Nevertheless, when Rise and Fall appeared in January 1988, Reagan’s America was seen to be grappling with so-called imperial overstretch, while the Soviet Union still appeared secure and Japan’s growing economic clout was seemingly assured.
How fast the wheel of fortune turned during the following months. Had the volume appeared three years later, in 1991, when an American-led coalition defeated Saddam Hussein’s armies in the first Gulf War, while Japan’s 30 years of economic expansion had sputtered to a dismal halt and Mikhail Gorbachev was dissolving the USSR, the book may well have missed its moment.
Still, there was something incontrovertible about the argument that a great power’s relative imperial and military position in the world hung upon its relative productive and economic capacity at home, and that uneven growth rates altered the pecking order of states over time. Of all the quotations used in Rise and Fall, perhaps none was more memorable than Lenin’s question to a Bolshevik colleague in 1918:“Half a century ago, Germany was a miserable, insignificant country, as far as its capitalist strength was concerned, compared with the strength of England at that time. Japan was similarly insignificant compared with Russia. Is it ‘conceivable’ that in ten or 20 years’ time the relative strength of the imperialist powers will have remained unchanged? Absolutely inconceivable.”
One did not need to share Lenin’s views on capitalist/imperialist states to agree that, as I wrote, “the rule seems common to all national units”. But didn’t this imply that, however far away its time might be, America’s fall would eventually come? When entering the “declinism” debate in the late 1980s, the political scientist Samuel Huntington liked to quote Voltaire’s line: “If Rome and Carthage fell, which country is then immortal?” The US couldn’t remain at the apex of the global order for ever.
As Moscow fell and Tokyo stagnated, Washington’s power rose in relative terms. The US, as the conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer put it, enjoyed “the unipolar moment”. That moment has gone. China has risen, and now threatens US hegemony in a way that the Soviet Union and Japan never did. China’s population is much larger than the US’s: the USSR’s had only slightly exceeded it and Japan was half its size in 1988. Although China spends a growing share of its economic power on its military, the country is not, as in the late Soviet era, burdened by its armed forces in a way that is starving its domestic industry of resources. (That is a familiar trap that strong nations have historically fallen into, as Rise and Fall detailed.)
