T
…he United States has been the
dominant world power since 1945,
and U.S. leaders have long sought
to preserve that privileged position. They
understood, as did most Americans, that
primacy brought important benefits. It
made other states less likely to threaten
America or its vital interests directly. By
dampening great-power competition and
giving Washington the capacity to shape re-
gional balances of power, primacy contrib-
uted to a more tranquil international envi-
ronment. That tranquility fostered global
prosperity; investors and traders operate
with greater confidence when there is less
danger of war. Primacy also gave the United
States the ability to work for positive ends:
promoting human rights and slowing the
spread of weapons of mass destruction. It
may be lonely at the top, but Americans
have found the view compelling.
When a state stands alone at the pin-
nacle of power, however, there is nowhere
to go but down. And so Americans have
repeatedly worried about the possibility
of decline—even when the prospect was
remote. Back in 1950, National Security
Council Report 68 warned that Soviet ac-
quisition of atomic weapons heralded an
irreversible shift in geopolitical momentum
in Moscow’s favor. A few years later, Sput-
nik’s launch led many to fear that Soviet
premier Nikita S. Khrushchev’s pledge to
“bury” Western capitalism might just come
true. President John F. Kennedy report-
edly believed the ussr would eventually be
wealthier than the United States, and Rich-
ard Nixon famously opined that America
was becoming a “pitiful, helpless giant.”
Over the next decade or so, defeat in In-
dochina and persistent economic problems
led prominent academics to produce books
with titles like America as an Ordinary
Country and After Hegemony. 1 Far-fetched
concerns about Soviet dominance helped
propel Ronald Reagan to the presidency
and were used to justify a major military
buildup in the early 1980s. The fear of
imminent decline, it seems, has been with
us ever since the United States reached the
zenith of global power.
Debates about decline took on new life
with the publication of Paul Kennedy’s best-
selling Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,
which famously argued that America was
in danger of “imperial overstretch.” Ken-
nedy believed Great Britain returned to the
unseemly ranks of mediocrity because it
spent too much money defending far-flung
interests and fighting costly wars, and he
warned that the United States was headed
Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renee Belfer
Professor of International Affairs at Harvard
University’s Kennedy School of Government.
The End of the American Era
By Stephen M. Walt
1 See Richard Rosecrance, ed., America as an
Ordinary Country: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Future
(Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1976); and
Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation
and Discord in the World Political Economy
(Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1984).
The End of the American Era 7 November/December 2011
down a similar path. Joseph Nye challenged
Kennedy’s pessimism in Bound to Lead: The
Changing Nature of American Power, which
sold fewer copies but offered a more ac-
curate near-term forecast. Nye emphasized
America’s unusual strengths, arguing it was
destined to be the leading world power for
many years to come.
Since then, a host of books and articles—
from Charles Krauthammer’s “The Unipo-
lar Moment,” G. John Ikenberry’s Liberal
Leviathan and Niall Ferguson’s Colossus to
Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World
(to name but a few)—have debated how
long American dominance could possibly
last. Even Osama bin Laden eventually got
in on the act, proclaim-
ing the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan fatal blows
to American power and
a vindication of al-Qae-
da’s campaign of terror.
Yet for all the ink that
has been spilled on the
durability of American
primacy, the protago-
nists have mostly asked
the wrong question. The
issue has never been
whether the United
States was about to imi-
tate Britain’s fall from
the ranks of the great
powers or suffer some
other form of catastroph-
ic decline. The real ques-
tion was always whether what one might
term the “American Era” was nearing its
end. Specifically, might the United States
remain the strongest global power but be
unable to exercise the same influence it
once enjoyed? If that is the case—and I
believe it is—then Washington must devise
a grand strategy that acknowledges this new
reality but still uses America’s enduring as-
sets to advance the national interest.
T
he American Era began immediately
after World War II. Europe may have
been the center of international politics for
over three centuries, but two destructive
world wars decimated these great powers.
The State Department’s Policy Planning
Staff declared in 1947 that “preponderant
power must be the object of U.S. policy,”
and its willingness to openly acknowledge
this goal speaks volumes about the imbal-
ance of power in America’s favor. Interna-
tional-relations scholars commonly speak of
this moment as a transition from a multipo-
lar to a bipolar world, but Cold War bipo-
larity was decidedly lopsided from the start.
