Paul Krugman has an odd column today. He says that America is as powerful economically as ever and that Joe Biden has conducted a strong foreign policy. Nevertheless:
Serious students of international affairs are noting that the world seems to be becoming more dangerous, with many local cold wars turning hot, and suggesting that we may be witnessing the end of the Pax Americana, the long era in which U.S. economic and military dominance limited the potential for wars of conquest.
....It seems safe to say that the world no longer trusts U.S. promises, and perhaps no longer fears U.S. threats, the way it used to.
Krugman places the blame for this on the chaotic Republican Party, but I think it would be better to ask first if it's even true.
American power was at its peak in the '50s and '60s, when the US accounted for nearly half the world's economy and the Cold War made us the world's uncontested military leader as well.
But did that scare off the Soviet Union? It did not. They seized control of Eastern Europe after World War II. They blockaded Berlin. They invaded Hungary in the '50s and Czechoslovakia in the '60s. They fought proxy wars against the US in Korea, Vietnam, Congo, and Nicaragua. As bad as Vladimir Putin is, his record of military intervention pales in comparison to the Cold War USSR.
Hamas's attack on Israel, needless to say, is also nothing new. Israel has literally been at war since its founding, and terrorist groups have never been intimidated by American power.
In terms of leadership, the US has been pretty effective at gathering support for Ukraine and opposition to China—every bit as effective as it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
This leaves China's recent behavior, which has unquestionably become more anti-American over the past decade. At the same time, China was hardly America's good buddy during the heyday of US power.
So color me unconvinced. America has long had plenty of enemies as well as plenty of obstreperous allies. I'm skeptical of the idea that the world is becoming more dangerous, which strikes me as decidedly ahistorical. I'm equally skeptical of a decline in Pax Americana, which I think never existed in the first place. Can anyone point me toward a good argument for either of these?
I agree with Kevin here 110%. This is especially apparent in the case of the Middle East. There have been innumerable wars in that part of the world, quite a good number of them taking place during the years of supposed US predominance. The myth of a Roman Empire-style Pax Americana lording it over a planet where violence was held at bay was always just that.
Pax Americana isn't used to describe post-WWII as peaceful; it describes America's economic and military power as keeping the world relatively peaceful. None of the wars you cite have expanded beyond regional disputes.
I think most people are wondering if we're entering a period where, either out of complacency or growing isolationism, there's a rise in hot wars across several continents. The National Defense Strategy has, for a while now, put aside the two-war doctrine. Was that a mistake? Probably not, given the lackluster support for wars. But now we're at a point where we might have to aid two separate wars that may expand beyond its immediate geography to encompass other nations.
And FTR, I think the real reason why we sent a second carrier group to the Middle-East region is to (a) avoid having to put boots on the ground and (b) not put Israel in the position of using its tactical nukes against Iran and Syria.
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"Pax Americana isn't used to describe post-WWII as peaceful; it describes America's economic and military power as keeping the world relatively peaceful."
This^
The US involvement in and its losses in Viet Nam and Afghanistan eroded the idea that our military power was up to keeping the world safe. Iraq was even worse. Europe's economy recovered with the help of the Marshall Plan, and eventually rivaled ours. We transferred a good bit of our economy to China, which was racing ahead until Covid. And then there was TFG. So yes. I believe that the Idea of America has deteriorated, both at home and abroad.
This is correct. There were wars, some of them quite big, during the Pax Romana, the Pax Mongolica, and the Pax Britannica, and then things changed. But each era had an imperial force as an anchor of relative stability. KD seems to be getting hung up (again) on semantics.
The claim of Pax Americana was not the end of war but a relative peace compared to the centuries that preceded it.
The chart here shows global death rates in conflicts since 1400. We dropped below 1 in 100,000 a few decades ago, and the average was about 20X that for several centuries, and 100X to 200X that during peaks. We're living through the longest period of peace and prosperity in the last millennium.
You can call that Pax Americana or something else but it's real.
