The decline of US’s superpower status?

Some commentators have been writing even before the global financial crisis took hold that the US was in decline, as evidenced by its challenges in Iraq and Afghanistan, and its declining image in Europe, Asia and elsewhere.

The BBC also asked if the US’s superpower status was shaken by this financial crisis: The financial crisis is likely to diminish the status of the United States as the world’s only superpower. On the practical level, the US is already stretched militarily, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and is now stretched financially. On the philosophical level, it will be harder for it to argue in favor of its free market ideas, if its own markets have collapsed. Some see this as a pivotal moment.

The political philosopher John Gray, who recently retired as a professor at the London School of Economics, wrote in the London paper The Observer: “Here is a historic geopolitical shift, in which the balance of power in the world is being altered irrevocably.“ The era of American global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War, is over… The American free-market creed has self-destructed while countries that retained overall control of markets have been vindicated.” “How symbolic that Chinese astronauts take a spacewalk while the US Treasury Secretary is on his knees.”

Paul Reynolds, US superpower status is shaken, BBC, October 1, 2008 Yet, others argue that it may be too early to write of the US: The director of a leading British think-tank Chatham House, Dr Robin Niblett … argues that we should wait a bit before coming to a judgment and that structurally the United States is still strong. “America is still immensely attractive to skilled immigrants and is still capable of producing a Microsoft or a Google,” he went on. “Even its debt can be overcome. It has enormous resilience economically at a local and entrepreneurial level.“ And one must ask, decline relative to who? China is in a desperate race for growth to feed its population and avert unrest in 15 to 20 years. Russia is not exactly a paper tiger but it is stretching its own limits with a new strategy built on a flimsy base. India has huge internal contradictions. Europe has usually proved unable to jump out of the doldrums as dynamically as the US.“But the US must regain its financial footing and the extent to which it does so will also determine its military capacity. If it has less money, it will have fewer forces.”