“The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” by Paul Kennedy is a seminal work that examines the cyclical patterns of rise and decline among major world powers throughout history. Kennedy’s analysis spans several centuries and provides insights into the factors that contribute to the ascendancy and eventual decline of great powers.
Kennedy begins by examining the concept of power and its various manifestations, including military, economic, and technological strength. He argues that the balance of power among nations is a key determinant of stability and conflict in the international system.
The author then traces the rise of great powers throughout history, from ancient empires like Rome and China to modern nation-states like Britain, France, and the United States. Kennedy identifies common themes in the rise of these powers, including economic growth, technological innovation, and military expansion.
Kennedy explores the role of geopolitics in shaping the rise and fall of great powers, highlighting the importance of strategic geography, access to resources, and control of key trade routes. He examines how shifts in geopolitical dynamics, such as the rise of maritime empires and the opening of new trade routes, have influenced the trajectory of great powers over time.
Kennedy also analyzes the impact of economics on the rise and fall of great powers, emphasizing the role of economic strength and productivity in sustaining military power and global influence. He examines how economic factors, such as industrialization, trade imbalances, and fiscal policies, have contributed to the rise and decline of great powers throughout history.
The author discusses the role of military power in shaping the rise and fall of great powers, highlighting the importance of military innovation, strategy, and organization in maintaining dominance on the battlefield. He examines how changes in military technology, tactics, and organization have influenced the outcome of conflicts and wars between great powers.
Kennedy explores the role of leadership and governance in the rise and fall of great powers, emphasizing the importance of effective leadership, institutional stability, and national cohesion in sustaining long-term power and influence. He examines how political factors, such as governance structures, state capacity, and leadership qualities, have influenced the rise and decline of great powers over time.
Kennedy also discusses the role of ideology and culture in shaping the rise and fall of great powers, highlighting the impact of ideas, values, and beliefs on national identity, cohesion, and resilience. He examines how ideological factors, such as nationalism, imperialism, and political ideologies, have influenced the behavior and policies of great powers throughout history.
The author explores the concept of “imperial overstretch” and its role in the decline of great powers, emphasizing the dangers of overextending military and economic resources in pursuit of global hegemony. He examines how imperial overreach has contributed to the decline of great powers, leading to economic stagnation, military exhaustion, and internal unrest.
In conclusion, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” provides a comprehensive analysis of the factors that contribute to the rise and decline of great powers throughout history. Kennedy’s insights into the role of geopolitics, economics, military power, leadership, ideology, and culture offer valuable lessons for understanding the dynamics of power and influence in the international system.
The relative strengths of the leading nations in world affairs never remain constant, principally because of the uneven rate of growth among different societies and of the technological and organizational breakthroughs which bring a greater advantage to one society than to another. For example, the coming of the long-range gunned sailing ship and the rise of the Atlantic trades after 1500 was not uniformly beneficial to all the states of Europe — it boosted some much more than others. In the same way, the later development of steam power and of the coal and metal resources upon which it relied massively increased the relative power of certain nations, and thereby decreased the relative power of others.
At the beginning of the 16th century it was by no means apparent that the last-named region was destined to rise above all the rest. But however imposing and organized some of those oriental empires appeared by comparison with Europe, they all suffered from the consequences of having a centralized authority which insisted upon a uniformity of belief and practice, not only in official state religion but also in such areas as commercial activities and weapons development.
The chief theme of this chapter is that despite the great resources possessed by the Habsburg monarchs, they steadily overextended themselves in the course of repeated conflicts and became militarily top-heavy for their weakening economic base.
Since the cost of standing armies and national fleets had become horrendously great by the early 18th century, a country which could create an advanced system of banking and credit (as Britain did) enjoyed many advantages over financially backward rivals.
This relatively stable international scene allowed the British Empire to rise to its zenith as a global power, in naval and colonial and commercial terms, and also interacted favorably with its virtual monopoly of steam-driven industrial production.
As the 20th century approached, therefore, the pace of technological change and uneven growth rates made the international system much more unstable and complex than it had been 50 years earlier. This was manifested in the frantic post-1880 jostling by the Great Powers for additional colonial territories in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, partly for gain, partly out of a fear of being eclipsed. It also manifested itself in the increasing number of arms races, both on land and at sea, and in the creation of fixed military alliances, even in peacetime, as the various governments sought out partners for a possible future war.
Despite their best efforts, traditional European Great Powers like France and Austria-Hungary, and a recently united one like Italy, were falling out of the race. By contrast, the enormous, continent-wide states of the US and Russia were moving to the forefront, and this despite the inefficiencies of the czarist state. Among the western European nations only Germany, possibly, had the muscle to force its way into the select league of the future of world Powers. Japan, on the other hand, was intent upon being dominant in East Asia, but not farther afield.
Austria-Hungary was gone, Russia in revolution, Germany defeated; yet France, Italy, and even Britain itself had also suffered heavily in their victory. The only exception were Japan, which further augmented its position in the Pacific; and, of course, the US, which by 1918 was indisputably the strongest Power in the world.
In the background, however, the US remained by far the mightiest manufacturing nation in the world, and Stalin’s Russia was quickly transforming itself into an industrial superpower. Consequently, the dilemma for revisionist “middle” Powers was that they had to expand soon if they were not to be overshadowed by the two continental giants. The dilemma for the status quo middle Powers was that in fighting off the German and Japanese challenges, they would most likely weaken themselves as well.
But the problem which historians — as opposed to political scientists — have in grappling with general theories is that the evidence of the past is almost always too varied to allow for “hard” scientific conclusions. Thus, while it is true that some war (e.g., 1939) can be linked to decision-makers’ fears about shifts taking place in the overall power balances, that would not be so useful in explaining the struggles which began in 1776 (American Revolutionary War) or 1792 (French Revolutionary) or 1854 (Crimean War). In the same way, while one could point to Austria-Hungary in 1914 as a good example of a “falling” Great Power helping to trigger off a major war, that still leaves the theorist to deal with the equally critical roles played then by those “rising” Great Powers Germany and Russia. Similarly, any general theory about whether empires pay, or whether imperial control is affected by a measurable “power-distance” ratio, is likely — from the conflicting evidence available - -to produce the banal answer sometimes yes, sometimes no.
Nevertheless, if one sets aside a priori theories and simply looks at the historical record of “the rise and fall of Great Powers” over the past 500 years, it is clear that some generally valid conclusions can be drawn — while admitting all the time that there may be individual exceptions.
The second is that, so far as the international system is concerned, both wealth and power are always relative and should be seen as such. 300 years ago, the German mercantilist writer Hornigk observed that:
whether a nation be today mighty and rich or not depends not on the abundance or security of its power and riches, but principally on whether its neighbors possess more or less of it.
The Netherlands in the mid-18th century was richer in absolute terms than 100 years earlier, but by that stage was much less of a Great Power because neighbors like France and Britain had “more … of it”. The France of 1914 was, absolutely, more powerful than that of 1850 — but this was little consolation when France was being eclipsed by a much stronger Germany. Britain today has far greater wealth, and its armed forces possess far more powerful weapons, than its mid-Victorian prime; that avails it little when its share of the world product has shrunk from about 25% to about 3%. If a nation has “more … of it,” things are fine; if “less of it,” there are problems.
Once again, the reason for this is not difficult to grasp. An economically expanding Power — Britain in the 1860s, the US in the 1890s, Japan today — may well prefer to become rich rather than to spend heavily on armaments. A half-century later, priorities may well have altered. The earlier economic expansion has brought with it overseas obligations (dependence upon foreign markets and raw materials, military alliances, perhaps bases and colonies). Other, rival Powers are now economically expanding at a faster rate, and wish in their turn to extend their influence abroad. The world has become a more competitive place, and market shares are being eroded. Pessimistic observers talk of decline; patriotic statesmen call for “renewal.”
In these troubled circumstances, the Great Power is likely to find itself spending much more on defense than it did 2 generations earlier, and yet still discover that the world is a less secure environment — simply because other Powers have grown faster, and are becoming stronger. Great Powers in relative decline instinctively respond by spending more on “security,” and thereby divert potential resources from “investment” and compound their long-term dilemma.
One can make these generalizations, however, without falling into the trap of crude economic determinism. Despite this book’s abiding interest in tracing the “larger tendencies” in world affairs over the past five centuries, it is not arguing that economics determines every event, or is the sole reason for the success and failure of each nation. There simply is too much evidence pointing to other things: geography, military organization, national morale, the alliance system, and many other factors can all affect the relative power of the members of the states system. In the 18th century, for example, the United Provinces were the richest parts of Europe, and Russia the poorest — yet the Dutch fell, and the Russians rose. Individual folly (like Hitler’s) and extremely high battlefield competence (whether of the Spanish regiments in the 16th century or of the German infantry in this century) also go a long way to explain individual victories and defeats. What does seem incontestable, however, is that in a long-drawn-out Great Power (and usually coalition) war, victory has repeatedly gone to the side with more flourishing productive base — or, as the Spanish captains used to say, to him who has the last escudo
This does not deny that men make their own history, but they do make it within a historical circumstance which can restrict (as well as open up) possibilities.
Indeed, placed alongside these other great centers of cultural and economic activity, Europe’s relative weaknesses were more apparent than its strength. It was, for a start, neither the most fertile nor the most populous area in the world; India and China took pride of place in each respect. Geopolitically, the “continent” of Europe was an awkward shape, bounded by ice and water to the north and west, being open to frequent landward invasion from the eat, and vulnerable to strategic circumvention in the south.
Unlike the Ottoman and Chinese empires, unlike the rule which the Moguls were soon to establish in India, there never was a united Europe in which all parts acknowledged one secular or religious leader. Instead, Europe was a hodgepodge of petty kingdoms and principalities, marcher lordships and city-states. Some more powerful monarchies were arising in the west, notably Spain, France, and England, but none was to be free of internal tensions and all regarded the others as rivals, rather than allies in the struggle against Islam.
To readers brought up to respect “western” science, the most striking feature of Chinese civilization must be its technological precocity. Huge libraries existed from early on. Printing by movable type had already appeared in 11th-century China, and soon large number of books were in existence. Trade and industry, stimulated by the canal-building and population pressures, were equally sophisticated. Chinese cities were much larger than their equivalents in medieval Europe, and Chinese trade routes as extensive. Paper money had earlier expedited the flow of commerce and the growth of markets.
Apart from the costs and other disincentives involved, therefore, a key element in China’s retreat was the sheer conservatism of the Confucian bureaucracy — a conservatism heightened in the Ming period by resentment at the changes earlier forced upon them by the Mongols. In this “Restoration” atmosphere, the all-important officialdom was concerned to preserve and recapture the past, not to create a brighter future based upon overseas expansion and commerce. According to the Confucian code, warfare itself was a deplorable activity and armed forces were made necessary only by the fear of barbarian attacks or internal revolts. The mandarins’ dislike of the army (and the navy) was accompanied by a suspicion of the trader. The accumulation of private capital, the practice of buying cheap and selling dear, the ostentation of the nouveau riche merchant, all offended the elite, scholarly bureaucrats — almost as much as they aroused the resentments of the toiling masses.
For centuries before 1500 the world of Islam had been culturally and technologically ahead of Europe. Its cities were large, well-lit, and drained, and some of them possessed universities and libraries and stunningly beautiful mosques. In mathematics, cartography, medicine, and many other aspects of science and industry — in mills, gun-casting, lighthouses, horsebreeding — the Muslims had enjoyed a lead. The Ottoman system of recruiting future janissaries from Christian youth in the Balkans had produced a dedicated, uniformed corps of troops. Tolerance of other races had brought many a talented Greek, Jew, and Gentile into the sultan’s service.
Yet the Ottoman Turks, too, were to falter, to turn inward, and to lose the chance of world domination, although this became clear only a century after the strikingly similar Ming decline.
With this array of adversaries, the Ottoman Empire would have needed remarkable leadership to have maintained its growth; but after 1566 there reigned 13 incompetent sultans in succession.
External enemies and personal failings do not, however, provide the full explanation. The system as a whole, like that of Ming China, increasingly suffered from some of the defects of being centralized, despotic, and severely orthodox in its attitude toward initiative, dissent, and commerce. An idiot sultan could paralyze the Ottoman Empire in the way that a pope or Holy Roman emperor could never do for all Europe. Without clear directives from above, the arteries of the bureaucracy hardened, preferring conservatism to change, and stifling innovation.
To a distinct degree, the fierce response to the Shiite religious challenge reflected and anticipated a hardening of official attitude toward all forms of free thought. The printing press was forbidden because it might disseminate dangerous opinions.
The sheer rigidity of Hindu religious taboos militated against modernization: rodents and insects could not be killed, so vast amount of foodstuffs were lost; social mores about handling refuse and excreta led to permanently insanitary conditions, a breeding ground for bubonic plagues; the caste system throttled initiative, instilled ritual, and restricted the market; and the influence wielded over Indian local rulers by the Brahman priests meant that his obscurantism was effective at the highest level. Here were social checks of the deepest sort to any attempts at radical change.
Thousands of servants and hangers-on, extravagant clothes and jewels and harems and menageries, vast arrays of bodyguards, could be paid only by the creation of a systematic plunder machine. Tax collectors, required to provide fixed sums for their masters, preyed mercilessly upon peasant and merchant alike; whatever the state of the harvest or trade, the money had to come in. There being no constitutional or other checks — apart from rebellion — upon such depredations, it was not surprising that taxation was known as “eating.”
Europe had always been politically fragmented, despite even the best efforts of the Romans, who had not managed to conquer much farther north of the Rhine and the Danube; and for a thousand years after the fall of Rome, the basic political power unit had been small and localized, in contrast to the steady expansion of the Christian religion and culture.
This is not to say that the rise of market forces did not disturb many in authority. Feudal lords, suspicious of towns as centers of dissidence and sanctuaries of serfs, often tried to curtail their privileges. As elsewhere, merchants were frequently preyed upon, their goods stolen, their property seized. Papal pronouncements upon usury echo in many ways the Confucian dislike of profit-making middlemen and moneylenders. But the basic fact was that there existed no uniform authority in Europe which could effectively halt this or that commercial development; no central government whose changes in priorities could cause the rise and fall of a particular industry; no systematic and universal plundering of businessmen and entrepreneurs by tax gatherers, which so retarded the economy of Mogul India.
Long before Adam Smith had coined the exact words, the rulers of certain societies of western Europe were tacitly recognizing that “little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and tolerable administration of justice…”
For the explanation of this shift one must again point to the decentralization of power in Europe. What it did, above all else, was to engender a primitive form of arms race among the city-states and then the larger kingdoms. To some extent, this probably had socioeconomic roots. Once the contending armies in Italy no longer consisted of feudal knights and their retainers but of pikemen, crossbowmen, and (flanking) cavalry paid for by the merchants and supervised by the magistrates of a particular city, it was almost inevitable that the latter would demand value for money — despite all the best maneuvers of condottieri not to make themselves redundant; the city would require, in other words, the sort of arms and tactics which might produce a swift victory, so that the expenses of war could then be reduced. Similarly, once the French monarchs of the late 15th century had a “national” army under their direct control and pay, they were anxious to see this force produce decisive results.
It is important to recall here that when cannon were first employed, there was little difference between the West and Asia in their design and effectiveness. Yet it seems to have been only in Europe that the impetus existed for constant improvements: in the gunpowder grains, in casting much smaller (yet equally powerful) cannon from bronze and tin alloys, in the shape and texture of the barrel and the missile, in the gun mounting and carriages.
But because the Ming government had a monopoly of cannon, and the thrusting leaders of Russia, Japan, and Mogul India soon acquired a monopoly, there was much less incentive to impose such weapons once their authority had been established.
The Japanese, for their part, were much more blunt. When the Portuguese sent a mission in 1640 to protest against the expulsion of foreigners, almost all its members were killed; there could be no attempt at retribution from Lisbon.
To most European statesmen the loss of Hungary was of far greater import than the establishment of factories in the Orient, and the threat to Vienna more significant than their own challenges at Aden, Goa and Malacca; only governments bordering the Atlantic could, like their later historians, ignore this fact.