That chart ends at 2000, which means it fails to mention minor details like our invasion of Iraq (and Afghanistan), the Libyan Civil War, Darfur, the Somali Civil war, Yemen, Ukraine, etc, etc. (Skipping a bunch of wars in Africa that "no one cares about/pays attention to.)
That's whole lot of war and death to skip over.
Here's data for this century. Total deaths are far below the WWII period, as well as the 1960s thru 1980s. If you adjust for population (2.3 billion in 1945, 8.1 billion today), the death rates are minor in a historical comparison.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-state-based-conflicts-by-world-region
Another extension of the data, in deaths per 100,000.
Numbers are still low.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rate-in-conflicts
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I found that chart unhelpful (mostly because of the log scale, which IMO obscures more than it illuminates in this case), so I went to the source data for war deaths up to 2000 and spent a while playing around with it. Ultimately I ended up grouping the death rate into 50-year blocks to get a sense of where it has been historically. Here's what I got:
Years . . . . . . . . War Deaths
1600-1649 . . . . 40 / 100K
1650-1699 . . . . 9 / 100K
1700-1749 . . . . 9 / 100K
1750-1799 . . . . 12 / 100K
1800-1849 . . . . 19 / 100K
1850-1899 . . . . 12 / 100K
1900-1949 . . . . 79 / 100K
1950-1999 . . . . 12 / 100K
So we have a fairly steady background level of war deaths since 1600 (about 10 per 100K), but with two massive jumps: the first half of the 17th century during the Thirty Years' War, and the first half of the 20th century which got both of the World Wars.
The second half of the 20th century dropped to 12/100K, right around that background level. So, at a glance, this looks more like reversion to the mean than anything else.
If you restrict the topic to the 20th century and mechanized warfare, and break it out by decade, here's what you get:
Years . . . . . . . . War Deaths
1900-1909 . . . . 6 / 100K
1910-1919 . . . . 129 / 100K
1920-1929 . . . . 6 / 100K
1930-1939 . . . . 76 / 100K
1940-1949 . . . . 178 / 100K
1950-1959 . . . . 21 / 100K
1960-1969 . . . . 15 / 100K
1970-1979 . . . . 14 / 100K
1980-1989 . . . . 8 / 100K
1990-1999 . . . . 5 / 100K
So, dead silence before each World War, and an elevated level after WW2 that declines slowly but steadily each decade. Is that decline an indication of Pax Americana, as the Soviet Union declined from its midcentury peak and American hegemony advanced? Could be. It certainly looks good, whatever it is.
Of course, a cautionary note when you extend that second analysis backward a few decades:
Years . . . . . . . . War Deaths
1850-1859 . . . . 23 / 100K
1860-1869 . . . . 28 / 100K
1870-1879 . . . . 17 / 100K
1880-1889 . . . . 2 / 100K
1890-1899 . . . . 4 / 100K
1900-1909 . . . . 9 / 100K
The Pax Britannica then looks unsettlingly like the Pax Americana now. If the Pax Americana ends the same way, then we should expect World War III in the next decade or two. Buckle up.
Edit: Made a mistake in the last chart, here's what it should have been:
Years . . . . . . . . War Deaths
1850-1859 . . . . 20 / 100K
1860-1869 . . . . 26 / 100K
1870-1879 . . . . 12 / 100K
1880-1889 . . . . 1 / 100K
1890-1899 . . . . 4 / 100K
1900-1909 . . . . 6 / 100K
Also, note that these figures are annualized, so you can compare the 10-year rate with the 50-year rate and with individual years.
This is a thoroughly unquantitative look. Without numbers, this is an unconvincing argument. Similarly, I find Krugman's argument (as cited) unconvincing.
Joseph Harbin above brings up the easiest number to cite, and it's pretty convincing. Some of that is certainly due to the period of hegemony that we've been living in. Is American hegemony declining? Sure, but it's not gone yet.
