Darrell88

Recently a lot of my friends have been talking about how there are many similarities between Great Britain's fall from power and what is currently happening in America. Most of them think Great Britain fell because of a mix of poor reactions to economic problems during the Great Depression, huge debts incurred after WWII, and the loss of its manufacturing capability of WWII.

My friends tell me America today is reacting poorly to the "Great Recession" (I'm not sure how much I agree), that it obviously is incurring great debts, and that it has already lost its manufacturing ability to other countries (I think most of you would agree with this).

China on the other hand is growing economically even through the recession. though many argue it has to contend with huge social issues such as human rights and urban rural population shifts, it seems to me that the US went through all of these to the same extent.

So the question I pose to you is will the US go the way of Britain and will China take its place?

Sharks and love

Yes it will.

But the post American world is more the ascent of other countries more than it is the descent of America.

Great Britain could have never held onto it's empire given the rise of the rest of the world and neither can America.

Darrell88

But do you think that America can retain its place as "leader", for lack of a better word, of the international community? The ascent of other nations has occurred before with the U.S. not losing its place (the Marshall plan for example).

Dr Realism

Short answer: no.

The US isn't so much declining as others are coming up. For several centuries there was a situation where a few countries got ahead and the rest all fell behind and under the domination of those few. Then those countries all threw themselves at each other(WW1-WW2), leaving only two. Then one of them fell apart and the US was left all by itself in a very strange, yet short instance in history where it had economic and military capability beyond far beyond any other country, and it had a lot of the great powers under its alliance system(UK, Germany, France, Italy, Japan).

In the 21st Century there are more players than before.
1914: There were about 9 players
1946: Only 3
1955: Only 2
1992: Only 1
2010: US, China, Russia, Japan, India, Germany, France, UK, Italy, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Turkey, etc.

America's share of the economic pie is thus smaller and its military share of the pie is still absurdly huge but will start getting smaller.

China will get stronger but it will not dominate the world because the world is heading straight into a demographic winter and China will be joining the party along with the already developed countries. By 2050 it should be 40% over the age of 60. For developed countries, the first half of the twentieth century will be all about how well each country can absorb the blow of
the graying tidal wave.

The world population is also heading for 9 billion. Food and Water are becoming more and more precious and China is having a problem with that. The problem with that is that China's problems are also the US's problems.

So no, the US will not go the way of Britain. Britain was a small country that managed to grow strong by strategy and circumstance. Its not a natural giant and it managed to punch well above its weight class. Without an empire and without the other countries held down. The US and China are heavy weights with or without empires. Sometimes Russia collapses but it always comes back because its Russia. China has collapsed and fragmented numerous times but it always comes back eventually because its China. The US can hit economic problems but it'll come back because its the US. Britain wasn't like that.

Dr Realism

That happened in the context of the Cold War. And the US was still far beyond the others. Those other powers were also quite exhausted not just from the two world wars but from the collapse of their overseas empires.

With the Soviets gone the others just decided that opposing the US just wasn't worth it or beneficial. They could have done the logical balance of power thing and France, UK, Germany, Japan, China and Russia all band together in a giant alliance against the US but the furthest anyone got was the SCO which hasn't done much.

Dr Realism

As for being leader in the 21st century. As long as it has the military power, the US can stay the leader. Ya notice whenever the US tries to get everyone to do something, Russia and China don't go along with it. Because they're too big to be pushed around. If anyone else tries to be the leader they'll have to try and push the US around which is an even bigger stone. At the moment I am unaware that China has any vision for the world. The US, (even if it doesn't always practice it or fully believe in it), has a vision which is: democracy, human rights, free trade, space travel, and all that.

DIVUS IVLIVS

I will agree with Dr Realism and say that the short answer is no.

As DR pointed out, although some people are fond of drawing surface comparisons between the British Empire and the United States of America, the fact is that the situations of the two "empires" are completely different - in the way that they rose to prominence, the nature of their relative strength, and not least in the international contexts that both their rise and prominence took/take place in, are several magnitudes apart.

So the comparison with Britain, I would argue, is largely specious.

Whether the United States is set on decline is another question altogether, but personally I would say that the answer to that is also a no. The trouble with making these assessments of the trend that a nation is going to follow is that they have a tendancy to confound all expectations - case in point, just ten short years ago most economists were predicting the the US economy was headed toward a golden age of prosperity even greater than what had come before, with no dark horizons in sight, and furthermore that within a decade we would have completely paid off the National Debt (2010, as a matter of fact, was the year in which we were projected to retire the debt - and look at what has happened instead). Those predictions were made in a time of prosperity; now the US is going through a definite rough patch in the form of our worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, coupled with a crushing debt. In the time of prosperity predictions were made for continued prosperity - now that we're sitting in a hole that we largely dug for ourselves the forecasts have naturally grown rather more gloomy.

Still, in the long run there is still ample reason to remain confident in prospect of returning success for the US. The economic problems that we are facing at the moment are nasty ones, no doubt about that - but they are not insurmountable, as long as the lessons of what went wrong over the last few years are remembered. The US economy is still possessed of massive advantages compared to other countries, and if we get over this hurdle, which will likely consume our efforts for the next few years, the odds are rather good that America is still set to be the world's leading economic power for years to come.

That is the (relative) short term. In the long term it is hard to say exactly how the international scene is set to develop, but a few themes do look likely to emerge. China will hopefully continue to grow and develop as a nation (yes, I say hopefully - an economically strong China is good business for the United States) - although they still have a long way to go. In terms of relative development China's economy is roughly at the stage that the US had reached in the early 20th Century, and its economy in its size is still more on the level of Japan (which it has recently surpassed), France, or Germany than the United States. India should also continue its development, and in the coming decades Africa may well begin to startle some people.

If the United States plays its cards (it still has a very good hand to work with) right, then it is IMO looking at another century of holding a leading position on the international stage. It differs hugely from Britain in that the geo-politico-economic factors upon which its strength has been built and continues to be based are not in danger of disappearing - they are still very much there. The British Empire disintergrated inevitably due to geographic and economic changes in the world that it was hardly in a position to stop, whereas the problems that the United States faces today are inherently solvable and survivable. It is more a question of how long it will take to overcome then than if it will overcome them.

jduster

Short answer: I do not have a crystal ball, but I do not imagine so.

Lucius

Will America lose its influence like Britain, will China take its place?

No.

That is, it's already happened. The election of Barack Obama is the sign of it. The US had dug ourselves into such a deep hole, we actually had to bring in a Black guy to clean up the mess.

From now on, if anyone needs anything, call China or Russia or Brazil or India or whomever it is that's next in line. We'll be on the down-low for a couple of generations.

Seeya!

DIVUS IVLIVS

^^

Thankfully, the Black guy in question is doing a commendable job of trying to clean up said mess.

Our current president is one of the reasons why I personally remain confident in this regard - we have highly competent leadership at the helm.