A Momentary Lapse of Hegemonic Decline
By The Parag Khanna excerpt continues to produce some interesting discussion. Yglesias:
In 1945-46 the U.S. economy completely dominated the world, contributing some absurdly high share of total output. Every other significant country on earth had been completely destroyed by war, and we had a monopoly on nuclear weapons. Over time, this dominant position unraveled.
To which Drezner replies:
Yglesias is completely correct that the U.S. had nowhere to go but down after 1945 — a year in which we had the nuclear monopoly and were responsible for 50% of global economic output. Nevertheless, the U.S. resurgence in the nineties was not an illusion. The simple fact is that all of the potential peer competitors to the United States — Germany, Japan and the USSR — either stagnated or broke apart. At the same time, U.S. GDP and productivity growth surged. The revival of U.S. relative power was not a mirage.
This is a good point, and one that’s probably not mentioned enough. The story of how the neoconservative position on American hegemony developed in the 1970s and 1980s should be familiar by now, but the impact of the relative economic growth during the 1990s has probably been under-studied. In 1990 it wasn’t uncommon to see arguments that Japan and a Germany-driven Europe would be the premier world economic actors by, well, now. By 1995 this position was no longer tenable; setting the collapse of the USSR aside for a moment, the Japanese and German economies both stagnated while relatively fast US growth resumed. This was a situation which hegemonic-stability theorists in the 1970s didn’t foresee, and it probably goes some distance towards explaining how theories of American exceptionalism and consequently of the necessity of strong American hegemony became popular in the mid-1990s.
To put it another way, the ideas behind Kristol and Kagan’s 1996 Foreign Affairs article Towards a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy have a long history, but relative American economic strength in 1996 made them plausible and attractive to a larger audience.
Cross-posted to TAPPED.