Above all, in the sheer courage of those who partook in the overseas voyages and endured all that the mighty seas, hostile climates, wild landscapes, and fierce opponents could place in their way. For a complex mixture of motives — personal gain, national glory, religious zeal, and perhaps a sense of adventure — men were willing to risk everything, as indeed they did in many cases.
But the colonizing powers rarely if ever gave up their acquisitions, and within short while a fresh wave of expansion and exploration would begin. After all, if the established imperial nations did not exploit their positions, others were willing to do it instead.
There was the prospect of gaining glory and riches, of striking at a rival and boosting the resources of one’s own country, and of converting new souls to the one true faith; what possible counterargument could hold out against the launching of such ventures?
The fairer aspect of this increasing commercial and colonial rivalry was the parallel upward spiral in knowledge — in science and technology. No doubt many of the advances of this time were spinoffs from the arms race and the scramble for overseas trade; but the eventual benefits transcended their inglorious origins.
By extension, this lack of economic and political rigidity would imply a similar lack of cultural and ideological orthodoxy — that is, a freedom to inquire, to dispute, to experiment, a belief in the possibilities of improvement, a concern for the practical rather than the abstract, a rationalism which defied mandarin codes, religious dogma, and traditional folklore. In most cases, what was involved was not so much positive elements, but rather the reduction of the number of hindrances which checked economic growth and political diversity. Europe’s greatest advantage was that it had fewer dis advantages than the other civilizations.
The sheer heterogeneity and diffusion of these lands might suggest that the Habsburg imperium could never be a real equivalent to the uniform, centralized empires of Asia.
In view of his other problems, it was scarcely surprising that Charles V could not concentrate his energies upon the Lutheran challenge in Germany until after mid-1540s. When he did so, he was at first quite successful, especially by defeating the armies of the leading Protestant princes at the battle of Muhlberg. But any enhancement of Habsburg and imperial authority always alarmed Charles V’s rivals, so that the northern German princes, the Turks, Henry II of France, and even the papacy all strove to weaken his position.
It was these spiraling costs of war which exposed the real weakness of the Habsburg system. The general inflation, which saw food prices increase fivefold and industrial prices threefold between 1500 and 1630, was a heavy enough blow to government finances; but this was compounded by the doubling and redoubling in the size of armies and navies. In consequence, the Habsburgs were involved in an almost continual struggle for solvency.
The second chief cause of the Spanish and Austrian failure must be evident from the narrative account given above: the Habsburgs simply had too much to do, too many enemies to fight, too many fronts to defend.
But all the other states enjoyed certain periods of peace and recovery. It was the Habsburg’s, and more especially Spain’s, fate to have to turn immediately from a struggle against one enemy to a new conflict against another; peace with France was succeeded by war with the Turks; a truce in the Mediterranean was followed by extended conflict in the Atlantic, and that by the struggle for northwestern Europe. During some awful periods, imperial Spain was fighting on three fronts simultaneously, and with her enemies consciously aiding each other, diplomatically and commercially if not military. In contemporary terms, Spain resembled a large bear in the pit: more powerful than any of the dogs attacking it, but never able to deal with all of its opponents and growing gradually exhausted in the process.
Yet how could the Habsburgs escape from this vicious cycle? Historians have pointed to the chronic dispersion of energies, and suggested that Charles V and his successors should have formulate a clear set of defense priorities. The implication of this is that some areas were expendable; but which ones?
Finally, there was the “domino theory” — if the Netherlands were lost, so also would be the Habsburg cause in Germany, smaller possessions like Franche-Comte, perhaps even Italy.
Until the flow of American silver brought massive additional revenues to the Spanish crown, the Habsburg war effort principally rested upon the backs of Castilian peasants and merchants; and even at its height, the royal income from sources in the New World was only about 1/4 to 1/3 of that derived from Castile and its six million inhabitants.
Finally, although there were some notable exceptions, the Castilian economy on the whole was also heavily dependent upon imports of foreign manufactures and upon the services provided by non-Spaniards, in particular Genoese, Portuguese, and Flemish entrepreneurs. It was dependent, too, upon the Dutch, even during hostilities; to the profit of the nation’s greatest foes.
Unable to raise revenues by the most efficacious means, Habsburg monarchs resorted to a variety of expedients, easy in the short term but disastrous for the long-term good of the country. Taxes were steadily increased by all manner of means, but rarely fell upon the shoulders of those who could bear them most easily, and always tended to hurt commerce. Various privileges, monopolies, and honors were sold off by a government desperate for ready cash.
The flow of American silver was bound to cause economic problems (especially price inflation) which no society of the time had the experience to handle, but the conditions prevailing in Spain meant that this phenomenon hurt the productive classes more than the unproductive, that the silver tended to flow swiftly out of Seville into the hands of foreign bankers and military provision merchants, and that these new transatlantic sources of wealth were exploited by the crown in a way which worked against rather than for the creation of “sound finance.” The flood of precious metals from the Indies, it was said, was to Spain as water on a roof — it poured on and then was drained away.
At the center of the Spanish decline, therefore, was the failure to recognize the importance of preserving the economic underpinning of a powerful military machine. Time and again the wrong measures were adopted. Although the decline of Spanish power did not full reveal itself until the 1640s, the causes had existed for decades beforehand.
The keys to the English recovery following the Wars of the Roses had been Henry VII’s concentration upon domestic stability and financial prudence, at least after the peace with France in 1492. By cutting down his own expenses, paying off his debts, and encouraging the wool trade, fishing, and commerce in general, the first Tudor monarch provided a much-needed breathing space for a country hit by civil war and unrest.
In considering the strategy which England should best employ, naval leaders urged upon the queen a policy of intercepting the Spanish silver trade, raiding the enemy’s coasts and colonies, and in general exploiting the advantages of sea power to wage war on the cheap — an attractive proposition in theory, although often difficult to implement in practice.
Yet, while these English actions finally tilted the balance and forced Spain to end its war with France in 1659, this was not achieved without domestic strains. The profitable Spanish trade was lost to the neutral Dutch in these years after 655, and enemy privateers reaped a rich harvest of English merchant ships along the Atlantic and Mediterranean routes. Above all, paying for an army of up to 70k men and a large navy was a costly business. Taxes were imposed, and efficiently extorted, at an unprecedented level, yet they were never enough for a government which was spending “four times as much as had been thought intolerable under Charles I” before the English Revolution.
For a generation Sweden had been drunk with victory and bloated with booty: Charles XI led her back into the grey light of everyday existence, gave her policies appropriate to her resources and her real interests, equipped her to carry them out, and prepared for her a future of weight and dignity as a second-class power.
The second feature was Amsterdam’s growing role as the center of international finance, a natural corollary to the republic’s function as the shipper, exchanger, and commodity dealer of Europe. What its financiers and institutions offered (receiving deposits at interest, transferring monies, crediting and clearing bills of exchange, floating loans) was not different from practices already established in, say, Venice and Genoa; but, reflecting the United Provinces’ trading wealth, it was on a larger scale and conducted with a greater degree of certainty — the more so since the chief investors were a part of the governments, and wished to see the principles of sound money, secure credit, and regular repayment of debt upheld. In consequence of all this, there was usually money available for government loans, which gave the Dutch Republic an inestimable advantage over its rivals; and since its credit rating was firm because it promptly repaid debts, it could borrow more cheaply than any other government — a major advantage in the 17th century and, indeed, at all time!
While this demonstrates that even wealthy states winced at the cost of military expenditures, it also confirmed that as long as success in war depended upon the length of one’s purse, the Dutch were always likely to outstay the others.
There were various causes for this evolution of the European nation-state. Economic change had already undermined much of the old feudal order, and different social groups had to relate to each other through newer forms of contract and obligation. The Reformation, in dividing Christendom on the basis cuius regio, eiu relgio, that is, of the rulers’ religious preferences, merged civil and religious authority, and thus extended secularism on a national basis. The decline of Latin and the growing use of vernacular language of politicians, lawyers, bureaucrats, and poets accentuated this secular trend. Improved means of communication, the more widespread exchange of goods, the invention of printing, and the oceanic discoveries mad man more aware not only of other peoples but also the differences in language, taste, cultural habits, and religion. In such circumstances, it was no wonder that many philosophers and other writers of the time held the nation-state to be the best natural and best form of civic society, that its powers should be enhanced and its interests defended, and that its rulers and ruled to work harmoniously for the common, national good.
But it was war, and the consequence of war, that provided much more urgent and continuous pressure toward “nation-building” than these philosophical considerations and slowly evolving social tendencies.
All remarks about the general rise in government spending, or about new organizations of revenue-collecting, or about the changing relationship between kings and estates in early-modern Europe, remain abstract until the central importance of military conflict is recalled. In the last few years of Elizabeth’s England, or in Phillip I’s Spain, as much as 3/4 of all government expenditures was devoted to war or to debt repayments for previous wars. Military and naval endeavors may not always have been the raison d’etre of the new nation-states, but it certainly was their most expensive and pressing activity.
Raising and controlling an army in this period was a frighteningly difficult enterprise: ragtag troops, potentially disloyal mercenaries, inadequate supplies, transport problems, unstandardized weapons, were the despair of most commanders. Even when sufficient monies were allocated to military purposes, corruption and waste took their toll.
This problem of pay and supply affected military performance in all sorts of ways: one historian has demonstrated that Gustavus Adolphus’s stunningly mobile campaigns in Germany, rather than being dictated by military-strategic planning in the Clausewitzian sense, reflected a simple but compelling search for food and fodder for his enormous force. Well before Napoleon’s aphorism, commanders knew that an army marched upon its stomach.
But these physical restrictions applied at the national level, too, especially in raising fund for war. No state in this period, however prosperous, could pay immediately for the costs of a prolonged conflict; no matter what fresh taxes were raised, there was always a gap between governmental income and expenditure which could only be closed by loans — either from private bankers like the Fuggers or, later, through a formally organized money market dealing in government bonds. Again and again, however, the spiraling cost of war forced monarchs to default upon debt repayments, to debase the coinage, or to attempt some other measure of despair, which brought short-term relief but long-term disadvantage. Like their commanders frantically seeking to keep troops in order and horses fed, early-modern governments were engaged in a precarious hand-to-mouth living.
The victory of the anti-Habsburg forces was, then, a marginal and relative one. They had managed, but only just, to maintain the balance between their material base and their military power better than their Habsburg opponents. At least some of the victors had seen that the sources of national wealth needed to be exploited carefully, and not recklessly, during a length conflict. They may also have admitted, however reluctantly, that the trader and the manufacturer and the farmer were as important as the calvary officer and the pikeman. But the margin of their appreciation, and of their better handling of the economic elements, was slight. It had been, to borrow the later words of the Duke of Wellington, a “damned close-run thing.” Most great contests are.
The most significant feature of the Great Power scene after 1660 was the maturing of the genuinely multipolar system of European states, each one of which increasingly tended to make decisions about war and peace on the basis of “national interests” rather than for transnational, religious causes. This was not, to be sure, an instant or absolute change: the European states prior to 1660 had certainly maneuvered with their secular interests in mind, and religious prejudice still fueled many international quarrels of the 18th century. Nevertheless, the chief characteristic of the 1519-1659 era now disappeared, and was replaced by a much looser system of short-term, shifting alliances. Countries which had been foes in one war were often to find themselves partners in the next, which placed an emphasis upon calculated Realpolitik rather than deeply held religious conviction in the determination of policy.
The fluctuations in both diplomacy and war that were natural to this new volatile, multipolar system were complicated by something which was not new, but was common to all ages: the rise of certain states and the decline of others.
The monopolization and bureaucratization of military power by the state is clearly a central part of the story of “nation-building”; and the process is a reciprocal one, since the enhanced authority and resources of the state in turn gave to their armed forces a degree of permanence which had often not existed a century earlier. Not only were there “professional,” “standing” armies and “royal” navies, but there was also a much more developed infrastructure of war academies, barracks, ship-repair yards, and the like, with administrators to run them. Power was now national power, whether expressed through the enlightened despotisms of eastern Europe, the parliamentary controls of Britain, or the later demagogic forces of revolutionary France.
The mere fact that these were coalition wars increased their duration, since a belligerent whose resources were fading would look to a more powerful ally for loans and reinforcements in order to keep itself in the fight.
What is clear that even the most thriving and “modern” of the 18th-century states could not immediately pay for the wars of this period out of their ordinary revenue. Moreover, vast rises in taxes, even if the machinery existed to collect them, could well provoke domestic unrest, which all regimes feared — especially when facing foreign challengers at the same time.
While it is true that its general taxation system was more regressive than that of France — that is, it relied far more upon indirect than direct taxes — particular features seem to have made it much less resented by the public. For example, there was in Britain nothing like the vast array of French tax farmers, collectors, and other middlemen; many of the British duties were “invisible” (the excise duty on a few basic products), or appeared to hurt the foreigner (customs); there were no internal tolls, which so irritated French merchants and were a disincentive to domestic commerce; the British land tax — the chief direct tax for so much of the 18th century — allowed for no privileged exceptions and was also “invisible” to the greater part of society; and these various taxes were discussed and then authorized by an elective assembly, which for all its defects appeared more representative than the ancien regime in France.
This problem of raising revenue to pay for current — and previous — wars preoccupied all regimes and their statesmen. Even in peacetime, the upkeep of the armed services consumed 40 to 50% of a country’s expenditure; in wartime, it could rise to 80 or even 90% of the far larger whole!
What is meant by that term here is not merely such elements as a country’s climate, raw materials, fertility or agriculture, and access to trade routes — important though they all were to its overall prosperity — but rather the critical issue of strategical location during these multilateral wars. Was a particular nation able to concentrate its energies upon one front, or did it have to fight on several? Did it share common borders with weak states, or powerful ones? Was it chiefly a land power, a sea power, or a hybrid? Could it secure additional resources from overseas?
The English alliance which William III had cemented in 1689 was simultaneously the saving of the United Provinces and a substantial contributory factor in its decline as an independent great power — in rather the same way in which, over 200 years later, Lend-Lease and the US alliances would both rescue and help undermine a British Empire which was fighting for survival.
France’s strength rested firmly upon indigenous materials; its large and relatively homogeneous territory, its agricultural self-sufficiency, and its population of about 20M.
With Spain exhausted, the Austrians distracted by the Turkish threat, and the English at first neutral or friendly, Louis enjoyed two decades of diplomatic success; but then the very hubris of French claims alarmed the other powers.
Only in the war of 1778-1783, by supporting the American rebels in the western hemisphere but abstaining from any moves into Germany, did France manage to humiliate its British foe. In all its other wars, the French never enjoyed the luxury of strategical concentration — and suffered as a result.
In sum, the France of the ancien regime remained, by its size and population and wealth, always the greatest of the European states; but it was not big enough or efficiently organized enough to be a “superpower,” and, restricted on land and diverted by sea, it could not prevail against the coalition which its ambitions inevitably aroused. French action confirmed, rather than upset, the plurality of power in Europe.
France’s geostrategical problem of having to face potential foes on a variety of fronts was not unique, even if that country had made matters worse for itself by a repeated aggressiveness and a chronic lack of direction.
The lengthly struggle against Prussia after 1740 was particularly revealing: it demonstrated that for all the military, fiscal, and administrative reforms undertaken in the Habsburg lands in this period, Vienna could not prevail against another, smaller German state which was considerably more efficient in its army, revenue collection, and bureaucracy.
By contrast, two more distant powers, Russia and the US, enjoyed a relatively invulnerability and a freedom from the strategical ambivalences which plagued the central European states in the 18th century. Both of these future superpowers had, to be sure, “a crumbling frontier” which required watching; but neither did they encounter militarily advanced societies posing a danger to the home base.
By 1776, moreover, the NA colonies had grown enormously: the population of 2M was by then doubling every 30 years, was spreading out westward, was economically prosperous, and was self-sufficient in foodstuffs and many other commodities. This meant, as the British found to their cost over the next 7 years, that the rebel states were virtually invulnerable to merely naval operations and were also too expensive to be subjected by land forces drawn from a home island 3,000 miles away.