And for those of us who think that there might be something fundamentally different about the world now, in the information age, it may never really be gone so long as the world is made up of many nation-states. The world needs a default currency and there are no likely or convincing reasons for why it would cease to be the dollar, so American economic power is likely to remain a head above everybody else (on top of the fact that the human and natural resources of the country are more immense than nearly all other nations). Militarily, there's simply no contest and it's even more unlikely than in the economic/soft power dimensions that another nation will even come close within the next few decades or even century.
Joseph Harbin above brings up the easiest number to cite, and it's pretty convincing. Some of that is certainly due to the period of hegemony that we've been living in
Almost none of it is due to US "hegemony" because the only time we've seen anything resembling that word was for about 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Even the very brief period when the United States possessed a nuclear monopoly was a far cry from hegemonic: the presence of a gigantic Soviet army of occupation in Eastern Europe rendered US anger at Russian expansionism in that region largely impotent.
The reduction in battlefield deaths globally flows from one reason only: the advent of nuclear weapons. Their existence makes great power wars too costly to contemplate. And so we haven't had one in nearly 80 years (and so wars have been small scale, at least compared to the previous era). But, to state the obvious, mutliple countries possess nuclear aresenals; this happy situation is very definitely not an effect of American "hegemony."
Ukraine wishes it never gave up its nukes.
Well that was almost my entire life. I have very vague 80s memories but even then Gorbachev was less a threat than a partner (in the mind of a little kid).
Agree with your analysis. Example: Border skirmishes between India and Pakistan, and India and China, have continued, but diminished in intensity since all parties acquired nukes, and there has been essentially no concern that any of these would explode into large-scale conflict.
I wasn't meaning to imply that it was because of American hegemony, nor do I think Joseph was saying so. I think there are other (systemic) factors at play - such as nukes, but also the new economic order of the world. The USA plays a key role in that system, to be sure.
Which group of people would be better prepped for the "next terrorist attack"
By that I don't mean the next 911. I'm thinking something more nefarious. What happens when someone develops "the" weapon to disrupt global (or targeted) computer power and networks
What society would be able to survive that best?
A massive solar flare could achieve that. Or enough EMP from exploding nuclear weapons.
our safety also depends on the resilience of american, russian, chinese, and north korean nuclear weapons systems
who knows how these systems (and human operators) will respond when a solar flare takes down terrestrial electrical systems or blinds satellites
some engineer: "damn, didn't think of *that"
I think we should call it Pax deterrentem in honor of the nuclear weapons that have (so far) checked the psychopaths who rise to power from directly engaging in massive wars against similarly able foes.
Well, remember that last guy who kept bragging about his "big button" and asking the Joint Chiefs why we have nuclear weapons, if we're not using them. Also sending out deranged "tweets" to world leaders about unleashing "fire&fury like the world has never seen."
By Pax Americana was never meant a fear-based order but a rules-based order largely inspired by the US and when necessary defended by coalitions led by the US. That the US sometimes breached the rules itself didn't make it less the indispensable nation. I think it effectively ended under Bush II when the US became hostile to international agreements. Europe then tried to take its place, reluctantly, but lacked the teeth and the unity.
The Pax America was not overtrowing the government of Chile, quite the opposite. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Jimmy Carter's creation, is more like it. Not to forget patrolling the high seas which no-one else can.
From more recent events, I would add that the Iran nuclear agreement was an Obama attempt to restore Pax Americana. No other country would have been able to create the stick of international sanctions. Trump blew that one up and with it a large part of the US's reputation as a reliable leader.
Leading international help to Ukraine and opposing Russia's expansionism is again Pax Americana. No-one else could. And had Putin bowed before this reality, or Ukraine decisively won, Krugman might be heralding the return of Pax Americana rather than lamenting its demise.
But they didn't. So it's gone because other states feel they can successfullu defy the old hegemon
I’m still with Jasper_in_Boston and jvoe; it was always the nuclear balance of terror/MAD that kept World War III from happening, despite lots of regional conflicts. And the USSR/Russia was never deterred from military intervention in what it considered its sphere of influence.