In 1945, for example, the U.S. econo-
my produced roughly half of gross world
product, and the United States was a major
creditor nation with a positive trade bal-
ance. It had the world’s largest navy and air
force, an industrial base second to none,
sole possession of atomic weapons and a
globe-circling array of military bases. By
supporting decolonization and backing Eu-
ropean reconstruction through the Marshall
Plan, Washington also enjoyed considerable
The National Interest 8 The End of the American Era
goodwill in most of the developed and de-
veloping world.
Most importantly, the United States was
in a remarkably favorable geopolitical posi-
tion. There were no other great powers in
the Western Hemisphere, so Americans did
not have to worry about foreign invasion.
Our Soviet rival had a much smaller and
less efficient economy. Its military might,
concentrated on ground forces, never ap-
proached the global reach of U.S. power-
projection capabilities. The other major
power centers were all located on or near
the Eurasian landmass—close to the Soviet
Union and far from the United States—
which made even former rivals like Ger-
many and Japan eager for U.S. protection
from the Russian bear. Thus, as the Cold
War proceeded, the United States amassed a
strong and loyal set of allies while the ussr
led an alliance of comparatively weak and
reluctant partners. In short, even before the
Soviet Union collapsed, America’s overall
position was about as favorable as any great
power’s in modern history.
What did the United States do with these
impressive advantages? In the decades after
World War II, it created and led a political,
security and economic order in virtually
every part of the globe, except for the sphere
that was directly controlled by the Sovi-
et Union and its Communist clients. Not
only did the United States bring most of
the world into institutions that were largely
made in America (the un, the World Bank,
the imf, and the General Agreement on Tar-
iffs and Trade), for decades it retained the
dominant influence in these arrangements.
In Europe, the Marshall Plan revitalized
local economies, covert U.S. intervention
helped ensure that Communist parties did
not gain power, and nato secured the peace
and deterred Soviet military pressure. The
position of supreme allied commander was
always reserved for a U.S. officer, and no
significant European security initiative took
place without American support and ap-
proval. (The main exception, which sup-
ports the general point, was the ill-fated
Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt dur-
ing the Suez crisis of 1956, an adventure
that collapsed in the face of strong U.S. op-
position.) The United States built an equal-
ly durable security order in Asia through
bilateral treaties with Japan, South Korea,
Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines and
several others, and it incorporated each of
these countries into an increasingly liberal
world economy. In the Middle East, Wash-
ington helped establish and defend Israel
but also forged close security ties with Saudi
Arabia, Jordan, the shah of Iran and sev-
eral smaller Gulf states. America continued
to exercise a position of hegemony in the
Western Hemisphere, using various tools to
oust leftist governments in Guatemala, the
Dominican Republic, Chile and Nicaragua.
In Africa, not seen as a vital arena, America
did just enough to ensure that its modest
interests there were protected.
To be sure, the United States did not
exert total control over events in the vari-
ous regional orders it created. It could not
prevent the revolution in Cuba in 1959 or
Iran in 1979, it failed to keep France from
leaving nato’s integrated military command
structure in 1966, and it did not stop Israel,
India, North Korea and Pakistan from ac-
quiring nuclear weapons. But the United
States retained enormous influence in each
of these regions, especially on major issues.
Furthermore, although the U.S. posi-
tion was sometimes challenged—the loss in
Vietnam being the most obvious example—
America’s overall standing was never in dan-
ger. The U.S. alliance system in Asia held
firm despite defeat in Indochina, and dur-
ing the 1970s, Beijing formed a tacit part-
nership with Washington. Moreover, China
eventually abandoned Marxism-Leninism as
a governing ideology, forswore world revo-
lution and voluntarily entered the structure
The End of the American Era 9 November/December 2011
of institutions that the United States had
previously created. Similarly, Tehran became
an adversary once the clerical regime took
over, but America’s overall position in the
Middle East was not shaken. Oil contin-
ued to flow out of the Persian Gulf, Israel
became increasingly secure and prosperous,
and key Soviet allies like Egypt eventu-
ally abandoned Moscow and sided with the
United States. Despite occasional setbacks,
the essential features of the American Era
remained firmly in place.
Needless to say, it is highly unusual for a
country with only 5 percent of the world’s
population to be able to organize favorable
political, economic and security orders in
almost every corner of the globe and to
sustain them for decades. Yet that is in fact
what the United States did from 1945 to
1990. And it did so while enjoying a half
century of economic growth that was nearly
unmatched in modern history.
