The Decline and Fall of Almost Everything

Kennedy's account of Japan is mirrored in his inventory of the United States. The United States is often the polar opposite of Japan in crucial respects. With the most heterogeneous population and the most liberal immigration laws of any major nation, the United States is likely to receive the full force of immigration flows. With its low savings rate and its large pool of unskilled labor, it has abandoned what little robotics industry it ever had. With its increasingly unskilled and uneducated population, it is not able to meet the demands of high-technology and high value-added industries for productive workers.

While Japan might be considered the most "perfect" example of a classical nation state, the United States is in many ways no longer a real nation state but rather is becoming a sort of multicultural regime. In regard to the capacity to bring forth political leaders, however, Kennedy believes that Japan and the United States have something in common: he is skeptical about the leadership potential of both.

What If He's Wrong?

Almost a century ago in 1904, another British scholar, Halford Mackinder, published his famous and pessimistic lecture, "The Geographical Pivot of History," which could well have been entitled "Preparing for the Twentieth Century." Mackinder argued that the sweeping international trends of his day--the great expansion of quick and cheap means of land transportation and the increasing importance of large landmasses inhabited by large populations--meant that the era of naval power had come to an end, to be succeeded by the era of land power. The result would be the decline of Britain as a world power and the rise of the greatest power on the Eurasian landmass--either Germany or Russia--to be the dominant power of the world.

Like Malthus before him, Mackinder was of course eventually proven wrong; neither Germany nor Russia became the world's dominant power. But in another sense, Mackinder was right. It took the monumental events of the twentieth century--the First World War, the Second World War and the Cold War--to refute him. Each of these three wars was fought to prevent Mackinder's prediction from becoming true, and it took 75 years, 45 million lives and trillions of dollars to do so.

Kennedy's predictions about the forthcoming century could come to share the fate of Malthus's and Mackinder's about their respective centuries. He may be wrong that the great transnational trends of our day will bring about a decline in the power of almost every nation state and in the quality of life of almost every human being. But to prove him wrong may require great conflicts and great catastrophes that are as unanticipated and unimaginable now as were the conflicts and catastrophes of the twentieth century to Mackinder and his contemporaries.

The three world wars of this century were fought the way they were because nations--especially Britain and the United States--and their political leaders actively, even heroically, resisted seemingly inexorable international trends. At certain points, the conjunction of political will and material resources enabled the United States to reverse or rather, transcend these trends.

The United States turned out to be capable of combining the strengths of both the naval and the land epochs. With its strategic location between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and with its landmass and population on a continental scale, the United States achieved a versatility and flexibility in world politics that Mackinder could not anticipate. It was its political leadership, however, that enabled the United States to combine the best of both epochs (as it did in two world wars), rather than falling between them (as in the isolationism of the interwar period).

In addition, the American invention of the airplane (as it happened, only two months before Mackinder gave his lecture proclaiming the superiority of land power) and later the American development of the nuclear bomb made it possible for the greatest land power, Russia, to be deterred and contained by the greatest air power-another outcome that Mackinder could not foresee. Again, however, it was political leadership, as well as a good deal of unpredictable luck, that enabled the United States and the world to traverse the unknown and dangerous territory of the nuclear age.

In the 21st century similar conflicts may come about because nation states and their political leaders will resist the great transnational trends. Some such possibilities have already been suggested. A century ago a period of labor mobility and massive immigration was succeeded by a period of labor immobility, exclusionary laws and ethnic hostilities. Even the United States imposed sharp restrictions on immigration for almost half a century, from the early 1920s to 1965. There is every likelihood that in the next few years the European and East Asian nations will reimpose new restrictions on immigrants from outside their own regions and cultures. The means may be formal and legal (as in Japan today and Germany soon), or they may be disorganized and violent (as in Germany in the last two years), or they may be organized and murderous (as in Germany, Austria and Hungary in the first half of the twentieth century). Which path is taken will, in large measure, depend upon the capacities and choices of political leadership.