To be sure, it also required a government aware of the importance of maritime trade and ready to pay for a large war fleet. Subject to that precondition, the British political elite seemed by the 18th century to have discovered a happy recipe for the continuous growth of national wealth and power. Flourishing overseas trade aided the British economy, encouraged seamanship and ship building, provided funds for the national Exchequer, and was the lifeline to the colonies. The colonies not only offered outlets for British products but also supplied many raw materials, from the valuable sugar, tobacco, and calicoes to the increasingly important NA naval stores. And the Royal Navy ensured respect for British merchants in times of peace and protected their trade and garnered further colonial territories in war, to they country’s political and economic benefit. Trade, colonies, and the navy thus formed a “virtuous triangle,” reciprocally interacting to Britain’s long-term advantage.
While this explanation of Britain’s rise was partly valid, it was not the whole truth. Like so many mercantilist work, Mahan’s tended to emphasize the importance of Britain’s external commerce as opposed to domestic production, and in particular to exaggerate the importance of the “colonial” trades. Agriculture remained the fundament of British wealth throughout the 18th century, and exports (whose ratio to total national income was probably less than 10% until the 1780s) were often subject to strong foreign competition and to tariffs, for which no amount of naval power could compensate. The navalist viewpoint also inclined to forget the further fact that British trade with the Baltic, Germany, and the Mediterranean lands was — although growing less swiftly than those in sugar, spices, and slaves — still of great economic importance; so that a France permanently dominant in Europe might be able to deliver a dreadful blow to British manufacturing industry. Under such circumstances, isolationism from European power politics could be economic folly.
There was also the compelling argument — echoing Elizabeth I’s fears about Spain — that France’s enemies had to be given assistance inside Europe, to contain Bourbon (and Napoleonic) ambitions and thus to preserve Britain’s own long-term interests. A “maritime” and a “continental” strategy were, according to this viewpoint, complementary rather than antagonistic.
France will outdo us at sea when they have nothing to fear on land. I have always maintained that our marine should protect our alliances on the Continent, and so, by diverting the expense of France, enable us to maintain our superiority at sea.
The raiding strategy seemed cheaper and was much beloved by certain ministers, but it usually had negligible effects and occasionally ended in disaster. The provision of a continental army was more expensive in terms of men and money, but, as the campaigns of Marlborough and Wellington demonstrated, was also much more likely to assist in the preservation of the European balance.
Neither the army nor the navy — although numerically daunting — was equipped for sustained and distant fighting. A swift defeat of one of the major allies could break the deadlock, but where should that thrust be directed, and had Louis the will to order bold measures?
And the measure of that effectiveness could not simply be in sugar islands seized or French-backed nabobs toppled, because all these colonial gains, however valuable, would be only temporary if the foe occupied Hanover and eliminated Prussia. The correct way to a decisive victory, as Pitt gradually realized, was to complement the popular “maritime” strategy with a “continental” one, providing large-scale subsidies to Frederick’s own forces and paying for a considerable “Army of Observation” in Germany, to protect Hanover and help contain the French.
We must be merchants before we are soldiers trade and maritime force depend upon each other, and the riches which are the true resources of this country depend upon its commerce.
To conquer and hold the entire eastern territories of America would have been a difficult task for Napoleon’s Grand Army, let alone the British-led troops of the 1770s.
The second unprecedented difficulty in the realm of grand strategy was that Britain fought alone, unaided by European partners who would distract the French. To a large degree, of course, this was a diplomatic rather than a military problem. The British were now paying for their break with Prussia after 1762, their arrogance toward Spain, their heavy-handed treatment of the shipping of neutral states like Denmark and the United Provinces, and their failure to secure Russian support.
A very important period of reform had occurred in the French army — in matters of organization, staff planning, artillery, and the battle tactics — during the two or three decades before 1789; and what the Revolution did was to sweep aside the aristocratic hindrances to these new ideas and to give the reformers the opportunity (and the weight of numbers) to put their concepts into practice when war broke out.
The fact remains that overseas expansion had given the country unchallenged access to vast new wealth which its rivals did not enjoy.
Despite his own assumptions of grandeur, Napoleon seems to have become obsessed with Britain at times — with its invulnerability, its maritime dominance, its banks and credit system — and to have yearned to see it all tumble in the dust. Such feelings of envy and dislike doubtless existed, if in a less extreme form, among the Spaniards, Dutch, and others who saw the British monopolizing the outside world. The Russian general Kutusov, wishing to halt his army’s westward advance in 1812, once the Grand Army had been driven from the homeland, may have spoken for more than himself when he doubted the wisdom of totally destroying Napoleon, since the “succession would not fall to Russia or to any other continental power, but to the power which already commands the sea, and whose domination would be intolerable.” At the end of the day, however, that result was unavoidable: Napoleon’s hubris and refusal to compromise ensured not only his downfall, but his greatest enemy’s supreme victory.
Three decades of British economic hegemony were accompanied by large-scale improvements in transport and communications, by the increasingly rapid transfer of industrial technology from one region to another, and by an immense spurt in manufacturing output, which in turn stimulated the opening of new areas of agricultural land and raw-material sources.
Thirdly, technology deriving from the Industrial Revolution began to make its impact upon military and naval warfare. But the changes were much slower than has sometimes been represented, and it was only in the second half of the century that railways, telegraphs, quick-firing guns, steam propulsion, and armored warships really became decisive indicators of military strength.
Where previously an amelioration of the conditions of existence, hence of survival, and an increase in economic opportunity had always been followed by a rise in population that eventually consumed the gains achieved, now for the first time in history, both the economic and the knowledge were growing fast enough to generate a continuing flow of investment and technological innovation, a flow that lifted beyond visible limits the ceiling of Malthus’s positive checks.
There are today on the plains of India and China men and women, plague-ridden and hungry, living lives little better, to outward appearance, than those of the cattle that toil with them by day and share their places of sleep by night. Such Asiatic standards, and such unmechanized horrors, are the lot of those who increase their numbers without passing through an industrial revolution.
It was not the case, as was once fancied, that the people of Asia, Africa, and Latin America lived a happy, ideal existence prior to the impact of western man. “The elemental truth must be stressed that the characteristic of any country before its industrial revolution and modernization is poverty, with low productivity, low output per head, in traditional agriculture.”
What this also meant was that, given the sheer numbers of Asiatic peasants and craftsmen, Asia still contained a far larger share of world manufacturing output than did the much less populous Europe before the steam engine and the power loom transformed the world’s balances.
Not only did their shares of total world manufacturing shrink relatively, simply because the West’s output was rising so swiftly; but in some cases their economies declined absolutely, that is, they deindustrialized, because of the penetration of their traditional markets by the far cheaper and better products of the Lancashire textile factories.
In this early-19th-century expansion, the British were undoubtedly the “winners.” They had already achieved a remarkable degree of global preeminence by 1815, thanks to their adroit combination of naval mastery, financial credit, commercial expertise, and alliance diplomacy. What the Industrial Revolution did was to enhance the position of a country already made supremely successful in the preindustrial, mercantilist struggles of the 18th century, and then to transform it into a different sort of power.
Between 1760 and 1830, the UK was responsible for around 2/3 of Europe’s industrial growth of output, and its share of world manufacturing production leaped from 1.9 to 9.5%; in the next 30 years, British industrial expansion pushed that figure to 19.9%, despite the spread of the new technology to other countries in the West. With 2% of the world’s population and 10% of Europe’s, the UK would seem to have had a capacity in modern industries equal to 40-45% of the world’s potential and 55-60% of that in Europe. Its energy consumption from modern sources (coal, lignite, oil) in 1860 was 5 times that of either the US or Prussia/Germany, 6 times that of France, and 155 times that of Russia.
The plains of North America and Russia are our corn fields; Chicago and Odessa our granaries; Canada and the Baltic are our timber forests; Australia contains our sheep farms, and in Argentina and on the western prairies of North America are our herds of oxen; Peru sends her silver, and the gold of South Africa and Australia flows to London; the Hindus and the Chinese grow tea for us, and our coffee, sugar and spice plantations are in all the Indies. Spain and France are our vineyards and the Mediterranean our fruit garden; and our cotton grounds, which for long have occupied the Southern United States, are now being extended everywhere in the warm regions of the earth.
By itself the volume of total GNP has no important significance; the physical product of hundreds of millions of peasants may dwarf that of five million factory workers, but since most of it is immediately consumed, it is far less likely lead to surplus wealth or decisive military striking power.
For 50 years and more following 1815 the armed services consumed only about 2-3% of GNP, and central government expenditures as a whole took much less than 10%. These would have been impressively figures for a country of modest means and ambitions. For a state which managed to “rule the waves,” which possessed an enormous, far-flung empire, and still claimed a large interest in preserving the European balance of power, they were truly remarkable.
Like that of the US in, say, the early 1920s, therefore, the size of the British economy in the world was not reflected in the country’s fighting power; nor could its laissez-faire institutional structures, with a minuscule bureaucracy increasingly divorced from trade and industry, have been able to mobilize British resources for an all-out war without a great upheaval.
Even in the extra-European world, where Britain preferred to deploy its regiments, military and political officials in places such as India were almost always complaining of the inadequacy of the forces they commanded, given the sheer magnitude of the territories they controlled. However imposing the empire may have appeared on a world map, district officers knew that it was being run on a shoestring.
Outside Europe, where smaller Royal Navy fleets or even individual warships engaged in a whole host of activities — suppressing piracy, intercepting slaving ships, landing marines, and overawing local potentates from Canton to Zanzibar — the impact seemed perhaps even more decisive.
The second point was that the British economy acted as a vast bellows, sucking in enormous amounts of raw materials and foodstuffs and sending out vast quantities of textiles, iron goods, and other manufactures, and this pattern of visible trade was paralleled, and complemented, by the network of shipping lines, insurance arrangements, and banking links which spread outward from London.
While all of this made Britons wealthier than ever in the short term, did it not also contain elements of strategic danger in the longer term? With the wisdom of retrospect, one can detect at least two consequences of these structural economic changes which would later affect Britain’s relative power in the world. The first was the way in which the country was contributing to the long-term expansion of other nations, both by establishing and developing foreign industries and agriculture with repeated financial injections and by building railways, harbors, and steamships which would enable overseas producers to rival its own production in future decades. In this connection, it is worth noting that while the coming of steam power, the factory system, railway, and later electricity enabled the British to overcome natural, physical obstacles to higher productivity, and thus increased the nation’s wealth and strength, such inventions helped the US, Russia, and central Europe even more, because the natural, physical obstacles to the development of their landlocked potential were much greater.
The second potential strategical weakness lay in the increasing dependence of the British economy upon international trade and, more important, international finance.
The world was the City of London’s oyster, which was all very well in peacetime; but what would the situation be if ever it came to another Great Power war? Would Britain’s export markets be even more badly affected than in 1809? Was not the entire economy, and domestic population becoming too dependent upon imported goods, which might easily be cut off or suspended in periods of conflict? And would not the London-based global banking and financial system collapse at the onset of another world war, since the market might be closed, insurances suspended, international capital transfer retarded, and credit ruined? In such circumstances, ironically, the advanced British economy might be more severely hurt than a state which was less “mature” but also less dependent upon international trade and finance.
Given these auspicious circumstances, fears of strategical weakness appeared groundless; and most mid-Victorian preferred, like Kingsley as he cried tears of pride during the Great Exhibition at the Crytal Palace in 1851, to believe that a cosmic destiny was at work:
“The spinning jenny and the railroad, Cunard’s liners and the electric telegraph, are to me signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among us … the Ordering and Creating God.”
Like all other civilizations at the top of the wheel of fortune, therefore, the British could believe that their position was both “natural” and destined to continue. And just like all those other civilizations, they were in for a rude shock. But that was still some way into the future, and in the age of Palmerston and Macaulay, it was British strengths rather than weaknesses which were mostly in evidence.
If the coming of peace meant a resumption of normal trade and also continental entrepreneurs to see how far behind Great Britain they had fallen, it did not produce a sudden burst of modernization. There simply was not enough capital, or local demand, or official enthusiasm, to produce a transformation; and many a European merchant, craftsman, and handloom weaver would bitterly oppose the adoption of English techniques, seeing in them (quite correctly) a threat to their older way of life.
All those periods of tension merely confirmed what the quarrels with Vienna and occasional growls from St. Petersburg already suggested: that Prussia in the first half of the 19th century was the least of the Great Powers, disadvantaged by geography, overshadowed by powerful neighbors, distracted by internal and inner-German problems, and quite incapable of playing a larger role in international affairs.
Yes, as with many other things in life, strategical weakness is relative; and, compared with the Habsburg Empire to the south, Prussia’s problems were perhaps not so daunting. If the period 1648-1815 had seen the empire “rising” and “asserting itself,” that expansion had not eliminated the difficulties under which Vienna labored as it strove to carry out a Great Power role.
It was true that each of these tasks was supported by one or more of the other Great Powers, depending upon the context; but the Habsburg Empire was vital to the functioning of this complex five-sided checkmate, if only because it seemed to have the greatest interest of all in freezing the 1815 settlement — whereas France, Prussia, and Russia, sooner or later, wanted some changes.
The fact was that in an age of increasing national consciousness, the Habsburg Empire looked ever more of an anachronism. The Austrian Emperor ruled an ethnic mishmash that must have made him groan every time he thought about it. He and 8M of his subjects were German, but twice as many were Slavs of one sort or another (Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ruthenians, Slovenes, Croats and Serbs), 5M were Hungarians, 5M Italians and 2M Romanians. What sort of nation did that make? The answer is none at all.
Since there were no railway south of Moscow (!), the horse-drawn supply wagon had to cross hundreds of miles of steppes, which were a sea of mud during the spring thaw and the autumn rains. Furthermore, the horses themselves required so much fodder (which in turn had to be carried by other packhorses, and so on) that an enormous logistical effort produced disproportionately small results: allied troops and reinforcements could be sent from France and England by sea to the Crimea in 3 weeks, whereas Russian troops from Moscow sometimes took 3 months to reach the front.
If the Crimean War had shocked the British, that was nothing compared to the blow which had been delivered to Russia’s power and self-esteem. “We cannot deceive ourselves any longer. We are both weaker and poorer than the 1st class powers, and furthermore poorer not only in material but also in mental resources, especially in matters of administration.”
Military effectiveness is, after all, relative — which was later demonstrated by the fact that Habsburg forces could still deal easily with the Italians on land and at sea even when they were incapable of taking on France, or Prussia, or Russia.
The railway supply system by itself did not guarantee success; often it merely built up a vast stockpile of stores at the frontier, while the armies which needed those stocks had moved away from any nearby lines.
The real point about the Prussian system was not that it was free of errors, but that the general staff carefully studied its past mistakes and readjusted training, organization, and weapons accordingly.
Europe, to repeat the quip of the day, had lost a mistress and gained a master. Under Bismarck’s astonishing adroit handling, the Great Power system was going to be dominated by Germany for two whole decades after 1870; all roads, diplomats remarked, now led to Berlin. Yet as most people could see, it was not merely the cleverness and ruthlessness of the imperial chancellor which made Germany the most important power on the European continent. It was also German industry and technology, which boomed still faster once national unification had been accomplished; it was German science and education and local administration; and it was the impressive Prussian army. That the Second German Reich possessed major internal flaws, over which Bismarck constantly fretted, was scarcely noticed by outside observers.
Even the usually cautious British PM Lord Salisbury admitted in 1898 that the world was divided into the “living” and “dying” powers. The recent Chinese defeat in their war with Japan, the humiliation of Spain by the US in their brief conflict, and the French retreat before Britain over the incident on the Upper Nile were all interpreted as evidence that the “survival of the fittest” dictated the fates of nations as well as animal species.
