Report

Editor’s Note: Michael Beckley’s 2018 book, Unrivaled: Why America will remain the world’s sole superpower, was the subject of an H-Diplo | ISSF roundtable. Participants included Christopher Layne, Emma Ashford, Mauro Gilli, and Joshua Shifrinson. Beckley’s response to their comments is available below. The full roundtable can be found here.

I am grateful to Emma Ashford, Mauro Gilli, and Josh Shifrinson for their thoughtful reviews and to Christopher Layne for graciously introducing the discussion. I will respond to what I view as the three core questions raised by the reviewers. First, what defines a pole in the international system? Second, will future trends, such as changes in the nature of technology or the decay of U.S. political institutions, undermine American power? Third, given U.S. power advantages, why do I recommend that the United States remain engaged abroad?

Shifrinson critiques my book for not including a robust theoretical discussion about what defines a pole in the international system. This is an important question, but my failure to address it does not, as Shifrinson asserts, “undermine the central premise [of the book] that unipolarity will endure.” Scholars have written extensively about what defines unipolarity and, by any reasonable definition, my book shows that the world is and will likely remain unipolar for many decades.[52]

For example, Nuno Monteiro defines unipolarity as a situation in which only one country can fight major conventional wars beyond its home region; my book shows that no other country is close to developing this capability (62-71, 100-102).[53] Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth identify three benchmarks—economic, technological, and military—that a country would need to pass before it could be considered a rival pole; my book shows that China has not even achieved the first of these benchmarks and likely will fall further behind in the coming decades (33-61, 120-133).[54] John Mearsheimer defines a pole as a state that can “put up a serious fight in an all-out conventional war against the most powerful state.”[55] Although I find that China could temporarily deny the United States sea and air control within a few hundred miles of the Chinese coastline (71-75), I also find that China would have trouble sustaining major combat operations anywhere beyond its shores in a limited war in East Asia, let alone in an all-out war on the high seas (76-97).

Shifrinson argues that net stocks of economic and military resources are not as decisive as I suggest for determining the polarity of the system. To support his claim, Shifrinson points out that the Soviet Union “gave the United States a good run for its money” during the Cold War despite having a fraction of U.S. wealth. China, he implies, could do the same today.

I agree that China does not need to match U.S. power resources to be considered a rival pole, but it at least needs to be in the same ballpark. By Soviet standards, China has a ways to go. During the Cold War, the Soviet economy was roughly 60 percent the size of the U.S. economy in dollar terms, just as China’s is today, but Soviet per capita incomes were 50 percent of America’s whereas China’s today are only 20 percent;[56] Soviet technology was on par with U.S. technology in many militarily-relevant sectors whereas Chinese military technology, some pockets of excellence aside (e.g. missiles, quantum computing), generally lags far behind U.S. standards (48-52, 69-71);[57] and the Soviet Union outspent the United States on defense and fielded a massive army that could potentially overrun central Europe whereas China today spends several times less on defense than the United States and probably cannot conquer Taiwan, let alone overrun East Asia (62-66, 76-97). In sum, China today is much weaker relative to the United States than the Soviet Union was during the Cold War. Focusing on net resources makes this distinction clear and provides a solid basis for distinguishing today’s unipolar system from previous, and potential future, bipolar and multipolar eras.

Second, Gilli suggests that two trends—technological change and U.S. domestic political decay—may drag down U.S. economic growth and allow China to catch up. However, the Fourth Industrial Revolution seems unlikely to disadvantage the United States, given that the United States already dominates the industries that comprise it, accounting for 3 to 6 times China’s shares of value-added in artificial intelligence, computing, data analytics, robotics, biotechnology, nanotechnology, alternative energy, medical technology, and aerospace among other “industries of the future” (48-52). Gilli suggests that the United States might have a harder time adjusting to a “Second Machine Age,” in which robots perform the lion’s share of routine tasks and humans must be capable of high-level critical thinking or creativity to find gainful employment. But China relies more heavily than does the United States on mass low-skill employment for economic growth and social stability; and the Chinese population is far less educated than is the U.S. population—the average Chinese citizen receives half the years of schooling of the average American; and one-third of Chinese children currently entering the workforce have an IQ below 90, largely a result of malnutrition, poor care, and rampant pollution (34-43). China, therefore, seems especially unprepared for the new economy.

I also am skeptical that political decay will undermine U.S. relative power, not because the U.S. political system is in great shape—it is clearly a mess (146-150)—but because China’s political system is so much worse (124-130). The United States may be a flawed democracy, but China is an oligarchy ruled by a dictator for life. Special interests may drag down U.S. economic efficiency, but the Chinese Communist Party systematically sacrifices economic efficiency to maintain political control. To cite one of many examples, private firms generate most of China’s wealth, but state-owned enterprises receive 80 percent of the loans and subsidies. As a result, state zombie firms are propped up, at enormous expense, while private firms are starved of capital (44-48).

Third, Ashford and Shifrinson argue that my policy recommendations are at odds with my empirical results. If the United States is so dominant, they ask, why should it remain engaged abroad? I am a surprised by the pushback on this point, because the last chapter of my book outlines a grand strategy that is far more modest and less militarized than current U.S. policy. I advocate offshore balancing in the Middle East (145-146);[58] an active denial strategy in Europe and Asia that would shift more of the burden of containing Russia and China to local actors (139-141); the resurrection of a war tax and Congressional constraints on the use of force (143-145); and a redistribution of resources from the U.S. military to foreign aid and domestic infrastructure projects, scientific research, and family and worker assistance programs. In other words, I advocate restraint (152-154).

I do not advocate retrenchment, however, because I believe ditching allies and gutting the U.S. military and foreign service would be an enormous gamble. We are living in the most peaceful, prosperous, and democratic era in history, and a large body of research, including some of my own work, suggests that U.S. engagement has played an important, albeit mixed, role in making these outcomes possible.[59] Ashford may be right that the world would sort itself out in the absence of U.S. engagement, but I am not willing to find out, given how great things are now, how terrible they were the last time the United States pulled back from the world during the interwar period, and how many options remain for the United States to stabilize local balances of power abroad at moderate cost (139-141, 150-154).

Shifrinson is probably right that the United States could improve its relative position by adopting an America First policy and letting the world burn, but one of the benefits of unrivaled power is that the United States can afford to pursue absolute gains, sacrificing a bit of relative advantage to make America and the world better off overall. As the most secure and powerful country in history, the United States can and should do more than ceaselessly struggle for power. Would other countries suffer more than the United States from the collapse of the liberal order? Probably, but that strikes me as cold comfort if it means living in a nasty and brutish world of rigid trade blocs; closed borders; a splintered internet; militarized sea lanes; fewer democracies; more nuclear proliferation; a higher likelihood of major war; and a lower likelihood of collective action on transnational issues, such as climate change.

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