At least this much is clear: The big errors of American foreign policy in the decades since 2000 are all the fault of GOP administrations. The Irak war, the endless engagement in Afghanistan were Bush/Cheney "accomplishments" and the hostility to alliances and the blow up of the Iran nuclear deal are on Trump's record card.
Those were all massive and easily avoidable mistakes, in fact actions of almost inconceivable incompetence.
Yes.
Pax Americana existed for about 100 years. Recall all those charts we've seen over the last 50 years celebrating the decline in global poverty (as a percentage). It's been remarkable as other states either (a) get into gear with the modern economy (China, Brazil, India) or (b) get rich selling them vital natural resources (oil, grains).
With all that money swirling about, the United States is going to have, relatively speaking, a smaller economic and military role than before.
One thing that I believe seriously damaged the United States in terms of being an effective world leader, was Bush's insane Iraq War that was "justified" by shoddy "evidence" (see Powell U.N.). Remember the bullying of smaller nations to get a U.N. vote? That left a bad taste in everyone's mouth - including here in this country. Lots of MAGA types point, justifiably, at the Iraq War as a sign of waste that the Blob/Swamp/Establishment brought to bear. That folly has diminished the appeal of military alliances (NATO) and military support (UKR).
Bush is largely ignored when essayists look at Trump / MAGA / declining U.S. influence. He was more consequential, and did more damage, than people realize.
Amen. If only voters took this fact under advisement. I never tire of telling Repubs that they're supporting the very party undermining US dominance.
BTW, weren't these MAGA-types BushII voters as well? (Perhaps some non-voters, too.) You can't begin to trust them -- turn over an America-First isolationist and you'll find an America-First belligerent who'd just as soon bomb 'em back to the stone age. Their position of the moment doesn't begin to represent a thought-out position.
It seems odd to claim a post wwii pax americana never existed but provide as support only actions by our one major nuclear armed rival and it's client state proxies. The idea of a pax americana in my understanding explicitly excludes the soviet union's decades long cold war with the US, where mutually assured nuclear destruction hobbled our power, and refers to the rest of the world where the soviets weren't wielding strong influence. But I'm truly not a very strong student of history so maybe I'm just wrong.
If there was a Pax Americana it sold out long ago.
Nah it was real. The US definitely the hegemon and then the hyper power at the end snd everything improvrd in thise charts you loved to throw at us.
That's over now. 56% of the world now lives in an autocracy.
These type of conversations belong in Foreign Affairs or other similar styled publications. Pax Americana is shorthand to describe world hegemony after WW2 but whether it describes some type of policy description depends on the writer. IOW, the term has many interpretations, some of which may indeed be useful but really, it does not describe a transcendent world view. To put things in perspective, I would say, the ongoing world order was put in place in the Congress of Vienna in 1815 with Britain at the top, and after many wars, revolutions and transformations, the successor state of Britain, the U.S., is still the world leader as to setting the course of the discourse. Now, the world economy has changed, culture keeps shifting, technology is doing its thing; however, it is still an Anglo driven world after 200 years.
While American power was at is relative peak in the late 40s and 50s, the high of Pax Americana was the 90s. The US economy was booming, our military was clearly second to none, no great powers opposed us (Russia and China were generally neutral, and some times even cooperative). There was a widespread belief that Western-style liberal democracy was on the march. We could do things to enforce the peace like punish Serbia for ethnic cleansing or lead a multi-national military to drive Iraq out of Kuwait. Heck, we almost got peace between Israel and the Palestinians!
Man the 90s were a great time...
THAT is the American Peace.
Israel has been at war since before its founding. Some three weeks before declaring independence, Israel invaded Palestine.
How did a thing that didn't exist "invade" a thing that did exist? There was violence going back years and decades prior to 1948, better to start there.
Bellum Americana
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