Individuals still counted — who, in the century of Lenin, Hitler, and Stalin, could say they did not? — but they counted in power politics only because they were able to control and reorganize the productive forces of a great state. And, as Nazi Germany’s own fate revealed, the test of world power by war was ruthlessly uncaring to any nation which lacked the industrial-technical strength, and thus the military weaponry, to achieve its leader’s ambitions.
The power of a nation-state by no means consists only in its armed forces, but also in its economic and technological resources; in the dexterity, foresight and resolution with which its foreign policy is conducted; in the efficiency of its social and political organization. It consists most of all in the nation itself, the people; their skills, energy, ambition, discipline, initiative; their beliefs, myths and illusions. And it consists, further, in the way all these factors are related to one another. Moreover national power has to be considered not only in itself, in its absolute extent, but relative to the state’s foreign or imperial obligations; it has to be considered relative to the power of other states.
It did create an iron and steel industry, but in 1913 its output was 1/8 that of Britain, 1/17 that of Germany, and only 2/5 that of Belgium. It did achieve swift rates of industrial growth, but that was from such a very low beginning level that the real results were not impressive. At the outset of WW1, it had not achieved even 1/4 of the industrial strength which Britain possessed in 1900.
The loyalties which existed in the Italian body politic were familial and local, perhaps regional, but not national.
The 1896 catastrophe at Adowa gave Italy the awful reputation of having the only European army defeated by an African society without means of effective response.
The alliance treaty that Italy signed in 1882 with Berlin was comforting at first, particularly when Bismarck seemed to paralyze the French; but even then the Italian government kept pressing for closer ties with Britain, which alone could neutralize the French fleet. When, in the years after 1900, Britain and France moved closer together and Britain and Germany moved from cooperation to antagonism, the Italians felt that they had little alternative but to tack toward the new Anglo-French combination.
The cause of this transformation, effected by the Meiji Restoration from 1868 onward, was the determination of influential members of the Japanese elite to avoid being dominated and colonized by the West, as seemed to be happening elsewhere in Asia, even if the reform measures to be taken involved the scrapping of the feudal order and the bitter opposition of the samurai clans. Japan had to be modernized not because individual entrepreneurs wished it, but because the “state” needed it. After the early opposition had been crushed, modernization proceeded with a dirigisme and commitment which makes the efforts of Colbert or Frederick the Great pale by comparison. A new constitution, based on the Prusso-German model, was established. The legal system was reformed. The educational system was vastly expanded, so that the country achieved an exceptionally high literacy rate.
If the new warships are considered necessary we must, at any cost, build them: if the organization of our army is inadequate we must start rectifying it from now; if need be, our entire military system must be changed.
At present Japan must keep calm and sit tight, so as to lull suspicions nurtured against her; during this time the foundations of national power must be consolidated; and we must watch and wait for the opportunity in the Orient that will surely come one day. When this day arrives, Japan will decide her own fate.
The samurai spirit, it seemed, could secure battlefield victories with they bayonet even in the age of mass industrialized warfare. If, as all the contemporary military experts concluded, morale and discipline were still vital prerequisites of national power, Japan was rich in those resources.
Even then, however, Japan was not a full-fledged Great Power. Japan had been fortunate to have fought an even more backward China and a czarist Russia which was military top-heavy and disadvantaged by the immense distance between St. Petersburg and the Far East.
Most important of all, it had found the immense costs of the war impossible to finance from its own resources and yet had been able to rely upon loans floated in the US and Britain. As it turned out, Japan was close to bankruptcy by the end of 1905, when the peace negotiations with Russia got under way.
In June 1914 the octogenarian Lord Welby recalled that “the German they remembered in the 50s was a cluster of insignificant states under insignificant princelings”; now, in one man’s lifetime, it was the most powerful state in Europe, and still growing.
The German race brings it. It brings army, navy, money and power. Modern, gigantic instruments of power are possible only when an active people feels the spring-time juices in its organs.
In this age of the “new imperialism,” similar calls could be heard in every other Great Power, each country seemed to be asserting, “We are the pick and flower of nations… above all things qualified for governing others.”
The question is not whether we want to colonize or not, but that we must colonize, whether we want it or not.
Even here it may be unwise to exaggerate the particularly aggressive nature of this German “ideological consensus” for expansion; statesmen in France and Russia, Britain and Japan, the US and Italy were also announcing their country’s manifest destiny, although perhaps in a less deterministic and frenetic tone.
Germany was “born encircled.” Even if German expansionism was directed overseas, where could it go without trespassing upon the spheres of influence of other Great Powers?
Germany was to go empty-handed. When Bulow, in his famous “hammer or anvil” speech of 1899, angrily declared, “We cannot allow any foreign power, any foreign Jupiter to tell us: ‘What can be done? The world is already partitioned,’” he was expressing a widely held resentment. Little wonder that German publicists called for a redivision of the globe.
To be sure, all rising powers call for changes in an international order which has been fixed to the advantage of the older, established powers. From a Realpolitik viewpoint, the question was whether this particular challenger could secure changes without provoking too much opposition. And while geography played an important role here, diplomacy was also important; because Germany did not enjoy, say, Japan’s geopolitical position, its statecraft had to be of an extraordinarily high order. Realizing the unease and jealousy which the Second Reich’s sudden emergence had caused, Bismarck strove after 1871 to convince the other Great Powers that Germany had no further territorial ambitions. Wilhelm and his advisers, eager to show their mettle, were much less careful. Not only did they convey their dissatisfaction with the existing order, but — and this was the greatest failure of all — the decision-making process in Berlin concealed, behind a facade of high imperial purpose, a chaos and instability which amazed all who witnessed it in close action.
While some observers felt that a war would unite the nation behind the emperor, others feared it would further strain the German sociopolitical fabric. Again, this needs to be placed in context — for example, German internal weaknesses were hardly as serious as those in Russia or Austria-Hungary, but they did exist, and they certainly could affect the country’s ability to engage in a lengthy “total” war.
Russian and Austrian anti-Semitism was at least as strong as German, French chauvinism as marked as the German, Japan’s sense of cultural uniqueness and destiny as broadly held as Germany’s. Each of the powers examined here was “special,” and in an age of imperialism was all too eager to assert its specialness. From the criterion of power politics, however, Germany did possess unique features which were of great import. It was the one Great Power which combined the modern, industrialized strength of the western democracies with the autocratic decision-making features of the eastern monarchies. It was the one “newcomer” Great Power, with the exception of the US, which really had the strength to challenge the existing order.
Vienna controlled the most ethnically diverse cluster of peoples in Europe — when the war came in 1914, for example, the mobilization order was given in 15 different languages.
To cap it all, it seemed to have so many possible foes that its general staff had to plan for a whole variety of campaigns — a complication which very few of the other Great Powers were distracted with.
The heart of the matter was simply that Austria-Hungary was trying to act the part of a great power with the resources of a second-rank one. The desperate efforts to be strong on all fronts ran a serious risk of making the empire weak everywhere.
Until Henry Ford’s mass-production methods were developed, indeed, France was the leading automobile producer in the world.
Above all, the French poured money into the modernization of their Russian ally — on the condition that the Russian strategic railway system in the Polish provinces be greatly extended, so that the “Russian steamroller” could be mobilized the faster to crush Germany. This was the clearest demonstration yet of France’s ability to use its financial muscle to bolster its own strategic power (although the irony was that the more efficient the Russian military machine became, the more the Germans had to prepare to strike quickly against France).
Not only could the Prussian general staff, employing its better-trained reserves, mobilize somewhat over 100 divisions, but it had a vast manpower potential to draw upon — almost 10M men in the requisite age group, compared with France’s 5M; and it possessed the fantastic figure of 112K well-trained NCOs — the key element in an expanding army — compared with France’s 48K.
Most important of all, the French had been able to compose their colonial differences with Britain in the 1904 entente, and then to convince leading members of the Liberal government in London that France’s security was a British national interest. Although domestic-political reasons in Britain precluded a fixed alliance, the chances of France obtaining future British support improved with each addition to Germany’s High Seas Fleet and with every indication that a German strike westward would go through neutral Belgium.
France was not strong enough to oppose Germany in 1-to-1 struggle, something which all French governments were determined to avoid. If the mark of a Great Power is a country which is willing and able to take on any other, then France (like Austria-Hungary) had slipped to a lower position. But that definition seemed too abstract in 1914 to a nation which felt psychologically geared up for war, militarily stronger than ever, wealthy, and, above all, endowed with powerful allies.
There had taken place, in the half-century or so before the [1914] war, a tremendous expansion of British power, accompanied by a pronounced lack of sympathy for any similar ambition on the part of other nations… If any nation had truly made a bid for world power, it was Great Britain. In fact, it had more than made a bid for it. It had achieved it. The Germans were merely talking about building a railway to Bagdad. The Queen of England was Empress of India. If any nation had upset the world’s balance of power, it was Great Britain.
However, if viewed from other perspectives — say, from the sober calculations of the British “official mind,” or from that of later historians of the collapse of British power — the late 19th century was certainly not a time when the empire was making a “bid for world power.” On the contrary, that “bid” had been made a century earlier and had climaxed in the 1815 victory, which allowed the country to luxuriate in the consequent half-century of virtually unchallenged maritime and imperial preeminence. After 1870, however, the shifting balance of world forces was eroding British supremacy in two ominous and interacting ways. The first was that the spread of industrialization and the changes in the military and naval weights which followed from it weakened the relative position of the British Empire more than that of any other country, because it was the established Great Power, with less to gain than to lose from fundamental alterations in the status quo.
While some of these problems (in Africa or China) were fairly new, others (the rivalry with Russia in Asia, and with the US in the western hemisphere) had exercised many earlier British administrations. What was different now was that the relative power of the various challenger states was much greater, while the threats seemed to be developing almost simultaneously. Just as the Austro-Hungarian Empire was distracted by having to grapple with a number of enemies within Europe, so British statesmen had to engage in a diplomatic and strategical juggling act that was literally worldwide in its dimensions.
It was a juggling act which had to be carried out in naval terms as well; for no matter how regularly the Royal Navy’s budget was increased, it could no longer “rule the waves” in the face of the five or six foreign fleets which were building in the 1890s, as it had bene able to do in midcentury. As the Admiralty repeatedly pointed out, it could meet the American challenge in the western hemisphere, but only by diverting warships from European waters, just as it could increase the size of the Royal Navy in the Far East, but only be weakening its squadrons in the Mediterranean. It could not be strong everywhere.
The second, interacting weakness was less immediate and dramatic, but perhaps even more serious. It was the erosion of Britain’s industrial and commercial preeminence, upon which, in the last resort, its naval, military, and imperial strength rested.
In terms of industrial muscle, both the US and imperial Germany had moved ahead. The “workshop of the world” was now in third place, not because it wasn’t growing, but because others were growing faster.
Nothing frightened the thinking British imperialists more than this relative economic decline, simply because its impact upon British power.
It was true that if Britain became involved in a lengthy, mass-industrialized conflict between the Great Powers, it would find that much of its armaments industry was inadequate, reflecting the traditional assumption that the British army was to be deployed and equipped for small colonial wars and not gigantic continental struggles. But for the greater part of this period, those were exactly the sort of conflicts in which the army was involved. And if the exhausting, lengthy “modern” warfare of trenches and machine guns which at least some pundits were already forecasting in 1898 did come to pass, then the British would not be alone in wanting the correct materiel.
That Britain also possessed economic strengths in this period ought to be a warning, therefore, against too gloomy and sweeping a portrayal of the country’s problems.
But there is also a danger of exaggerating and anticipating the pace of that decline and of ignoring the country’s very considerable assets, even in the nonindustrial sphere. It was, in the first place, immensely wealthy, both at home and abroad.
In addition, although the possession of an extensive and hard-to-defend colonial empire implied immense strategical problems, it also brought with it considerable strategical advantages. The great array of imperial garrisons, coaling stations, and fleet bases, readily reinforceable by sea, placed it in an extremely strong position against European powers in any conflict fought outside the continent.
Finally, it might cynically be argued that because British power and influence had been extended so much in earlier times, Britain now possessed lots of buffer zones, lots of less-than-vital areas of interest, and therefore lots of room for compromise, especially in its spheres of so-called “informal empire.”
But this position as number one was also the essential British problem. Britain was now a mature state, with a built-in interest in preserving existing arrangements or, at least, in ensuring that things altered slowly and peacefully. It would fight for certain obvious aims — the defense of India, the maintenance of naval superiority especially in home waters, probably also the preservation of the European balance of power — but each issue had to be set in its larger context and measured against Britain’s other interests. While this made Britain’s future policy frustratingly ambiguous and uncertain to decision-makers in Paris and Berlin, it reflected Palmerston’s still widely held claim that the country had permanent interests but not permanent allies.
But perhaps the best indication of its underdeveloped status was the fact that as late as 1913, 63% of Russian exports consisted of agricultural produce and 11% of timber, both desperately needed to pay for the American farm equipment, German machine tools, and the interest on the country’s vast foreign debt — which, however, they did not quite manage to do.
Yet the assessment of Russian strength is worse when it comes to comparative output. Although Russia was the 4th-largest industrial power before 1914, it was a long way behind the US, Britain, and Germany.
In the fast-growing cities, the workers had to contend with no sewerage, health hazards, appalling housing conditions, and high rents. There were fantastic levels of drunkenness — a short-term escape from brute reality. The mortality rate was the highest in Europe. Such conditions, the discipline enforced within the factories, and the lack of any appreciable real rise in living standards produced a sullen resentment of the system which in turn offered an ideal breeding ground for the populists, Bolsheviks, anarchosyndicalists, radicals — indeed, for anybody who (despite the censorship) argued for drastic changes.
In short, it is not simply from the perspective of the post-Bolshevik Revolution that one can see that Russia before 1914 was a sociopolitical tinderbox, and very likely to produce large conflagrations in the event of further bad harvests, or reductions in the factory workers’s standards of living, or — possibly — a great war. One is bound to use the words “very likely” here, since there also existed (alongside these discontents) a deep loyalty to czar and country in many areas, an increasingly nationalistic assembly, broad Pan-Slavic sympathies, and a corresponding hatred of the foreigner. Indeed, there was many a feckless publicist and courtier, in 1914 as in 1904, who argued that the regime could not afford to appear reticent in great international issues. If it came to war, they urged, the nation would firmly support the pursuit of victory.
In the war against Japan, the Russian soldier had fought bravely and stolidly enough — as he had in the Crimea and in the 1877 war against Turkey — but incompetent staffwork, poor logistical support, and unimaginative tactics all had had their effect.
The same sort of gloomy conclusions arose when Russia’s planned mobilization and strategic-railway system were examined in detail. Although the overall mileage of the railway network by 1914 seemed impressive, once it was set against the immense distances of the Russian Empire — or compared with the much denser systems of western Europe — its inadequacy became clear. In any case, since many of these lines were built on the cheap, the rails were often too light and the bedding for the track to weak, and there were too few water tanks and crossings.
The 50 divisions of Russian cavalry, thought vital in a country with few modern roads, required so much fodder — there were about 1M horses! — that they alone would probably produce a breakdown in the railway system; supplying hay would certainly slow down any sustained offensive operation, or even the movement of reserves. Because of the backwardness of its transport system and the internal-policing roles of the military, literally millions of its soldiers in wartime would not be considered front-line troops at all.
Achieving radical reforms in this atmosphere was impossible, when the aristocracy cared only for its privileges and the czar cared only for his peace of mind. Here was an elite in constant fear of workers’ and peasants’ unrest, and yet, although government spending was by far the largest in the world in absolute terms, it kept direct taxes on the rich to a minimum (6% of the state’s revenue) and placed massive burdens upon foodstuffs and vodka (about 40%).
The US seemed to have all the economic advantages which some of the other powers possessed in part, but none of their disadvantages.
Technologically, leading American firms like International Harvester, Singer, Du Pont, Bell, Colt, and Standard Oil were equal to, or often better than, any in the world; and they enjoyed an enormous domestic market and economies of scale, which their German, British, and Swiss rivals did not.