And then the Soviet empire collapsed,
leaving the United States as the sole su-
perpower in a unipolar world. According
to former national-security adviser Brent
Scowcroft, the United States found itself
“standing alone at the height of power. It
was, it is, an unparalleled situation in his-
tory, one which presents us with the rarest
opportunity to shape the world.” And so
it tried, bringing most of the Warsaw Pact
into nato and encouraging the spread of
market economies and democratic institu-
tions throughout the former Communist
world. It was a triumphal moment—the
apogee of the American Era—but the cel-
ebratory fireworks blinded us to the trends
and pitfalls that brought that era to an end.
T
he past two decades have witnessed
the emergence of new power centers
in several key regions. The most obvious
example is China, whose explosive econom-
ic growth is undoubtedly the most signifi-
cant geopolitical development in decades.
The United States has been the world’s
largest economy since roughly 1900, but
China is likely to overtake America in total
economic output no later than 2025. Bei-
jing’s military budget is rising by roughly
10 percent per year, and it is likely to con-
vert even more of its wealth into military
assets in the future. If China is like all pre-
vious great powers—including the United
States—its definition of “vital” interests
will grow as its power increases—and it
will try to use its growing muscle to protect
an expanding sphere of influence. Given
its dependence on raw-material imports
(especially energy) and export-led growth,
prudent Chinese leaders will want to make
sure that no one is in a position to deny
them access to the resources and markets
on which their future prosperity and politi-
cal stability depend.
This situation will encourage Beijing to
challenge the current U.S. role in Asia.
Such ambitions should not be hard for
Americans to understand, given that the
United States has sought to exclude out-
side powers from its own neighborhood
ever since the Monroe Doctrine. By a simi-
lar logic, China is bound to feel uneasy if
Washington maintains a network of Asian
alliances and a sizable military presence
in East Asia and the Indian Ocean. Over
time, Beijing will try to convince other
Asian states to abandon ties with America,
Instead of trying to be the “indispensable nation” nearly
everywhere, the United States will need to figure out
how to be the decisive power in the places that matter.
The National Interest 10 The End of the American Era
and Washington will almost certainly resist
these efforts. An intense security competi-
tion will follow.
The security arrangements that defined
the American Era are also being under-
mined by the rise of several key regional
powers, most notably India, Turkey and
Brazil. Each of these states has achieved
impressive economic growth over the past
decade, and each has become more will-
ing to chart its own course independent of
Washington’s wishes. None of them are on
the verge of becoming true global powers—
Brazil’s gdp is still less than one-sixth that
of the United States, and India and Turkey’s
economies are even smaller—but each has
become increasingly influential within its
own region. This gradual diffusion of power
is also seen in the recent expansion of the
G-8 into the so-called G-20, a tacit recogni-
tion that the global institutions created after
World War II are increasingly obsolete and
in need of reform.
Each of these new regional powers is a
democracy, which means that its leaders
pay close attention to public opinion. As a
result, the United States can no longer rely
on cozy relations with privileged elites or
military juntas. When only 10–15 percent
of Turkish citizens have a “favorable” view
of America, it becomes easier to understand
why Ankara refused to let Washington use
its territory to attack Iraq in 2003 and why
Turkey has curtailed its previously close
ties with Israel despite repeated U.S. ef-
forts to heal the rift. Anti-Americanism is
less prevalent in Brazil and India, but their
democratically elected leaders are hardly
deferential to Washington either.
The rise of new powers is bringing the
short-lived “unipolar moment” to an end,
and the result will be either a bipolar Sino-
American rivalry or a multipolar system
containing several unequal great powers.
The United States is likely to remain the
strongest, but its overall lead has shrunk—
and it is shrinking further still.
Of course, the twin debacles in Iraq and
Afghanistan only served to accelerate the
waning of American dominance and under-
score the limits of U.S. power. The Iraq War
alone will carry a price tag of more than $3
trillion once all the costs are counted, and
the end result is likely to be an unstable
quasi democracy that is openly hostile to
Israel and at least partly aligned with Iran.
Indeed, Tehran has been the main benefi-
ciary of this ill-conceived adventure, which
is surely not what the Bush administration
had in mind when it dragged the country
to war.
The long Afghan campaign is even more
likely to end badly, even if U.S. leaders
eventually try to spin it as some sort of
victory. The Obama administration finally
got Osama bin Laden, but the long and
costly attempt to eliminate the Taliban and
The End of the American Era 11 November/December 2011
build a Western-style state in Afghanistan
has failed. At this point, the only interest-
ing question is whether the United States
will get out quickly or get out slowly. In
either scenario, Kabul’s fate will ultimately
be determined by the Afghans once the
United States and its dwindling set of allies
leave. And if failure in Afghanistan weren’t
enough, U.S. involvement in Central Asia
has undermined relations with nuclear-
armed Pakistan and reinforced virulent an-
ti-Americanism in that troubled country. If
victory is defined as achieving your main
objectives and ending a war with your secu-
rity and prosperity enhanced, then both of
these conflicts must be counted as expen-
sive defeats.
