The Future of American Power

How America Can Survive the Rise of the Rest

Fareed Zakaria

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2008

Summary:  Despite some eerie parallels between the position of the United States today and that of the British Empire a century ago, there are key differences. Britain's decline was driven by bad economics. The United States, in contrast, has the strength and dynamism to continue shaping the world -- but only if it can overcome its political dysfunction and reorient U.S. policy for a world defined by the rise of other powers.

FAREED ZAKARIA is Editor of Newsweek International. This essay is adapted from his book The Post-American World (W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., © 2008 by Fareed Zakaria).

Britain's exalted position, however, was more fragile than it appeared. Just two years after the Diamond Jubilee, Britain entered the Boer War, a conflict that, for many scholars, marks the moment when British power began to decline. London was sure that it would win the fight with little trouble. After all, the British army had just won a similar battle against the dervishes in Sudan, despite being outnumbered by more than two to one. In the Battle of Omdurman, it inflicted 48,000 dervish casualties in just five hours while losing only 48 soldiers of its own. Many in Britain imagined an even easier victory against the Boers. After all, as one member of Parliament put it, it was "the British Empire against 30,000 farmers."

The war was ostensibly fought for a virtuous reason: to defend the rights of the English-speaking people of the Boer republics, who were treated as second-class citizens by the ruling Boers. But it did not escape the attention of London that after the discovery of gold in the region in 1886, these republics had been producing a quarter of the world's gold supply. In any event, the Boers launched a preemptive strike, and war began in 1899.

Things went badly for Britain from the beginning. It had more men and better weapons and was fielding its best generals (including Lord Kitchener, the hero of Omdurman). But the Boers were passionate in defending themselves, knew the land, and adopted successful guerrilla tactics that relied on stealth and speed. The British army's enormous military superiority meant little on the ground, and its commanders resorted to brutal tactics -- burning down villages, herding civilians into concentration camps (the world's first), sending in more and more troops. Eventually, Britain had 450,000 troops fighting a militia of 45,000.

The Boers could not hold back the British army forever, and in 1902 they surrendered. But in a larger sense, Britain lost the war. It had suffered 45,000 casualties, spent half a billion pounds, stretched its army to the breaking point, and discovered enormous incompetence and corruption in its war effort. Its brutal wartime tactics, moreover, gave it a black eye in the view of the rest of the world. At home, all of this created, or exposed, deep divisions over Britain's global role. Abroad, every other great power -- France, Germany, the United States -- opposed London's actions. "They were friendless," the historian Lawrence James has written of the British in 1902.

Fast-forward to today. Another superpower, militarily unbeatable, wins an easy victory in Afghanistan and then takes on what it is sure will be another simple battle, this one against Saddam Hussein's isolated regime in Iraq. The result: a quick initial military victory followed by a long, arduous struggle, filled with political and military blunders and met with intense international opposition. The analogy is obvious; the United States is Britain, the Iraq war is the Boer War -- and, by extension, the United States' future looks bleak. And indeed, regardless of the outcome in Iraq, the costs have been massive. The United States has been overextended and distracted, its army stressed, its image sullied. Rogue states such as Iran and Venezuela and great powers such as China and Russia are taking advantage of Washington's inattention and bad fortunes. The familiar theme of imperial decline is playing itself out one more time. History is happening again.

THE LONG GOODBYE

But whatever the apparent similarities, the circumstances are not really the same. Britain was a strange superpower. Historians have written hundreds of books explaining how London could have adopted certain foreign policies to change its fortunes. If only it had avoided the Boer War, say some. If only it had stayed out of Africa, say others. The historian Niall Ferguson provocatively suggests that had Britain stayed out of World War I (and there might not have been a world war without British participation), it might have managed to preserve its great-power position. There is some truth to this line of reasoning (World War I did bankrupt Britain), but to put things properly in historical context, it is worth looking at this history from another angle. Britain's immense empire was the product of unique circumstances. The wonder is not that it declined but that its dominance lasted as long as it did. Understanding how Britain played its hand -- one that got weaker over time -- can help illuminate the United States' path forward.

Britain has been a rich country for centuries (and was a great power for most of that time), but it was an economic superpower for little more than a generation. Observers often make the mistake of dating its apogee by great imperial events such as the Diamond Jubilee. In fact, by 1897, Britain's best years were already behind it. Its true apogee was a generation earlier, from 1845 to 1870. At the time, it was producing more than 30 percent of global GDP. Its energy consumption was five times that of the United States and 155 times that of Russia. It accounted for one-fifth of the world's trade and two-fifths of its manufacturing trade. And all this was accomplished with just two percent of the world's population.

By the late 1870s, the United States had equaled Britain on most industrial measures, and by the early 1880s it had actually surpassed it, as Germany would about 15 years later. By World War I, the United States' economy was twice the size of Britain's, and together France's and Russia's were larger as well. In 1860, Britain had produced 53 percent of the world's iron (then a sign of supreme industrial strength); by 1914, it was making less than 10 percent.