Its pig-iron production was larger than those of the next 3 countries (Germany, Britain, France) combined, and its steel production almost equal to the next 4 countries (Germany, Britain, Russia, and France).
It was, in fact an entire rival continent and growing so fart that it was coming close to the point of overtaking all of Europe. According to one calculation, indeed, had these growth rates continued and a world war been avoided, the US would have overtaken Europe as the region possessing the greatest economic output in the world by 1925. What WW1 did was to bring that time forward, by six years, to 1919. The “Vasco da Gamma era” — the 4 centuries of European dominance in the world — was coming to an end even before the cataclysm of 1914.
This growth of American industrial power and overseas trade was accompanied, perhaps inevitably, by a more assertive diplomacy and by an American-style rhetoric of Weltpolitik. Claims to a special moral endowment among the peoples of the earth which made American foreign policy superior to those of Old World were intermingled with Social Darwinistic and racial arguments, and with the urging of industrial and agricultural pressure groups for secure overseas markets. The traditional, if always exaggerated, alarm about threats to the Monroe Doctrine was accompanied by calls for the US to fulfill its “Manifest Destiny” across the Pacific.
Even as late as 1892 the New York Herald was proposing the abolition of the State Department, since it had so little business to conduct overseas.
In fact, given its turn-of-the-century rapprochement with Great Britain, the US was immensely secure, and even if it feared the rise of German sea power, it really had far less to worry about than any of the other major powers.
The small size of the US military was in many ways a reflection of that state of security.
No doubt Russia seemed the more powerful to all those European general staffs thinking of swiftly fought wars involving masses of available troops; but by all other criteria, the US was strong and Russia weak.
The first was the growing suspicion held by the British and French toward Germany, whose aims, although unclear, looked ambitious and dangerous, as Chancellor Bulow proclaimed the coming of the “German century.”
Yet the results of the Algeciras meeting, which saw most of the conference participants supporting France’s claim to a special position in Morocco, were a devastating confirmation of just how far Germany’s diplomatic influence had declined since Bismarck’s day, even as it industrial, naval, and military power had grown.
But these coalitions meant that even if one belligerent was heavily beaten in a campaign or saw its resources were inadequate to sustain further conflict, it was encouraged to remain in the war by the hope — and promises — of aid from its allies.
When Russia, like the other combatants, swiftly learned that it was using up its ammunition stocks about ten times faster than the prewar estimates, it had massively to expand its home production — which turned out to be far more reliable than waiting for the greatly delayed overseas orders, even if it also implied diverting resources into the self-interested hands of the Moscow industrialists.
By that time, too, it had decided to call up the 2nd-category recruits (males who were the sole breadwinners in the family), which not only produced tremendous peasant unrest in the villages, but also brought into the army hundreds of thousands of bitterly discontented conscripts.
When the British entered the war in August 1914, it was with no sense that they, too, would be dependent upon another Great Power in order to secure ultimate victory.
Although this looked like a repetition of Britain’s 18th-century role as “banker to the coalition,” there was now one critical difference: the sheer size of the trade deficit with the US, which was supplying billions of dollars’ worth of munitions and foodstuffs to the Allies yet required few goods in return. Neither the transfer of gold nor the sale of Britain’s enormous dollar securities could close this gap; only borrowing on the NY and Chicago money markets, to pay the American munitions suppliers in dollars, would do the trick. This in turn meant that the Allies became ever more dependent upon US financial aid to sustain their own war effort. In October 1916, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer was warning that “by next June, or earlier, the President of the American Republic would be in a position, if he wishes, to dictate his terms to us.” It was an altogether alarming position for “independent” Great Powers to be in.
This combination of on the one hand an authoritarian regime exercising all sorts of powers over the population and on the other a great growth in government borrowing and printing of paper money rather than raising income and dividend taxes — which, in turn, produced high inflation — dealt a heavy blow to popular morale — an ingredient in grand strategy which Ludendorff was far less equipped to understand than, say, a politician like Lloyd George or Clemenceau.
It is in this grand-strategical context, of each bloc being exhausted by the war but of Germany still possessing an overall military advantage, that one must place the high command’s inept policies toward the US in the first few months of 1917.
Its total industrial potential and its share of world manufacturing output was two and a half times that of Germany’s now overstrained economy. It could launch merchant ships in their hundreds. It could build destroyers in the astonishing time of three months. It produced half of the world’s food exports.
To the prophets of world politics in that earlier period, it was self-evident that the international scene was going to be increasingly influenced, if not dominated, by the three rising powers of Germany, Russia, and the US. Instead, the first named had been decisively defeated, the second had collapsed in revolution and then withdrawn into its Bolshevik-led isolation, and the third, although clearly the most powerful nation in the world by 1919, also preferred to retreat from the center of the diplomatic stage. In consequence, international affairs during the 1920s and beyond still seemed to focus either upon the actions of France and Britain, even though both countries had been badly hurt by the WW1, or upon the deliberations of the League, in which French and British statesmen were preeminent.
By the late 1920s, indeed, with prosperity returning to Europe, with the League apparently accepted as an important new element in the international system, and with a plethora of states solemnly agreeing not to resort to war to settle future disputes, the diplomatic stage seemed to have returned to normal. Statesmen such as Stressemann, Briand, and Austen Chamberlain appeared, in their way, the latter-day equivalents of Metternich and Bismarck, meeting at this or that European spa to settle the affairs of the world.
For the fact was that modern war, and the industrial productivity generated by it, also had positive effects. In strictly economic and technological terms, these years had seen many advances: in automobile and truck production, in aviation, in oil refining and chemicals, in the electrical and dyestuff and alloy-steel industries, in refrigeration and canning, and in a whole host of other industries.
Making peace at Versailles and drawing the map of Europe along (roughly) ethnic lines did not itself guarantee a restoration of economic stability.
All the European allies were in debt to Britain, and to a lesser extent to France; while those two powers were heavily in debt to the US. With the Bolsheviks’ repudiating Russia’s massive borrowings of $3.6B, with the Americans asking for their money back, with France, Italy, and other countries refusing to pay off their debts until they had received reparations from Germany, and with the Germans declaring that they could not possibly pay the amounts demanded of them, the scene was set for years of bitter wrangling, which sharply widened the gap in political sympathies between western Europe and a disgruntled US.
But perhaps even more disruptive feature, to those fondly looking back at the cabinet diplomacy of the 19th century, was the increasing influence of mass public opinion upon international affairs during the 1920s and 1930s. In some ways, of course, this was inevitable. Even before WW1, political groups across Europe had been criticizing the arcane, secretive methods and elitist preconceptions of the “old diplomacy,” and calling instead for a reformed system, where the affairs of state were open to the scrutiny of the people and their representatives.
To hundreds of thousands of former Frontsoldaten across the continent of Europe, disillusioned by the unemployment and inflation and boredom of the postwar bourgeois-dominated order, the conflict had represented something searing but positive: martial values, the camaraderies of warriors, the thrill of violence and action. To such groups, especially in the defeated nations of Germany and Hungary and in the bitterly dissatisfied victor nation of Italy, but also among the French right, the ideas of the new fascist movements — of order, discipline, and national glory, of the smashing of the Jews, Bolsheviks, intellectual decadents, and self-satisfied liberal middle classes — had great appeal. In their eyes (and in the eyes of their equivalents in Japan), it was struggle and force and heroism which were the enduring features of life, and the tenets of Wilsonian internationism which were false and outdated.
Ironically, yet predictably, the more that colonialism penetrated underdeveloped societies, drew them into a global network of trade and finance, and brought them into contact with western ideas, the more this provoked an indigenous reaction; whether it came in the form of tribal unrest against restrictions upon their traditional patterns of life and trade or, more significantly, in the form of western-educated lawyers and intellectuals seeking to create mass parties and campaigning for national self-determination, the result was an increasing challenge to European colonial controls.
Furthermore, the campaigning in West, Southwest, and East Africa, in the Near East, and in the Pacific raised questions about the viability and permanence of colonial empires in general — a tendency reinforced by Allied propaganda about “national self-determination” and “democracy.”
And it was overtaken altogether by the coming of the two versions of the “new diplomacy” proposed by Lenin and Wilson — for whatever the political differences between those charismatic leaders, they had in common a dislike of the old European colonial order and a desire to transform it into something else.
The swift collapse of Germany in October 1918 when its armies still controlled Europe from Belgium to Ukraine came as a great shock to nationalist, right-wing forces, who tended to blame “traitors within” for the humiliating surrender. When the terms of the Paris settlement brought even more humiliations, vast numbers of Germans denounced both the “slave treaty” and the Weimar-democratic politicians who had agreed to such terms.
Furthermore, because of the earlier disagreements between the French and British versions of what the League should be — a policeman or a conciliator — the body lacked enforcement powers and had no real machinery of collective security. Ironically, therefore, the League’s actual contribution turned out to be not deterring aggressors, but confusing the democracies. It was immensely popular with war-wearied public opinion in the West, but its very creation then permitted many the argument that there was no need for national defense forces since the League would somehow prevent future wars. In consequence, the existence of the League caused cabinets and foreign ministers to wobble between the “old” and the “new” diplomacy, usually securing the benefits of neither.
Secondly, the interwar developments in military technology made the armed forces more dependent than ever upon the productive forces of their nations. Without a flourishing industrial base and, more important still, without a large, advanced scientific community which could be mobilized by the state in order to keep pace with new developments in weaponry, victory in another great war was inconceivable.
Alas for such dreams, fascist Italy was, in power-political terms, spectacularly weak. The key problem was that even “at the end of WW1 Italy, economically speaking, was a semideveloped country.” Its per capita income in 1920 was probably equal to that achieved by Britain and the US in the early 19th century, and by France a few decades later.
At the root of Italy’s weakness was the continued reliance upon small-scale agriculture, which in 1920 accounted for 40% of GNP and absorbed 50% of the total working population. It was a further sign of this economic backwardness that even as late as 1938 over half a family’s expenditure went on food.
Its prospects were made the bleaker by the fact that its armed forces were the victims of early rearmament — and swift obsolescence.
Furthermore, all of these weapon systems were just beginning to be affected by the changes in electrical communications, by improvements in navigational devices and antisubmarine detection equipment, by early radar and improved radio equipment — which not only made the newer weapons so much more expensive, but also complicated the procurement process.
All of this emphasis upon weaponry and numbers does, of course, ignore the elements of leadership, quality of personnel, and national proclivity for combat; but the sad fact was that, far from compensating for Italy’s meteriel deficiencies, those elements merely added to its relative weakness. Despite superficial fascist indoctrination, nothing in Italian society and political culture had altered between 1900 and 1930 to make the army a more attractive career for talented, ambitious males.
Rarely in the history of human conflict has it been argued that the entry of an additional foe would hurt one’s enemy more than oneself; but Mussolini’s Italy was, in that way at least, unique.
In the world of the 1920s and 1930s, heavily colored by racist and cultural prejudices, many in the West tended to dismiss the Japanese as “little yellow men”; only during the devastating attacks upon Pearl Harbor, Malaya, and the Philippines was this crude stereotype of a myopic, stunted, unmechanical people revealed for the nonsense it was.
While other armies merely talked of fighting to the last man, Japanese soldiers took the phrase literally, and did so.
By 1938, in fact, Japan had not only become much stronger economically than Italy, but had also overtaken France in all of the indices of manufacturing and industrial production. Had its military leaders not gone to war in China in 1937 and, more disastrously, in the Pacific in 1941, one is tempted to conclude that it would also have overtaken British output well before actually doing so, in the mid-1960s.
The “China Incident,” as Tokyo referred to it, was now costing $5M a day and causing an even larger rise in defense spending. Rationing was introduced in 1938, as were a whole series of enactments which virtually put Japan onto a “total war” mobilization. The national debt spiraled upward at an alarming rate as the government borrowed more and more to pay for the enormous defense expenditures.
The “moral embargo” upon the export of aeronautical materials in June 1938, the abrogation of the American-Japanese trade treaty in the following year, and, most of all, the British-Dutch-US ban of oil and iron-ore exports following the Japanese takeover of Indochina in July 1941 made it clear that “economic security” could be achieved only at the price of war with the US. But the US had nearly twice the population of Japan, and 17 times the national income, produced 5 times as much steel, and 7 times as much coal, and made 80 times as many motor vehicles each year.
If the navy was less impressive in size, then that was to a large degree due to the fact that the creation of a powerful battle fleet took at least one to two decades.
Much of Hitler’s early popularity stemmed from the fact that the widespread programs of roadbuilding, electrification, and industrial investment greatly reduced the unemployment totals even before conscription did the rest.
The leading figures in the army were in their 60s and 70s, defensive-minded, cautious, uninterested in tactical innovations. While flatly rejecting de Gaulle’s proposals with alternative ways of using the newer weapons of war.
Finally, this imperial strand in British grand strategy was powerfully reinforced by the Royal Navy’s obsession with sending a “main fleet to Singapore” and with Whitehall’s justifiable concern about defending its distant and vulnerable possessions against the Japanese.
Its population had plummeted from 171M in 1914 to 132M in 1921. The stupendous decline in manufacturing — down to 13% of its 1913 output by 1920 — concealed the even greater collapse of certain key commodities.
By the late 1930s, indeed, Russia’s industrial output had not only soared well past that of France, Japan, and Italy but had probably overtaken Britain’s as well.
On top of this, there came the purges. The decapitation of the Red Army — 90% of all generals and 80% of all colonels suffered in Stalin’s manic drive — not only had the overall effect of destroying so many trained officers, but had specific results which badly hurt the armed forces. By wiping out Tukhachevsky and the “modern warfare” enthusiasts, by eliminating those who studied German methods and British theories, the purges left the army in the hands of such politically safe but intellectually retarded figures.
Worried by the Japanese aggression in Manchuria and perhaps even more by Hitler’s Germany, Stalin faced the prospect of a potential two-front war in theaters thousands of miles apart (exactly the strategical dilemma which paralyzed British decision-makers).
The Munich settlement not only seemed to confirm Hitler’s ambitions in east-central Europe but — more worryingly — revealed that the West was not prepared to oppose them and might indeed prefer to divert German energies farther eastward.
“To slacken the tempo would mean falling behind. And those who fall behind get beaten.” The Russia of the czars had suffered “continual beatings” because it had fallen behind in industrial productivity and military strength.
The US was the only major country, apart from Japan, to benefit from the Great War. It became the world’s greatest financial and creditor nation, in addition to its already being the largest producer of manufactures and foodstuffs. It had by far the largest stocks of gold. It had a domestic market so extensive that massive economies of scale could be practiced by giant firms and distributors, especially in the booming automobile industry. Its high standard of living and its ready availability of investment capital interacted in a mutually beneficial fashion to spur on further heavy investments in manufacturing industry, since consumer demand could absorb virtually all the goods which increased productivity offered.
It still remains staggering to note that the US in those years was producing “a larger output than that of the other six Great Powers taken together.”
The US’s political influence in the world was in no respect commensurate with her extraordinary industrial strength. In the first place, the American people decidedly rejected a leading role in world politics, with all the diplomatic and military entanglements which such a posture would inevitably produce; provided American commercial interests were not deleteriously affected by the actions of other states, there was little cause to get involved in foreign events.
Despite a widespread acceptance of world-market ideas in principle, American economic policy was much more responsive to domestic needs. Except in respect to certain raw materials, the world outside was not that important to American prosperity.
When the relative strengths and weaknesses of each of the Great Powers are viewed in their entirety, and also integrated into the economic and technological-military dynamics of the age, the course of international diplomacy during the 1930s becomes more comprehensible.
We have all been so distracted by day to day troubles that we never had a chance of surveying the whole situation and hammering out a policy regarding it, but have had to live from agitation to agitation.
It is a good reminder of the way politicians’ concerns were often immediate and practical, rather than long-term and strategic. But even after the British government had recovered its breath, there is no sign that it contemplated a change in its circumspect policy toward Japan’s conquest of Manchuria.
But the League itself, however admirable its principles, had no effective means for preventing Japanese aggression in Manchuria other than the armed forces of its leading members.