But the Iraq and Afghan wars were not
simply costly self-inflicted wounds; they
were also eloquent demonstrations of the
limits of military power. There was never
much doubt that the United States could
topple relatively weak and/or unpopular
governments—as it has in Panama, Af-
ghanistan, Iraq and, most recently, Libya—
but the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
showed that unmatched power-projection
capabilities were of little use in construct-
ing effective political orders once the of-
fending leadership was removed. In places
where local identities remain strong and
foreign interference is not welcome for
long, even a global superpower like the
United States has trouble obtaining desir-
able political results.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the greater
Middle East, which has been the main focus
of U.S. strategy since the ussr broke apart.
Not only did the Arab Spring catch Wash-
ington by surprise, but the U.S. response
further revealed its diminished capacity to
shape events in its favor. After briefly try-
ing to shore up the Mubarak regime, the
Obama administration realigned itself with
the forces challenging the existing regional
order. The president gave a typically elo-
quent speech endorsing change, but no-
body in the region paid much attention.
Indeed, with the partial exception of Libya,
U.S. influence over the entire process has
been modest at best. Obama was unable
to stop Saudi Arabia from sending troops
to Bahrain—where Riyadh helped to quell
demands for reform—or to convince Syrian
leader Bashar al-Assad to step down. U.S.
leverage in the post-Mubarak political pro-
cess in Egypt and the simmering conflict in
Yemen is equally ephemeral.
One gets a vivid sense of America’s altered
circumstances by comparing the U.S. re-
sponse to the Arab Spring to its actions in
the early years of the Cold War. In 1948,
the Marshall Plan allocated roughly $13
billion in direct grants to restarting Europe’s
economy, an amount equal to approximate-
ly 5 percent of total U.S. gdp. The equiva-
lent amount today would be some $700 bil-
lion, and there is no way that Washington
could devote even a tenth of that amount
to helping Egypt, Tunisia, Libya or others.
Nor does one need to go all the way back to
1948. The United States forgave $7 billion
of Egypt’s foreign debt after the 1991 Gulf
War; in 2011, all it could offer Cairo’s new
government was $1 billion worth of loan
guarantees (not actual loans) and $1 billion
in debt forgiveness.
America’s declining influence is also re-
vealed by its repeated failure to resolve
the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. It has been
nearly twenty years since the signing of the
Oslo accords in September 1993, and the
United States has had a monopoly on the
“peace process” ever since that hopeful day.
Yet its efforts have been a complete failure,
proving beyond doubt that Washington
is incapable of acting as an effective and
evenhanded mediator. Obama’s call for “two
states for two peoples” in his address to the
Arab world in June 2009 produced a brief
moment of renewed hope, but his steady
retreat in the face of Israeli intransigence
The National Interest 12 The End of the American Era
and domestic political pressure drove U.S.
credibility to new lows.
Taken together, these events herald a
sharp decline in America’s ability to shape
the global order. And the recent series of
economic setbacks will place even more sig-
nificant limits on America’s ability to main-
tain an ambitious international role. The
Bush administration inherited a rare budget
surplus in 2001 but proceeded to cut fed-
eral taxes significantly and fight two costly
wars. The predictable result was a soaring
budget deficit and a rapid increase in federal
debt, problems compounded by the finan-
cial crisis of 2007–09. The latter disaster
required a massive federal bailout of the fi-
nancial industry and a major stimulus pack-
age, leading to a short-term budget shortfall
in 2009 of some $1.6 trillion (roughly 13
percent of gdp). The United States has been
in the economic doldrums ever since, and
there is scant hope of a rapid return to vig-
orous growth. These factors help explain
Standard & Poor’s U.S. government credit-
rating downgrade in August amid new fears
of a “double-dip” recession.
The Congressional Budget Office projects
persistent U.S. budget deficits for the next
twenty-five years—even under its optimis-
tic “baseline” scenario—and it warns of
plausible alternatives in which total federal
debt would exceed 100 percent of gdp by
2023 and 190 percent of gdp by 2035.
