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The Sick Eagle and the Politics of Despair
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14602 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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5 / 1988 |
4,239 Words |
| Author
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Walter A. McDougall
Walter A. McDougall is professor of diplomatic history at the
University of California, Berkeley. He received the Pulitzer
Prize for The Heaven and the Earth: A Political History of the
Space Age. |
Paul Kennedy was born in 1945 in an England exhausted by two world wars and engaged in voting Winston Churchill out of office to make way for a Labor Party resolved to liquidate the British Empire and allocate what British wealth remained to welfare programs. Cultural decadence accelerated apace, as illustrated by a postcard I once received depicting a smiling London bobby flanked by punks with green and purple hair, their noses pierced and leathers pocked with skulls and swastikas. "Dear Wally," it read, "Spengler was right. Best, Tom." Meditating no doubt on how his native Britain reified Oswald Spengler's Predicted "decline of the West," Kennedy was to write this year's hottest "serious" book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.
I was born in Washington, D.C., in 1946, at the zenith of American might and the apparent dawn of Walter Lippmann's American Century. I grew up with the moon program and took for granted Zbigniew Brzezinski's boast that "all inventions for a long time will be made in the United States because we are moving so fast with technology, and large-scale efforts produce inventions." I then went to Vietnam with the best-equipped army backed by the most daunting firepower in history. It was there that the United States lost its first war, ruined its fiscal health, and shattered the national consensus on which the U.S. role in the world based. Cultural decadence accelerated rapidly, and now I ask my own students in California how it feels to grow up in a nation in decline. They stare dumbly or joke about moving to Australia. How are the mighty fallen!
America's decline has in fact been evident for twenty years, but apparently a British professor had to come to Yale and write this book before the American "official mind" (which means the New York media and Washington insiders) tumbled to the fact. Of course, a decline in U.S. economic and military power relative to our competitors around the globe was an inevitable consequence of the artificial hegemony bestowed on the United States by the destruction of the other major industrial regions of the world during World War II. The United States itself helped shrink its near 50 percent share of world production in the late 1940s by fostering the recovery of Europe and Japan. At the same time, Americans took upon themselves global military commitments in the hope of containing communism. By the latter stages of the Vietnam War, however, it became apparent that the United Stats, like all great powers before it, had begun to suffer from what Kennedy terms "overstretch." We could no longer bear the cost of far-flung military commitments without damaging our own economic competitiveness relative to the rising economies of Europe and
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