Precipitate decline: the advent of multipolarity.

As recently as 2003, it was considered absurd to talk of the decline of the United States. Now, however, such a belief has become common currency among theorists, policymakers, and the media. What significantly raised the awareness of this concept was, of course, the fiasco of the United States' preemptive invasion of Iraq. What is not yet sufficiently appreciated is the precise nature of this decline and when it specifically began.

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Most analysts contend that the United States was at its hegemonic apex in the post-1991 era when the world was marked by unipolarity, as contrasted with the bipolar structure that existed during the Cold War. But this notion has reality absolutely backwards. The United States was the sole hegemonic power from 1945 to approximately 1970. Its hegemony has been in decline ever since. The collapse of the Soviet Union was a major blow to US power in the world. And the invasion of Iraq in 2003 transformed the situation from one of slow decline into one of precipitous collapse. By 2007, the United States had lost its credibility not only as the economic and political leader of the world-system, but also as the dominant military power.

Since I am aware that this is not the standard picture either in the media or in scholarly literature, let me spell this out in some detail. I shall divide this account into three periods: 1945-1970, 1970-2001, and 2001 to the present. They correspond to the period of US hegemony, that of slow US decline giving rise to a creeping multipolarity, and that of the precipitate decline and effective multipolarity of the era inaugurated by US President George W. Bush.

Unquestioned Hegemony

The United States had been a rising world power since the 1870s, when it entered into steady competition with Germany to claim the succession as hegemonic power to the declining Great Britain. One way to think about the world wars is that they were really a single 30 years' war in which the principal protagonists were the United States and Germany. From that standpoint, the unconditional surrender of Germany in 1945 marked the clear victory of the United States. That it required the military assistance of the USSR is no more significant than when Great Britain required the military assistance of Russia in 1815 to achieve a clear victory over France and assume its hegemonic position.

This 30 years' war was quite destructive to infrastructure. In 1945, the United States was the sole major industrial power not to have suffered direct attacks on its physical equipment. In 1945, the United States was by far the most productive and efficient producer in the world-economy, to the point that it could out-compete all other countries even in their home markets.

On this economic base, the United States established its unquestioned hegemony. It created the types of international structures that would best serve its needs, such as turning Western Europe and Japan into political satellites. While it did partially dismantle its armed forces, it had a nuclear monopoly and the air force with which to deliver these bombs anywhere in the world. At the same time, New York City became the cultural capital of the world, displacing Paris in almost every artistic and literary domain.

Of course, the United States still faced a challenge from the Soviet Union, which had a very powerful military structure and a desire equal to that of the United States to impose its ideological preferences on other nations. On the other hand, given the massive destruction caused by World War II, the Soviet Union had no desire to engage in a military confrontation with the United States. So the two countries struck a deal, which was symbolically termed Yalta. The deal had three components. First, the world was divided into two blocs, whose boundaries were defined by the location of the respective armies in 1945: the Soviet Union controlled one-third of the world and the United States two-thirds. The arrangement was that there would be a military status quo, with neither power seeking to change these boundaries.

The second part of the deal was economic. The United States needed to assist in the rebuilding of significant zones of the world-economy, both to secure nations' political allegiance and to create export markets. But the United States saw no advantage in rebuilding the Soviet Union or its new satellites in Eastern and Central Europe. So the countries agreed that the two blocs would be largely self-contained economically. The Soviet Union built COMECON to secure its zone, while the United States entered into multiple economic and financial arrangements with its allies.

Third, each side created strong and lasting military alliances. The United States relied on NATO and the US-Japan Defense Pact, and the Soviet Union created the Warsaw Pact. The point of these military alliances, however, was not to use them offensively against each other but to retain the ability to riposte if necessary. It was also to secure the complete subordination of their so-called allies to the political decision-making of Washington and Moscow. Thus, inherent in the third part of the deal was that each side would hurl invectives at each other very loudly--not to incite real action against the other, but to ensure that their allies did not deviate from the party line.

This deal held very well throughout the Cold War, for there was no warfare between the United States and the USSR. There were, to be sure, mini-crises--the Berlin blockade, the Korean war, the Quemoy-Matsu affair, Hungary in 1956, the Cuban missile crisis, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Afghanistan in the 1980s. But each of these ended at the status quo ante. Indeed, the boundaries of the two blocs remained virtually unchanged up to 1989. The shouting, of course, never ceased, although it may have been louder and softer at various points. However, in the end, it was still only shouting. In the same way, the two economic zones remained separate until the 1970s, at which point there began a slow entry of the "socialist" bloc into the trade and financial channels of the capitalist world-economy.

We can call the period from 1945 to 1970 the period of unquestioned US hegemony because the United States was able to get 95 percent of what it wanted 95 percent of the time on all important questions. However, there were two potential wrenches in the works. The first was that the United States was so successful in helping Western Europe and Japan to recover that, by the mid-1960s, both zones had reached virtual economic parity with the United States, as measured by two simple facts. First, by the 1960s, it was no longer true that United States' producers could out-sell Western European or Japanese producers in their home markets. Indeed, the opposite was now true. Western European and Japanese producers began to enter the US home market. And secondly, the rest of the world had become a zone of direct competition between producers from all three zones in the North. The United States no longer had any particular advantage over its allies--a development that would have significant political consequences.

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The second potential wrench was the attitude of the developing world. The US-Soviet deal was beneficial for both parties, but it was less beneficial for the countries of the developing world. As a result, the more militant movements in the developing world simply pursued their own interests. Indeed, by the end of this first period, it had become clear that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union was in a position to slow down the drive for national liberation in the developing world.

The world revolutions of 1968 marked a decisive turning point for both US and Soviet strength in the world-system. The multiple revolutions that occurred between 1966 and 1970 shared two characteristics. On the one hand, they all denounced US hegemony as well as Soviet collusion with US hegemony--that is, the Yalta deal. But they also denounced the traditional antisystemic movements--what began to be called the Old Left.

The Old Left was comprised of three components--Communist parties, Social-Democratic parties, and national liberation movements. All three of these components affirmed a two-step strategy: first to conquer state power, and then to change the world. The period of 1945 to 1968 put this strategy to a severe test. For in this period--the very era of unquestioned US hegemony--the three varieties of antisystemic movements that had composed the Old Left up until then had come into state power almost everywhere. In the Soviet bloc, Communist parties were ruling, and in the pan-European world, Social-Democratic parties--defined loosely to include the British Labor Party and New Deal Democrats in the United States--had come into power as well. To be sure, it was "alternating" power, but the alternate more conservative parties had almost all committed themselves to the key ingredients of social-democratic policy: the welfare state.