State and local governments are hurting
too, which means less money for roads,
bridges, schools, law enforcement and the
other collective goods that help maintain a
healthy society.
The financial meltdown also undermined
an important element of America’s “soft
power,” namely, its reputation for compe-
tence and probity in economic policy. In
the 1990s, a seemingly robust economy
gave U.S. officials bragging rights and made
the “Washington Consensus” on economic
policy seem like the only game in town.
Thomas Friedman (and other popular writ-
ers) argued that the rest of the world needed
to adopt U.S.-style “DOScapital 6.0” or fall
by the wayside. Yet it is now clear that the
U.S. financial system was itself deeply cor-
rupt and that much of its economic growth
was an illusory bubble. Other states have
reason to disregard Washington’s advice and
to pursue economic strategies of their own
making. The days when America could drive
the international economic agenda are over,
which helps explain why it has been seven-
teen years since the Uruguay Round, the last
successful multilateral trade negotiation.
The bottom line is clear and unavoidable:
the United States simply won’t have the
resources to devote to international affairs
that it had in the past. When the president
of the staunchly internationalist Council on
Foreign Relations is penning articles decry-
ing “American Profligacy” and calling for re-
trenchment, you know that America’s global
role is in flux. Nor can the United States ex-
pect its traditional allies to pick up the slack
voluntarily, given that economic conditions
are even worse in Europe and Japan.
The era when the United States could
create and lead a political, economic and
security order in virtually every part of the
world is coming to an end. Which raises
the obvious question: What should we do
about it?
T
he twilight of the American Era ar-
rived sooner than it should have be-
cause U.S. leaders made a number of costly
mistakes. But past errors need not lead to
a further erosion of America’s position if
we learn the right lessons and make timely
adjustments.
Above all, Washington needs to set clear
priorities and to adopt a hardheaded and
unsentimental approach to preserving our
most important interests. When U.S. pri-
macy was at its peak, American leaders
could indulge altruistic whims. They didn’t
The End of the American Era 13 November/December 2011
have to think clearly about strategy be-
cause there was an enormous margin for
error; things were likely to work out even
if Washington made lots of mistakes. But
when budgets are tight, problems have
multiplied and other powers are less defer-
ential, it’s important to invest U.S. power
wisely. As former secretary of defense Rob-
ert Gates put it: “We need to be honest
with the president, with the Congress, with
the American people . . . a smaller mili-
tary, no matter how superb, will be able
to go fewer places and be able to do fewer
things.” The chief lesson, he emphasized,
was the need for “conscious choices” about
our missions and means. Instead of try-
ing to be the “indispensable nation” nearly
everywhere, the United States will need to
figure out how to be the decisive power in
the places that matter.
For starters, we should remember what
the U.S. military is good for and what it
is good at doing. American forces are very
good at preventing major conventional ag-
gression, or reversing it when it happens.
We successfully deterred Soviet ambitions
throughout the long Cold War, and we
easily reversed Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in
1991. The U.S. naval and air presence in
Asia still has similar stabilizing effects, and
the value of this pacifying role should not
be underestimated.
By contrast, the U.S. military is not good
at running other countries, particularly in
cultures that are radically different from our
own, where history has left them acutely
hostile to foreign interference, and when
there are deep ethnic divisions and few
democratic traditions. The United States
can still topple minor-league dictators, but
it has no great aptitude for creating stable
and effective political orders afterward.
It follows that the United States should
eschew its present fascination with nation
building and counterinsurgency and return
to a grand strategy that some (myself in-
cluded) have labeled offshore balancing. 2
Offshore balancing seeks to maintain be-
nevolent hegemony in the Western Hemi-
sphere and to maintain a balance of power
among the strong states of Eurasia and of
the oil-rich Persian Gulf. At present, these
are the only areas that are worth sending
U.S. soldiers to fight and die in.
Instead of seeking to dominate these re-
gions directly, however, our first recourse
should be to have local allies uphold the
balance of power, out of their own self-
interest. Rather than letting them free ride
on us, we should free ride on them as much
as we can, intervening with ground and air
forces only when a single power threatens
to dominate some critical region. For an
offshore balancer, the greatest success lies in
getting somebody else to handle some pesky
problem, not in eagerly shouldering that
burden oneself.
To be more specific: offshore balanc-
ing would call for removing virtually all
The biggest challenge the United States faces today is not a
looming great-power rival; it is the triple whammy of
accumulated debt, eroding infrastructure and a sluggish economy.