The French, predictably, were caught in a dilemma: they had no wish to see precedents being set for altering existing territorial boundaries and flouting League resolutions; on the other hand, being increasingly worried about clandestine German rearmament and the need to maintain the status quo in Europe, the French were appalled at the idea of complications arising in the Far East which would direct attention which would direct attention, and possibly military resources, away from the German problem. While Paris publicly stood firm alongside League principles, it privately let Tokyo know that it understood Japan’s problems in China.
To the French, aghast at the idea of turning a new potentially ally against Germany into a bitter foe, the whole Abyssianian episode was an unmitigated disaster: to allow a flagrant transgression of the League’s principles was disturbing, as was Mussolini’s muscle-flexing (for where might he strike next?); on the other hand, to drive Italy into the German camp would be an appalling act of folly in strictly Realpolitik terms.
In these gloomy, near-paralyzing circumstances, the role of Great Britain became of critical importance. Concerned at his country’s economic and strategical vulnerability and personally horrified at the prospect of war, Chamberlain was determined to head off any future crisis in Europe by making “positive” offers toward satisfying the dictators’ grievances.
To be sure, Italy’s participation would have complicated the Anglo-French position in the Mediterranean, but not perhaps by much, and Rome’s neutrality made it a useful conduit for German trade — which is why many of the planners in Berlin hoped that Mussolini would remain on the sidelines.
Russia could suffer appalling losses of men and equipment, and cede a million square miles of territory, and still not be defeated; the capture of Moscow, or perhaps even of Stalin himself, might not have forced a surrender, given the country’s extraordinarily large reserves. In sum, this was a limitless war, and the Third Reich, for all its imposing successes and operational brilliance, was not properly equipped to fight it.
Hitler’s fate is seal. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force.
Clearly, economic power was never the only influence upon military effectiveness, even in the mechanized, total war of 1939-1945; economics, to paraphrase Clausewitz, stood in about the same relationship to combat as the craft of the swordsmith to the art of fencing.
Because Japan was carrying out a “continental” strategy in which the army’s influence predominated, its operations in the Pacific and Southeast Asia had been implemented with a minimum of force — only 11 divisions, compared with the 13 in Manchuria and the 22 in China.
But would the USSR’s population have surrendered then and there when its only fate would have been extermination — and when it still had large productive and military reserves thousands of miles to the east? Despite the economic losses dealt by Operation Barbarossa, it is worth noting that Russia produced 4,000 more aircraft than Germany in 1941 and 10,000 more in 1942, and this was for one front, as opposed to Germany’s three.
Since the Anglo-American forces in France a few months earlier were enjoying “an effective superiority fo 20 to 1 in tanks and 25 to 1 in aircraft,” the amazing fact is that the Germans did so well for so long. To this question military historians have offered a virtually unanimous response: that German operational doctrine, emphasizing flexibility and decentralized decision-making at the battlefield level, proved far superior to the cautious, set-piece tactics of the British, the bloody, full-frontal assaults of the Russians, and the enthusiastic but unprofessional forward rushes of the Americans; that German “combined-arms” experience was better than anybody else’s; and that the caliber and training of both the staff officers and the NCOs was extraordinarily high, even in the final year of the war.
On D-Day, the Germans could muster 319 aircraft against the Allies 12,837 in the west.
By the 1943-1944, the US alone was producing one ship a day and one aircraft every five minutes.
No matter how cleverly the Wehrmacht mounted its tactical counterattacks on both the western and eastern fronts, it was to be ultimately overwhelmed by the sheer mass of Allied firepower.
Yet in the context of the 1945 campaigning, it was but one of a series of military tools which the US then could employ to compel Japan to surrender. The successful American submarine campaign was threatening to starve Japan; the swarms of B-29 bombers were pounding its towns and cities to ashes; and the American planners and their allies were preparing for a massive invasion of the home islands.
Former Great Powers — France, Italy — were already eclipsed. The German bid for mastery in Europe was collapsing, as was Japan’s bid in the Far East and Pacific.
Simply because much of the rest of the world was either exhausted by the war or still in a stage of colonial “’underdevelopment,” American power in 1945 was, for want of another term, artificially high, like, say, Britain’s in 1815.
Given the extraordinarily favorable economic and strategical position which the US thus occupied, its post-1945 outward thrust could come as no surprise to those familiar with the history of international politics. With the traditional Great Powers fading away, it steadily moved into the vacuum which their going created; having become number one, it could no longer contain itself within its own shores, or even its own hemisphere.
To this was added a determined, and perhaps excessive, advocacy by the military to ensure American control of (or unrestricted access to) strategically critical materials such as oil, rubber, and metal ores. All this combined to make the US committed to the creation of a new world order beneficial to the needs of western capitalism.
Only the later American perception of the twin dangers of widespread social discontent in Europe and growing Soviet influence, which stimulated the creation of the Marshall Plant, permitted funds to be released for the substantial industrial redevelopment of the “free world.”
Almost all of these American commitments were, it is true, “a response to events” as the Cold War unfolded; but regardless of the justification, the blunt fact was that they involved the US in a degree of global overstretch totally at variance with its own earlier history.
Little of this seems to have worried the decision-makers of 1945, many of whom appear to have felt not only that this was the working out of “manifest destiny,” but that they now had a golden opportunity to put right what the former Great Powers had managed to mess up. “American experience,” exulted Henry Luce of Life magazine, “is the key to the future… America must be the elder brother of nations in the brotherhood of man.” Not only China, in which extremely high hopes were placed, but all of the other countries of what was soon to be termed the Third World were encouraged to emulate American ideals of self-help, entrepreneurship, free trade, and democracy. “All these principles and policies are so beneficial and appealing to the sense of justice, of right and of the well-being of free peoples everywhere that in the course of a few years the entire international machinery should be working fairly satisfactorily.” Whoever was so purblind as not to appreciate that fact — whether old-fashioned British and Dutch imperialists, or leftward-tending European political parties, or the grim-faced Molotov — would be persuaded, by a mixture of sticks and carrots, in the right direction. As one American official put it, “It is now our turn to bat in Asia”; and, he might have added, nearly everywhere else as well.
And with its overseas departments and territories, it still possessed the second-largest colonial empire in the world and was determined to hang on to it. To many outside observers, especially the Americans, this attempt to regain the trappings of first-class power status while so desperately weak economically — and so dependent upon American financial support — was nothing more than a folie des grandeurs. And so, to a large extent, it was. Perhaps its chief consequence was to disguise, at least for some more years, the extent to which the strategical landscape of the globe had been altered by the war.
For the blunt fact was that in securing a victorious outcome to the war the British had severely overstrained themselves, running down their gold and dollar reserves, wearing out their domestic machinery, and becoming increasingly dependent upon American munitions, shipping, foodstuffs, and other supplies to stay in the fighting.
When the Labor government entered office in July 1945, one of the first documents it had to read was Keynes’s hair-raising memorandum about the “financial Dunkirk” which the country was facing; its colossal trade gap, its weakened industrial base, its enormous overseas establishments, meant that American aid was desperately needed, to replace the cut-off Lend-Lease. Without that help, indeed, “a greater degree of austerity would be necessary than we have experienced at any time during the war.”
Yet, the illusions of Great Power status lingered on, even among Labor ministers intent upon creating a “welfare state.” The history of the next few years therefore involved an earnest British attempt to grapple with these irreconcilables — improving domestic standards of living, moving to a “mixed economy,” closing the trade gap, and at the same time supporting a vastly extended array of overseas bases.
But to the government in London, even when Attlee replaced Churchill, it was inconceivable that the country should not possess those weapons, both as a deterrent and because they “were a manifestation of the scientific and technological superiority on which Britain’s strength, so deficient if measured in sheer numbers of men, must depend.” They were seen, in other words, as a relatively cheap way of retaining independent Great Power influence — a calculation which, shortly afterward, appealed equally to the French. Yet, however attractive that logic appeared to be, it was weakened by practical factors: that neither state would possess the weapons, and delivery systems, for some years; and that their nuclear arsenals would be minor compared with those of the superpowers, and might indeed be made obsolete by a further leap in technology. For all the ambitions of London and Paris (and, later on, China) to join the nuclear club, this striving during the early post-1945 decades was somewhat similar to the Austro-Hungarian and Italian efforts to possess their own Dreadnought-type battleships prior to 1914. It was, in other words, a reflection of weakness rather than strength.
Stalin’s suppression of the Communist International in 1943 and the West’s admiration for the Russian resistance to Operation Barbarossa also seemed to blur earlier suspicions — especially in the US, where Life magazine in 1943 airily claimed that the Russians “look like Americans, dress like Americans and think like Americans.”
Henceforward, international affairs would be presented, in even more emotional terms, as a Manichean struggle; in Eisenhower’s words, “Forces of good and evil are massed and armed and opposed as rarely before in history. Freedom is pitted against slavery, lightness against dark.”
The Greek communists, Tito, and Mao cared most about their local foes, not a global Marxist order; and the leaders of Communist parties and trade unions in the West had to respond, first and foremost, to their followers’ mood.
Among all of the varied elements of the fast-evolving “strategy of containment,” two stood out. The first, admitted by Kennan to be negative in nature although increasingly preferred by the military chiefs as offering more solid guarantees of stability, was to indicate to Moscow those regions of the globe which the US “cannot permit to fall into hands hostile to us.” Such states would, therefore, be given military support to build up their powers of resistance; and a Soviet attack on them would be regarded virtually as a casus belli. Much more positive, however, was the American recognition that resistance to Russian subversion was weakened because of “the profound exhaustion of physical plants and of spiritual vigor” caused by WW2. The most crucial component of any long-term containment policy would therefore be a massive program of US economic aid, to permit the rebuilding of the shattered industries, farms, and cities of Europe and Japan.
If, to use Kennan’s very plausible geopolitical argument, there were only “five centers of industrial and military power in the world which are important to us from the standpoint of national security” — the US itself, its rival the USSR, Great Britain, Germany and central Europe, and Japan — then it followed that by keeping the three last-named areas in the western camp and by building up their strength, there would be a resultant “correlation of forces” which would ensure that the Soviet Union was permanently inferior.
In these circumstances, even isolationist senators could be moved to support proposals for the creation of NATO, with full American membership — and, indeed, with its chief strategical purpose being the provision of NA aid to the European states in the event of Russian aggression. In its early years, NATO reflected political concerns more than any exact military calculations, symbolizing as it did the historic shift in American diplomatic traditions as it took over from Britain as the leading western “flank” power, dedicated to maintaining the European equilibrium.
During the war itself, the Allies had given aid to all manner of resistance movements struggling against their German and Japanese overlords, and it was natural for those groups to hope for a continuation of such aid after 1945, even while they engaged in jostling with rival contenders for power.
But the shock to the US of the “loss” of China was altogether more severe than these challenges farther south. From the time of American missionary endeavors in the 19th century onward, enormous amounts of cultural and psychological (much less financial) capital had been invested by the US in that large and populous land. In more than the religious sense, the US felt it had a “mission” in China.
One the one hand, the American public could not be seen to be the supporter of corrupt Third World regimes or of decaying colonial empires. On the other, it did not want the “forces of revolution” to spread further, since that (it was claimed) would enhance Moscow’s influence.
No longer convinced that the moral and cultural appeal of American civilization was enough to prevent the spread of communism, the US turned increasingly to military-territorial guarantees, especially after Dulles became secretary of state.
In 1953, Russia also tested an H-bomb, a mere nine months after the American test. Moreover, the Soviet government had devoted considerable resources to exploiting German wartime technology on rocketry.
With the further additions to NATO’s membership in the 1950s, this meant that the US was pledged “to defense of most of Europe and even parts of the Near East.” But that was only the beginning of the American overstretch.
The US had more than 1M soldiers in 30 countries, was a member of 4 regional defense alliances and an active participant in a fifth, had mutual defense treaties with 42 nations, was a member of 53 international organizations, and was furnishing military or economic aid to nearly 100 nations across the face of the globe.
Yet in a world which seemed to be swiftly shrinking in size and in which each part appeared to relate to another, these step-by-step pledges all had their logic. Where, in a bipolar system, could Washington draw the line — especially after it was claimed that its earlier definition that Korea was not vital had been an invitation to the Communist attack of the following year?
There were, moreover, many Third World countries eager to escape from what they termed “neocolonialism” and to institute a planned economy rather than a laissez-faire one — a preference which usually caused a cessation of western aid. All this fused to give Russian foreign policy a distinct “outward thrust.”
And yet, even as these two blocs competed across the globe, and in areas unknown to both in 1941, they were meeting up with a quite different trend. For a Third World was just at this time coming of age, and many of its members, having at last thrown off the controls of the traditional European empires, were in no mood to become mere satellites of a distant superpower, even if the latter could provide useful economic and military aid.
What was happening, in fact, was that one major trend in 20th-century power politics, the rise of the superpowers, was beginning to interact with another, newer trend — the political fragmentation of the globe. In the Social Darwinistic and imperialistic atmosphere that had prevailed around 1900, it was easy to think that all power was being concentrated in fewer and fewer capitals of the world. Yet the very arrogance and ambitiousness of western imperialism brought with it the sees of its own destruction.
It was fine to grant self-determination to the peoples of eastern Europe, because they were European and thus regarded as “civilized”; but it was not fine to extend these principles to the Middle East, Africa, or Asia, where the imperialist powers extended their territories and held down independence movements.
But it was described as a “third” world precisely because it insisted on its distinction both from the American- and the Russian-dominated blocs.
Given the vast swelling of their numbers, they could now begin to dominate the UN General Assembly; originally a body of 50 (overwhelmingly European and Latin American) countries, the UN steadily changed into an organization of well over 100 states with many new Afro-Asian members.
The very fact that so many new states were entering the international community in these years, and that Russia was eager to wean them away from the West without itself having much knowledge of local conditions, also meant that its diplomatic “gains” were frequently attended by “losses.”
The relationship between the Third World and the “first two worlds” was always, therefore, a complex and shifting one. Like other Great Powers before them, both Russia and the US had to grapple with the hard fact that their “universalist” message would not be automatically accepted by other societies and cultures.
In retrospect, it may seem self-evident that even the allegedly “scientific” and “’universalist” claims of Marxism would founder on the rocks of local circumstances, indigenous cultural strengths, and differing stages of economic development — after all, Lenin himself had had to make massive deviations from the original doctrine of dialectical materialism in order to secure the 1917 Revolution.
From Moscow’s viewpoint, however, it seemed foolish in the late 1950s to provoke the Americans unnecessarily, especially when the latter had a clear nuclear advantage; it would also be a setback, diplomatically, to support China in its 1959 border clash with India, which was so important to Russia’s Third World policy; and it would be highly unwise, given the Chinese proclivity to independent action, to aid their nuclear program without getting some controls over it — all of these being regarded as successive betrayals by Mao.
By 1972 40 Soviet divisions stood guard along the 4,500-mile border with China (compared to 31 divisions in Eastern Europe), while a quarter of the Soviet air force had been deployed from west to east.
Nonetheless, unless the USSR was prepared to run the risk of provoking the Americans and offending world opinion by launching a massive nuclear attack upon China, any fighting at a lesser level could quickly produce enormous casualties — which the Chinese seemed willing to accept, but Russian politicians in the Brezhnev era were less keen about.
In the political and diplomatic arena, the Sino-Soviet split was even more embarrassing to the Kremlin. Although Khrushchev himself had been willing to tolerate “separate roads to socialism” (always provided those routes were not too divergent!), it was quite another thing for the USSR to be openly accused of having abandoned true Marxist principles; for its satellites and clients to be encouraged to throw off the Russian “yoke”; and for its diplomatic effort in the Third World to be complicated by Peking’s rival aid and propaganda — the more especially since Mao’s brand of peasant-based Communism appeared often more appropriate than the Russian emphasis upon an industrial proletariat.
A mere 20 years after China was criticizing the USSR for being too soft toward the West, it was pressing NATO to increase its defenses and warning both Japan and the Common Market against strengthening economic ties with Russia.
