Once their productive capacity [is] enhanced, countries...normally find it easier to sustain the
    burdens of paying for large-scale armaments in peacetime and of maintaining and supplying large
    armies and fleets in wartime.  It sounds crudely mercantilistic to express it this way, but wealth is
    usually needed to acquire and protect wealth.  If, however, too large a portion of the state's
    resources is diverted from wealth creation and allocated instead to military purposes, then that is
    likely to lead to a weakening of national power over the longer term.  In the same way, if a state
    overextends itself strategically--by, say, the conquest of extensive territories or the waging of costly
    wars--it runs the risk that the potential benefits from external expansion may be outweighed by the
    great expense of it all--a dilemma which becomes acute if the nation concerned has entered a period
    of relative economic decline.
           -Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

Looking back it is hard at first to recall why this book stirred so much controversy when it was published.  It is Kennedy's unexceptional thesis that Great Powers rise to a point where they are overextended because of their imperial commitments and the expenditures needed to defend them.  This diversion of national resources to the military saps the strength of the economy and forces an inevitable decline.  When he writes as a historian, tracing the cycles of the rise and fall of Great Powers of the past, he makes an overwhelming case that this is so.  But he stumbles badly, and this is where the controversy arose, when he tries to apply his theory to the United States.

Kennedy's problems come from the fact that completely misunderstood American exceptionalism in general and the events of the Reagan years in particular.  In the first place, he failed to consider the fact that America has historically been unwilling to intervene in the affairs of other nations unless there is an actual or perceived threat to American life and has been unwilling to maintain even an adequate, never mind an enormous, military in peacetime.  Second, he, like many other Liberals, considered America to be at peace during the Cold War and, therefore, the relatively large defense expenditures of the 1980's did appear to fit the pattern of the other Empires.  However, all that is required is a simple shift in perspective, an understanding that the Cold War was in fact a war and then the budgetary emphasis on armaments actually appears pretty conservative.  For instance, even after fifty years of Cold War the National Debt today is only about 5/7ths of GDP.  By comparison, after WWII it stood at 125+%.  Thanks to the threat of nuclear war and our willingness to fight through proxy states, we managed to conduct the Cold War on the cheap.  And since the Cold War ended we have been disarming ourselves just as fast as humanly, and politically, possible, marking a return to normal American military inadequacy.

This same confusion led Kennedy to misapprehend American commitments abroad.  He looked at organizations like NATO and relationships with relatively unstable governments like El Salvador, South Africa, Israel, etc. and perceived eternal entangling alliances like those which dragged Britain into Europe's continental wars.  But, in fact, most of these were merely marriages of convenience on our part and with the demise of the Soviet Union it is hard to imagine us honoring most of these commitments.  In fact, we were only too happy to disown the whites of South Africa once we no longer had to worry about the Soviets getting control of the regions natural resources.  America is returning to it's normal fairly isolationist posture.  We remain a great power because of our economic might and our nuclear weapons, but we are in no sense an Empire, nor was there ever any real chance that we would try to become one.

Some of Kennedy's errors may simply have been attributable to innocent misunderstanding of the American system and to the problems inherent in all predictive models of human affairs.  However, there is also a strong ideological influence that lead him into error.  Kennedy is a declinist; like many on the Left he feels a visceral need to portray the West as past it's day.  Younger folk, grown used to the resurgent economic miracle that America has become, may have trouble believing that just twenty years ago there was serious talk about the failure of the American System.  In the dark days of the 70s, democracy was thought to be in crisis, a crisis from which it might not be capable of recovering.  The high water mark (low water mark?) of this doomsterism probably came with Jimmy Carter's "malaise" speech--here was a president of the United States essentially wringing his hands and throwing in the towel in the face of Soviet expansionism, skyrocketing inflation, social unrest, etc..  Given that kind of environment, it is not surprising that Left academics would have rushed to read the West's funeral oration.  Coming when it did, their thesis struck a note of not merely decline but of defeatism--as if the West's cause was already lost.  Unfortunately for their reputations as prognosticators and impartial historians, and happily for us, this was merely the darkness before the dawn.  As Kennedy should have understood, decades of what was basically a continuous war footing had warped the economy, while pusilanimousness in prosecution of the war had allowed the Soviets to gain an illusory upper hand.  As soon as Reagan took office and committed the West to actually winning and ending the Cold War, things started moving again and just twenty years later we find the country in the best economic shape that any nation has ever enjoyed.

There is still a baby that we should not throw out with the rest of this bath water; Kennedy's basic thesis is still valuable and provides the basis for a compelling argument that we should not have become involved in the Cold War in the first place.  The Soviets would have quickly become overextended trying to administer all of Europe and would have tipped into an even more rapid decline than they eventually sank into.  We could have retreated into Fortress America, balanced our budgets and gone along our merry way.  For that matter, this is one of the arguments that American isolationists made about WWII and it was equally valid then.  But Kennedy's book was not merely intended to be history; it was partially polemical, his purpose to portray an America in decline and to cast doubt upon the Reagan presidency and the renewed commitment to victory in the Cold War.  The happy fact that Kennedy's political goals were swamped by events and his warnings sound ludicrous now, should not obscure the important message of the rest of the book.  The lesson it teaches is that vast international commitments, and the military expenditures they require, are detrimental to a nation's economic health.  The corrective that the Reagan/Bush/Clinton years offer is that it's okay to get drawn into War, provided that you seek to win it and return the nation to it's normal peacetime isolation and military unpreparedness afterwards.

(Reviewed:31-May-00)

Grade: (C+) Orrin C. Judd

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