its ability to order the system, but the shift is far greater than the USA’s locus on the planetary totem-pole. An edifice fashioned by historical forces five centuries ago, manifest in European navigational/commercial ventures which shackled much of the planet in imperial-colonial bondage, and culminating in pax Americana, is coming to an end. What troubles the almost-ancien regime’s many beneficiaries is not that China is bound to supplant the USA in this anxious new world, it is more that nobody seems to know if anyone at all will, or indeed, if anyone ever can.
Suddenly, the prospects of not having a hegemon is beating the living daylights out of intellectually-gifted practitioners on both shores of the Pacific. And that IS a problem alright.
Thank you for a thoughtful overview of a complex subject
In discussing America’s military and economic power,the author of this post brings in a comparison with China. When referring to soft power, however, he refrains from mentioning China.
One aspect of US soft power is the appeal of American universities to foreign students and America’s attractiveness as a destination for migration.
To take just the first of these, Foreign Policy reported last year that one-third of all the almost one million foreign university students in the US came from China. By contrast, a few years earlier, there were some 26,000 US students in China, only 9% of whom were engaged in full undergraduate courses.
It would be interesting to know whether the author believes that ‘domestic nationalism, protectionism and Donald Trump’ will result in a sharp fall in Chinese students studying in the US, perhaps matched by a sharp rise in Americans studying in China.
Soft power is especially hard to measure. But the key reason for America’s attractiveness is not its culture or values or education system per se, although it’s important, but the material benefits being in America confers. America is seen to offer more economic opportunities, more living space. Is these are constrained, through protectionsism or racist immigration policies it will affect America’s soft power. But America’s loss need not be China’s gain, China’s soft power is really limited. Other countries, such as Australia and Canada and some European countries will attract more students, alongside China and other Asian countries like Singapore. But if protectionism and racism (Trump-like) I grows, I think America’s relative edge in soft power will be dented, if not completely undermined. But thank you for an interesting question.
Amitav-ji, thank you for replying so graciously to my comment. I agree that it is very hard to measure soft power. It is also very hard to predict how soft power will help in any military conflict. This may be the more important point.
I also agree that China’s soft power is very limited. Although I am far from well-versed in these matters, Korean pop music seems a far more potent soft power weapon than China finds in its arsenal.