By comparison, the dislocations which occurred in the western camp from the early 1960s onward, caused chiefly by de Gaulle’s campaign against American hegemony, were nowhere near as serious in the long term — although they certainly added to the impression that the two blocs were breaking up. With strong memories of WW2 still in mind, de Gaulle seethed at the fact that he was treated as less than equal by the US; he resented American policy during Suez crisis in 1956, not to mention Dulles’s habit of threatening a nuclear conflagration over issues like Quemoy. Although de Gaulle had more than enough to keep him busy for several years after 1958 as he sought to extricate France from Algeria, even at that time he criticized western Europe’s subservience (as he saw it) to American interests. Like the British a decade earlier, he saw in nuclear weapons a chance to preserve Great Power status; when news of the first French atomic test of 1960 arrived, the general called out, “Hooray for France — since this morning she is stronger and prouder.”
Yet if, in retrospect, the US was better placed to adjust to the changing patterns of world power, that was not obvious for many years after 1960.
That this was the first war in which the US had unequivocally lost, that it confounded the victorious experiences of WW2 and destroyed a whole array of reputations, from those of 4-star generals to those of “brightest and best” intellectuals; that it coincided with, and in no small measure helped to cause, the fissuring of a consensus in American society about the nation’s goals and priorities, was attended by inflation, unprecedented student protests and inner city disturbances, and was followed in turn by the Watergate crisis, which discredited the presidency itself for a time; that it seemed to many to stand in bitter and ironic contradiction to everything which the Founding Fathers had taught, and made the US unpopular across most of the globe; and finally that the shamefaced and uncaring treatment of the GIs who came back from Vietnam would produce its own reaction a decade later and thus ensure that the memory of this conflict would continue to prey upon the public consciousness, in war memorials, books, television documentaries, and personal tragedies — all of this meant that the Vietnam War, although far smaller in terms of casualties, impacted upon the American people somewhat as had WW1 upon Europeans. The effects were seen, overwhelmingly, at the personal and psychological levels; more broadly, they were interpreted as a crisis in American civilization and in its constitutional arrangements.
While the latter feeling was quite understandable, given what was at stake for each side, the fact was that it proved impossible for an open democracy to wage a halfhearted war successfully. This was the fundamental contradiction, which neither McNamara’s systems analysis nor the B-52 bombers based on Guam could alter.
Viewed from a longer perspective, say, backward from the year 2000 or 2020, it might be seen as having produced a salutory shock to American global hubris (or to what Senator Fulbright called “the arrogance of power”), and thus compelled the country to think more deeply about its political and strategical priorities and to readjust more sensibly to a world already much changed since 1945 — in other words, rather like the shock which the Russians received in the Crimean War, or the British received in the Boer War, producing in their turn beneficial reforms and reassessments.
Kissinger’s approach to world affairs was historicist and relativistic: events had to be seen in their larger context, and related to each other; Great Powers should be judged on what they did, not on their domestic ideology; and absolutist search for security was Utopian, since that would make everyone else absolutely insecure — all that one could hope to achieve was relative security, based upon a reasonable balance of forces in world affairs, a mature recognition that the world scene would never be completely harmonious, and a willingness to bargain. Like the statesmen he had written about (Metternich, Castlereagh, Bismarck), Kissinger felt that “the beginning of wisdom in human as well as in international affairs was knowing when to stop.”
Finally, Kissinger recognized the limitations upon American power, not only in the sense that the US could not afford to fight a protracted war in the jungles of Southeast Asia and to maintain its other, more vital interests, but also because both he and Nixon could perceive that the world’s balances were altering, and new forces were undermining the hitherto unchallenged domination of the two superpowers. A concert of large powers, balancing each other off and with no one dominating another, would be “a safer world and a better world” than a bipolar situation in which “a gain for one side appears as an absolute loss for the other.” Confident in his own abilities to defend American interests in such a pluralistic world, Kissinger was urging a fundamental reshaping of American diplomacy in the largest sense of that word.
Carter also took justified credit for “brokering” the 1978 Camp David agreement between Egypt and Israel — although he ought not to have been so surprised at the critical reaction of the other Arab nations, which in turn was to give Russia the opportunity to strengthen its ties with the more radical states in the Middle East. For all its worthy intention, however, the Carter government foundered upon the rocks of a complex world which seemed increasingly unwilling to abide to American advice, and upon its own inconsistencies of policy (often caused by quarrels within the administration).
When Russian troops invaded Afghanistan at the end of 1979, Washington, which was by then engaged in a large-scale defense buildup, withdrew the SALT II treaty, canceled grain sales to Moscow, and began to pursue — especially in Brzezinski’s celebrated visits to China and Afghanistan — “balance-of-power” politics which the president had condemned only four years earlier.
The rulers of the Soviet Union were in a position to appreciate the uncomfortable discovery made by so many Americans in the forties and fifties: enhanced power does not automatically, especially in the nuclear age, give a state greater security. From almost every point of view, economically and militarily, in absolute and in relative terms, the USSR under Brezhnev was much more powerful than it had been under Stalin. And yet along with this greatly increased strength came new international developments and foreign commitments that made the Soviet state more vulnerable to external danger and the turbulence of world politics than it had been, say, in 1952.
Yet the language of the 1979-1980 election campaign was difficult to shake off, perhaps because it had not been mere rhetoric, but a fundamentalist view of the world order and of the US’s destined place in it. As had happened so often in the past, the holding of such sentiments always made it difficult for countries to deal with external affairs as they really were, rather than as they thought they should be.
These are the five that will determine the economic future and, because economic power will be the key to other kinds of power, the future of the world in other ways in the last third of this century.
The average GNP per capita in the industrialized countries were $10,600 in 1980, but only $1,580 for the middle-income countries like Brazil, and a shocking $250 for the very poorest Third World countries like Zaire.
Although badly damaged by the 1937-1945 war, and cut off from its traditional markets and suppliers, it possessed an industrial infrastructure which could be repaired and a talented, well-educated, and socially cohesive population whose determination to improve themselves could not be channeled into peaceful commercial pursuits.
Toyota, for example, was in danger of foundering when it was rescued by the first of the US Defense Department’s orders for its trucks; and much the same happened to many other companies.
The economy required enormous amounts of capital to achieve sustained growth, and it received just that — partly because there was so little expenditure upon defense by a “demilitarized” country sheltering under the American strategic umbrella, but perhaps even more because of fiscal and taxation policies which encouraged an unusually high degree of personal savings, which could then be used for investment purposes.
When the Allied occupation ended in 1952, Japan’s “GNP was little more than 1/3 that of France or the UK. By the late 1970s the Japanese GNP was a large as the UK’s and France’s combined and more than half the size of America’s.”
To be sure, much of this decline in Britain’s shares was due to the fact that special technical and historical circumstances had given a country a disproportionately large amount of global wealth and commerce in earlier decades; now that those special circumstances had gone, and other countries were able to exploit their own potential for industrialization, it was natural that Britain’s relative position should slip. Whether it should have slipped so much and so fast is another issue; whether it will slip further, relative to its European neighbors, is equally difficult to say.
Although naturally worried at the competition posed by the even more efficient Japanese, the West Germans were undoubtedly the second most successful among the larger “trading states.” This was the more impressive since the country had been separated from 40% of its territory and over 35% of its population; ironically, the German Democratic Republic was soon to show that it was the most productive and industrialized per capita of all the easter European states (including the USSR) despite the loss of millions of its talented labor force to the West.
In 1980, the American farm worker was producing enough food to supply 65 people, whereas his Russian equivalent turned out enough to feed only 8. This, in turn, led to the embarrassing Soviet need to import increasing amounts of foodstuffs.
In Russia’s case, additional farmland could be brought under cultivation, though the limits imposed by the winter ecology in the north and the deserts in the south restricted possibilities in that direction (and easily reminded many of how Khrushchev’s confident exploitation of the “virgin lands” soon turned them into dustbowls); similarly, more intensive exploitation of raw materials ran the danger of increasing inefficiencies in dealing with, say, oil stocks, while extractive costs rose swiftly as soon as mining was extended into the permafrost region.
Yet despite that half-consoling thought — similar to the argument which the British used to half-console themselves 70 years earlier when their shares of world output began to be eroded — there was a worrying aspect to this development. The real question as not “Did the US have to decline relatively?” but “Did it have to decline so fast?”
Yet while that was true, the US was not helped by certain other secular trends which were occurring in its economy: fiscal and taxation policies encouraged high consumption, but a low personal savings rate; investment in R&D, except for military purposes, was slowly sinking compared with other countries; and defense expenditures themselves, as a proportion of national product, were larger than anywhere else in the western bloc of nations. In addition, an increasing proportion of the American population was moving from industry to services, that is, into low-productivity fields.
There were still consolations, to those who could see the American economy and its needs in larger terms than selected comparisons with Swiss incomes or Japanese productivity. Post-1945 policy did achieve some very basic and significant aims: domestic prosperity, as opposed to a 1930s-type slump; the containing of Soviet expansionism without war; the revival of the economies — and the democratic traditions — of western Europe, later joined by Japan to create “an increasingly integrated economic bloc,” with “an imposing battery of multilateral institutions to manage economic as well as military affairs”; and, finally, “the transformation of the old colonial empires into independent states still closely integrated into a world economy.” In sum, it had maintained the liberal international order, upon which, itself, increasingly depended; and while its share of world production and wealth had shrunk, perhaps faster than need have been the case, the redistribution of global economic balances still left an environment which was not too hostile to its own open-market and capitalist traditions. Finally, if it had seen its productive lead eroded by certain faster-growing economies, it had still maintained a very considerable superiority over the Soviet Union in almost all respects of true national power and — by clinging to its own entrepreneurial creed — remained open to the stimulus of managerial initiative and technological charge which its Marxist rival would have far greater difficulty in accepting.
The gyrations which have occurred in the international value of the dollar over the past few years and the post-1984 collapse in oil prices offer a good warning against drawing conclusions from economically based trends; and the world of politics and diplomacy has never been one which followed straight lines.
The argument in this book has been that there exist a dynamic for change, driven chiefly by economic and technological developments, which then impact upon social structures, political systems, military power, and the position of individual states and empires. The speed of this global economic change has not been a uniform one, simply because the pace of technological innovation and economic growth is itself irregular, conditioned by the circumstance of the individual inventor and entrepreneur as well as by climate, disease, wars, geography, the social framework, and so on. In the same way, different regions and societies across the globe have experienced a faster or slower rate of growth, depending not only upon the shifting patterns of technology, production, and trade, but also upon their receptivity to the new modes of increasing output and wealth. Because of man’s innate drive to improve his condition, the world has never stood still.
It was as clear to a Renaissance prince as it is to the Pentagon today that military power rests upon adequate supplies of wealth, which in turn derive from a flourishing productive base, from healthy finances, and from superior technology.
The international system, whether it is dominated for a time by six Great Powers or only two, remains anarchical — that is, there is no greater authority than the sovereign, egoistical nation-state.
Bombers cost 200 times as much as they did in WW2. Fighters cost 100 times or more than they did in WW2.
The former, driven by military men’s desire to have the most advanced “state-of-the-art” weaponry so that their armed services may be able to fight in all possible (if sometimes highly implausible) battle scenarios, produces goods which are increasingly more expensive, more elaborate, and much less numerous.
By 1984, world arms imports of a colossal $35B had exceeded the world trade in grain ($33B).
Although it has been claimed that defense expenditure can have a certain commercial economic spin-offs, it seems increasingly difficult to argue against the proposition that excessive arms spending will hurt economic growth. The difficulties experienced by contemporary societies which are military top-heavy merely repeat those which, in their time, affected Philip II’s Spain, Nicholas II’s Russia, and Hitler’s Germany. A large military establishment may, like a great monument, look imposing to the impressionable observer; but it is not resting upon a firm foundation (in this case, a productive national economy), it runs the risk of a future collapse.
Unless there is an enemy immediately at the gate, high defense spending in this century has nearly always provoked a “guns vs butter” controversy.
Not for the first time in history, therefore, there looms today a tension between a nation’s existence in an anarchic military-political world and its existence in a laissez-faire economic world; between on the one hand its search for strategic security, and on the other hand its search for economic security. Precisely because a top-heavy military establishment may slow down the rate of economic growth and lead to a decline in the nation’s share of world manufacturing output, and therefore wealth, and therefore power, the whole issue becomes one of the balancing the short-term security afforded by large defense forces against the longer-term security of rising production and income.
Between the two poles of the merchant and the warrior states, so to speak, there lie most of the rest of the nations of this planet, not convinced that the world is a safe enough place to allow them to reduce arms expenditure to Japan’s unusually low level, but also generally uneasy at the high economic and social costs of large-scale spending upon armaments, and aware that there is a certain trade-off between short-term military security and long-term economic security.
The feat demanded of most if not all governing bodies as the world heads toward the 21st century is therefore a threefold one: simultaneously to provide military security for its national interests, and to satisfy the socioeconomic needs of its citizenry, and to ensure sustained growth.
It is hard to imagine, but a country whose productivity growth lags 1 percent behind other countries over one century can turn, as England did, from the world’s indisputed industrial leader into the mediocre economy it is today.
Geography, politics, and culture will all ensure that one state’s “solution” will never be exactly the same as another’s. Nevertheless, the basic argument remains: without a rough balance between these competing demands of defense, consumption, and investment, a Great Power is unlikely to preserve its status for long.
Deng Xiaoping’s leadership may one day be seen in the way that historians view Colbert’s France, or the early stages of Frederick the Great’s reign, or Japan in the post-Meiji Restoration decades: that is, as a country straining to develop its power (in all senses of that word) by every pragmatic means, balancing the desire to encourage enterprise and initiative and change with an etatiste determination to direct events so that the national goals are achieved as swiftly and smoothly as possible. Such a strategy involves the ability to see how the separate aspects of government policy relate to each other. It therefore involves a sophisticated balancing act, requiring careful judgments as to the speed at which these transformations can safely occur, the amount of resources to be allocated to long-term as opposed to short-term needs, the coordination of the state’s internal and external requirements, and the ways by which ideology and practice can be reconciled.
The planned reduction of the PLA from 4.2 to 3M personnel is, in fact, an enhancement for real strength, since far too many of them were merely support troops, used for railway-building and civic duties. Those remaining within the armed forces are likely to be of higher overall quality: new uniforms and the restoration of military ranks (abolished by Mao as being “bourgeois”) are the outward sign of this.
A year later, one of its rockets launched three space satellites, which is an indication of a multiple-warhead rocket technology.
Finally, the mention of finance is a reminder that as long as China is spending only 1/8 or thereabouts of the amount upon defense as the superpowers, there is no way it can achieve full parity; it cannot, therefore, plan to acquire every sort of weapon or to prepare for every conceivable threat.
The East Asian method of wet-rice cultivation are inordinately productive in yields per hectare, but are also extremely labor-intensive — which makes it difficult to effect a switch to, say, the large-scale, mechanized forms of agriculture used on the American prairies.
Already China is attempting to feed a billion people on only 250M acres of arable land (compared with the US’s 400M acres of crops for its 230M population).
The first, and least important for our purposes, is that while the country’s economic growth will boost its foreign trade, it is impossible to transform it into another West Germany or Japan. The sheer size of the domestic market of a continent-wide Power such as China, and of its population and raw-materials base, makes it highly unlikely that it would become as dependent upon overseas commerce as one of the smaller, maritime “trading states.” The extent of its labor-intensive agricultural sector and the regime’s determination not to become to reliant upon imported foodstuffs will also be a drag upon foreign trade.
It may also be the case that China feels more relaxed about relations with Moscow simply because its own military improvements have created a rough equilibrium in central Asia. Having achieved a “correlation of forces,” or at least a decent defensive capacity, China can concentrate more upon economic development.
The answer lies in the fact that, notwithstanding its self-characterization as a threatened and aggrieved state, China has very shrewdly and even brazenly used its available political, economic, and military resources. Towards the superpowers, Peking’s overall strategy has at various times comprised confrontation and armed conflict, partial accommodation, informal alignment, and a detachment bordering on disengagement, sometimes interposed with strident, angry rhetoric. As a result, China becomes all things to all nations, with many left uncertain and even anxious about its long-term intentions and directions.
To be sure, such an indeterminate strategy has at times entailed substantial political and military risks. Yet the same strategy has lent considerable credibility to China’s position as an emergent major power. China has often acted in defiance of the preferences or demands of both superpowers; at other times it has behaved far differently from what others expect. Despite its seeming vulnerability, China has not proven pliant and yielding toward either Moscow or Washington. For all these reasons, China has assumed a singular international position.
Such a concern for enhancing the country’s economic substructure at the expense of an immediate investment in weapons will hardly satisfy China’s generals (who, like military groups everywhere, prefer short-term to long-term means of security).
Due to its immensely successful growth since 1945, the country enjoys a unique and very favorable position in the global economic and power-political order, yet that is also — the Japanese feel — an extremely delicate and vulnerable position, which could be badly deranged if international circumstances changed. The best thing that could happen from Tokyo’s viewpoint, therefore, would be for the continuation of those factors which caused “the Japanese miracle” in the first place. But precisely because this is an anarchic world in which “dissatisfied” powers jostle alongside “satisfied” ones, and because the dynamic of technological and commercial change is driving so fast, the likelihood is that those favorable factors will diminish — or even disappear altogether. Given Japan’s belief in the delicacy and vulnerability of its own position, it finds it hard openly to resist the pressures for change; instead, the latter must be slowed down, or deflected, by diplomatic compromise. Hence its constant advocacy of the peaceful solution to international problems, its alarm and embarrassment when it finds itself in a political crossfire between other countries, and its evident wish to be on good terms with everyone while it gets steadily richer.
For over 40 years the Japanese homeland has been protected by American nuclear and conventional forces, and its sea lanes by the US Navy.
All of these countries have far lower labor costs than Japan, and are challenging strongly in fields in which the Japanese no longer enjoy decisive advantages — textiles, toys, domestic goods, shipbuilding, even steel and automobiles. This does not, of course, mean that Japan’s production of ships, cars, trucks, or steel is doomed, but to the extent that it is increasingly necessary for them to move “up-market” they are withdrawing from the bottom end of a production spectrum where previously they were unchallenged.
Because of its own belief in an open world trading system, American administrations have hesitated to ban or otherwise restrict Japanese imports apart from dubious “voluntary” limits. But even the staunchest American advocates of laissez-faire have grown uneasy at a situation in which, essentially, the US supplies Japan with foodstuffs and raw materials and receives Japanese manufactures in return — a sort of “colonial” or “underdevelopment” trading status it has not known for a century and a half.
In addition, that same crisis impelled Japan into a sustained search for new sources of raw materials and a heavy investment in such areas (somewhat akin to Britain’s investments overseas in the 19th century). None of this makes it absolutely certain that Japan can rely upon a continued flow of low-priced raw materials; but the auguries for that are good.
More significant still is the continued surge of Japanese industry toward the most promising (and, ultimately, most profitable) sectors of the economy for the 21st century: that is, high technology. In other words, as Japan steadily pulls out of the production of textiles, shipbuilding, basic steel — leaving them to countries with lower labor costs — it clearly intended to be a (if not the) leading force in those scientifically advanced manufactures which have a much higher added value.
But perhaps the most important will be the already impressive lead which Japan has in the field of industrial robots and its development of (experimental) entire factories virtually controlled by computers, lasers, and robots: the ultimate solution to the country’s decreasing labor force! Japan continued to introduce about as many industrial robots as the rest of the world combined, several times the rate of introduction in the US.
The role of MITI as a sort of economic equivalent to the famous Prussian General Staff may have been exaggerated by foreigners, but there seems little doubt that the broad direction which it gives to Japanese economic development by arranging research and funding for growth industries and a gentle euthanasia for declining ones has worked better to date than the uncoordinated laissez-faire approach of the US.
Even more interesting, perhaps, is the fact that a far higher proportion of Japanese R&D is paid for and done by industry itself than in Europe and the US (where so much is done by governments or universities). In other words, it is aimed directly at the marketplace and is expected to pay its way quickly. “Pure” science is left to others, and tapped only when its commercial relevance becomes clear.
On average, too, the individual in Japan has to save much more for his or her old age, since the pension schemes are usually less generous. What all this means is that Japanese banks and insurance companies are awash with funds and can provide industry with masses of low-interest capital.
No statistically quantifiable assessment can be made of the combined effects of the above five factors, compared with conditions in other leading nations; but, taken together, they obviously give Japanese industry an immensely strong bedrock. So, too, does the docility and diligence of the Japanese work force and the harmony which seems to prevail in the industrial-relations system, where there are only company unions, a search for consensus, and virtually no strikes. There are, clearly, unattractive features here as well: longer hours of work, the all-pervading conformism, to the company ethos, the absence of truly independent trade unions, the cramped housing conditions, the emphasis upon hierarchy and deference.
It is for that reason that scholars have argued that Japan will be “number one” economically in the early 21st century, and it is not surprising that many Japanese are fired by that very prospect. For a country which possesses only 3% of the world population and only 0.3% of its habitable land, it seems an almost unbelievable achievement.
The average Japanese inhabitant had had to pay only $98 for defense that year, compared with the average Briton’s $439 and the average American’s $1,023.
Besides, it is argued, a large army and navy did not bring Japan “security,” whether of the military or economic sort, in the 1930s; and it is difficult to see at present how an increase in defense spending could prevent a possible cutoff of Arab oil — which is a far greater danger to Japan strategically than, say, the hypothetical nuclear winter, and explains Tokyo’s desperate efforts to “lie low and say nothing” whenever there is a crisis in the Middle East.
A heavy emphasis upon engineering and design in the German management tradition (as opposed to the American emphasis upon finance) has given it an international reputation for quality products.
None of those problems are insuperable, provided the Germans can maintain their “package” of low inflation, quality goods, high investment in new technology, superior design and salesmanship, and labor peace.
Since 1983, Britain’s trade balance on manufactures has been in deficit for the first time since the Romans invaded Britain. What is more, the decline in employment occurs no only in older industries but also in the “sunrise” high-technology firms.
For every $1 spent in Britain on R&D in the early 1980s, $1.50 was spent in Germany, $3 in Japan, and $8 in the US — yet 50 percent of that British R&D was devoted to nonproductive defense activities, compared with Germany’s 9 percent and Japan’s minuscule amount.
Unless something is done soon, this country’s defense policy will increasingly consist of trying to do the same job with less money, which can only be bad for Britain and NATO.
There is a great deal of truth in the cold observation that all of France’s posturing of independence have taken place behind the American shield and guarantee to wester Europe, both conventional and nuclear. A Gaullist policy of assertiveness was only possible because for the first time in this century France was not in the front line.
But in any event such strategy is likely to founder upon one insuperable reef: lack of money.
Parts of the triad of French nuclear weaponry — the land-based missiles, and especially the aircraft — suffer from deterioration over time and even their costly upgrading and modernization may not keep pace with newer weapon technology.
It proclaims the need for enhanced agricultural and industrial output, yet hobbles that possibility by collectivization and by heavy-handed planning. It asserts the overriding importance of world peace, yet its own massive arms buildup and its link with “revolutionary” states serve to increase international tensions.
“Acceleration of the country’s socio-economic development is the key to all our problems; immediate and long-term, economic and social, political and ideological, internal and external.”
To which it might be remarked that the final statement could have been made by any government in the world, and that the mere recognition of economic problems is no guarantee that they will be solved.
There are certain natural reasons for the precariousness of Soviet agriculture, and for the fact that its productivity is about 1/7 that of American farming. Although the USSR is often regarded as geographically rather similar to the US — both being continent-side, northern hemisphere states — it actually lies much farther to the north: the Ukraine is on the same latitude as souther Canada.
Decisions as to planting, investment, and so on are taken not by those who work the fields but by managers and bureaucrats. The denial of responsibility and initiative to the individual peasants is probably the single greatest reason for disappointing yields, chronic inefficiencies, and enormous wastage.
Producing masses of cement is not necessarily a good thing, if the excessive investment in it has taken resources from a more needy sector; if the actual cement-production process has been very wasteful of energy; if the final product has to be transported long distances across the country, thus placing further strains upon the overworked railway system; and if the cement itself has to be distributed among the thousands of building projects which Soviet planners authorized but have never been able to complete.
If, even today, senior scientists and scholars in the Soviet Union are forbidden to use copying machines personally (the copying departments are staffed by the KGB), then it is hard to see how the country could move toward the widespread use of word processors, interactive computers, email, etc. without a substantial loosening of police control and censorship.
To decentralize the planning and pricing system, to free the peasants from communal controls, to allow managers of factories a greater freedom of action, to offer incentives for individual enterprise rather than party loyalty, to close outdated plants, to refuse to accept shoddy products, and to allow a far freer circulation of information would be seen by those in power as dire threats to their own position.
One of the two clearest signs of this is the unease with which the Soviet Union has watched its weaponry being repeatedly outclassed by American hardware in the surrogate battles.
Since the Soviet tradition is one of “safety first,” probably the former tendency will prevail; but far from solving the dilemma, that merely reflects a choice between evils.
To any reasonable outside observer, the USSR already has more than enough forces to guarantee its security, and Moscow’s insistence upon building ever-newer weapon systems simply induces insecurity in everyone else. To the decision-makers in the Kremlin, heirs to a militaristic and often paranoid tradition of statecraft, Russia appears surrounded by crumbling frontiers; yet having pushed out so many Russian divisions and air squadrons to stabilize those frontiers has not produced the hoped-for invulnerability. Pulling back from easter Europe or making border concessions to China is also feared, however, not only because of the local consequences but because it may be seen as an indication of Moscow’s loss of willpower.
In 1913, Imperial Russia had a real product per man-hour 3 times greater than Japan’s but it has spent its nigh 70 socialist years slipping relatively backwards, to maybe a quarter of Japan’s rate now.
This can hardly be an unalloyed pleasure for the West, however, since there is nothing in the character or tradition of the Russian state to suggest that it could ever accept imperial decline gracefully. Indeed, historically, none of the overextended, multinational empires which have been dealt wit in this survey — the Ottoman, the Spanish, the Napoleonic, the British — ever retreated to their own ethnic base until they had been defeated in a Great Power war, or (as with Britain after 1945) were so weakened by war that an imperial withdrawal was politically unavoidable. Those who rejoice at the present-day difficulties of the Soviet Union and look forward to the collapse of that empire might wish to recall that such transformation normally occur at very great cost, and not always in a predictable fashion.
This test of American abilities will be the greater because it, like Imperial Spain around 1600 or the British Empire around 1900, is the inheritor of a vast array of strategical commitments which had been made decades earlier, when the nation’s political, economic, and military capacity to influence world affairs seemed so much more assured. In consequence, the US now runs the risk, so familiar to historians of the rise and fall of previous Great Powers, of what might roughly be called “imperial overstretch”: that is to say, decision-makers in Washington must face the awkward and enduring fact that the sum total of the US’s global interests and obligations is nowadays far larger than the country’s power to defend them all simultaneously.
In each case, the declining number-one power faced threats, not so much to the security of its own homeland, but to the nation’s interests abroad — interests so widespread that it would be difficult to defend them all at once, and yet almost equally difficult to abandon any of them without running further risks.
Each of those interests abroad, it is fair to remark, was undertaken by the US for what seemed very plausible (often very pressing) reasons at the time, and in most instances the reason for the American presence has not diminished; in certain parts of the globe, US interests may now appear larger to decision-makers in Washington than they were a few decades ago.
Even the outside possibility that the world’s largest concentration of manufacturing production might fall into the Soviet orbits is enough to convince the Pentagon that “the security of western Europe is particularly vital to the security of the US.”
If not, the results would be grim; for it is clear that today’s complex weaponry simply cannot be replaced in the short times which were achieved during WW2.
But it has been increasingly suggested that a country needing to reformulate its grand strategy in the light of the larger, uncontrollable changes taking place in world affairs may not be well served by an electoral system which seems to paralyze foreign-policy decision-making every two years. It may not be helped by the extraordinary pressures applied by lobbyists, political action committees, and other interest groups, all of which, by definition, are prejudiced in respect to this or that policy change; nor by an inherent “simplification” of vital but complex international and strategical issues through a mass media whose time and space for such things are limited, and whose raison d’etre is chiefly to make money and secure audiences, and only secondary to inform. Finally, the county many not always be assisted by its division of constitutional and decision-making powers, deliberately created when it was geographically and strategically isolated from the rest of the world two centuries ago.
More broadly, however, the surge in protectionist sentiment is also a reflection of the erosion of the previously unchallenged US manufacturing supremacy. Like mid-Victorian Britons, Americans after 1945 favored free trade and open competition, not just because they held that global commerce and prosperity would be boosted in the process, but also because they knew that they were most likely to benefit from the abandonment of protectionism. Forty years later, with that confidence ebbing, there is a predictable shift of opinion in favor or protecting the domestic market and the domestic producer. And, just as in that earlier British case, defenders of the existing system point out that enhanced tariffs might not only make domestic products less competitive internationally, but that there also could be various external repercussions — a global tariff war, blows against American exports, the undermining of the currencies of certain newly industrializing countries, and a return to the economic crisis of the 1930s.
Many of these individual points may be valid. Since the American economy is so large and variegated, some sectors and regions are likely to be growing at the same time as others are in decline — and to characterize the whole with sweeping generalizations about “crisis” or “boom” is therefore inappropriate.
Such campaigns usually do lead to reforms, here and there, but their very existence is, ironically, a confirmation of decline, in that such an agitation simply would not have been necessary a few decades earlier, when the nation’s lead was unquestioned. A strong man does not worry about his bodily efficiency; only when he weakens does he begin to talk about health. In the same way, when a Great Power is strong and unchallenged, it wiill be much less likely to debate its capacity to meet its obligations than when it is relatively weaker.
To a degree which amazes most European, the US in the 20th century had managed to avoid ostensible “class” politics. This is due, one imagines, to the facts that so many of its immigrants were fleeing from socially rigid circumstances elsewhere; that the sheer size of the country allowed those who were disillusioned with their economic position to “escape” to the West, and simultaneously made the organization of labor much more difficult than in, say France or Britain.
As with all of the other Powers surveyed in this chapter, there are no easy answers in dealing with the constant three-way tension between defense, consumption, and investment in settling national priorities.
But what is significant for our purpose is the comparative dimension. Even if defense expenditure formed 10% of GNP under Eisenhower and 9% under Kennedy, the US’s relative share of global production and wealth was at that time around twice what it is today; and, more particularly, the American economy was not then facing the challenges to either its traditional or its high-technology manufactures.
A low investment in armaments may, for a globally overstretched Power like the US, leave it feeling vulnerable everywhere; but a very heavy investment in armaments, while bringing greater security in the short term, may so erode the commercial competitiveness of the American economy that the nation will be less secure in the long term.
Viewed from one perspective, it can hardly be said that the dilemmas facing the US are unique. Which country in the world, one it tempted to ask, is not encountering problems in evolving a viable military policy, or in choosing between guns and butter and investment? From another perspective, however, the American position is a very special one. For all its economic and perhaps military decline, it remains “the decisive actor in every type of balance and issue.” Because it has so much power for good or evil, because it is the linchpin of the western alliance system and the center of the existing global economy, what it does, or does not do, is so much more important than what any of the other Powers decides to do.
All of them, if they were honest, admitted that it was really a matter of choice, and a difficult choice at that. Ideally, of course, “profit” and “power” should go hand in hand. Far too often, however, statesmen found themselves confronted with the usual dilemma: between buying military security, at a time of real or perceived danger, which then became a burden upon the national economy; or keeping defense expenditures low, but finding one’s interests sometimes threatened by the actions of other states.
To paraphrase Bismarck’s famous remark, all of these Powers are traveling on “the stream of Time,” which they can “neither create nor direct,” but upon which they can “steer with more or less skill and experience.”