2 On “offshore balancing,” see Christopher Layne,
“From Preponderance to Offshore Balancing:
America’s Future Grand Strategy,” International
Security 22, no. 1 (1997); John J. Mearsheimer,
The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W.
W. Norton, 2001); and Stephen M. Walt, Taming
American Power: The Global Response to U.S.
Primacy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), chap. 5.
The National Interest 14 The End of the American Era
U.S. troops from Europe, while remain-
ing formally committed to nato. Europe is
wealthy, secure, democratic and peaceful,
and it faces no security problems that it can-
not handle on its own. (The combined de-
fense spending of nato’s European members
is roughly five times greater than Russia’s,
which is the only conceivable conventional
military threat the Continent might face.)
Forcing nato’s European members to take
the lead in the recent Libyan war was a good
first step, because the United States will
never get its continental allies to bear more
of the burden if it insists on doing most of
the work itself. Indeed, by playing hard to
get on occasion, Washington would encour-
age others to do more to win our support,
instead of resenting or rebelling against the
self-appointed “indispensable nation.”
In the decades ahead, the United States
should shift its main strategic attention to
Asia, both because its economic importance
is rising rapidly and because China is the
only potential peer competitor that we face.
The bad news is that China could become
a more formidable rival than the Soviet
Union ever was: its economy is likely to be
larger than ours (a situation the United
States has not faced since the nineteenth
century); and, unlike the old, largely autar-
kic Soviet Union, modern China depends
on overseas trade and resources and will be
more inclined to project power abroad.
The good news is that China’s rising sta-
tus is already ringing alarm bells in Asia.
The more Beijing throws its weight around,
the more other Asian states will be looking
to us for help. Given the distances involved
and the familiar dilemmas of collective ac-
tion, however, leading a balancing coali-
tion in Asia will be far more difficult than
it was in Cold War Europe. U.S. officials
will have to walk a fine line between doing
too much (which would allow allies to free
ride) and doing too little (which might
lead some states to hedge toward China).
To succeed, Washington will have to keep
air and naval forces deployed in the region,
pay close attention to the evolving military
and political environment there, and de-
vote more time and effort to managing a
large and potentially fractious coalition of
Asian partners.
Perhaps most importantly, offshore bal-
ancing prescribes a very different approach
to the greater Middle East. And prior to
1991, in fact, that’s exactly what we did.
The United States had a strategic interest
in the oil there and a moral commitment to
defending Israel, but until 1968 it mostly
passed the buck to London. After Britain
withdrew, Washington relied on regional al-
lies such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel to
counter Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria.
When the shah fell, the United States cre-
ated the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force
(rdjtf) but did not deploy it to the region;
instead, it kept the rdjtf over the horizon
until it was needed. Washington backed Iraq
against Iran during the 1980s, and the U.S.
Navy escorted oil tankers during the Iran-
Iraq War, but it deployed U.S. ground and
air forces only when the balance of power
broke down completely, as it did when Iraq
seized Kuwait. This strategy was not perfect,
perhaps, but it preserved key U.S. interests
at minimal cost for over four decades.
Unfortunately, the United States aban-
doned offshore balancing after 1991. It first
tried “dual containment,” in effect con-
fronting two states—Iran and Iraq—that
also hated each other, instead of using each
to check the other as it had in the past.
This strategy—undertaken, as the Nation-
al Iranian American Council’s Trita Parsi
and Brookings’ Kenneth Pollack suggest,
in good part to reassure Israel—forced the
United States to keep thousands of troops
in Saudi Arabia, sparking Osama bin Lad-
en’s ire and helping fuel the rise of al-Qae-
da. The Bush administration compounded
this error after 9/11 by adopting the even
The End of the American Era 15 November/December 2011
more foolish strategy of “regional trans-
formation.” Together with the “special re-
lationship” with Israel, these ill-conceived
approaches deepened anti-Americanism in
the Middle East and gave states like Iran
more reason to consider acquiring a nu-
clear deterrent. It is no great mystery why
Obama’s eloquent speeches did nothing to
restore America’s image in the region; peo-
ple there want new U.S. policies, not just
more empty rhetoric.
One can only imagine how much policy
makers in Beijing have enjoyed watching
the United States bog itself down in these
costly quagmires. Fortunately, there is an
obvious solution: return to offshore balanc-
ing. The United States should get out of
Iraq and Afghanistan as quickly as possible,
treat Israel like a normal country instead
of backing it unconditionally, and rely on
local Middle Eastern, European and Asian
allies to maintain the peace—with our help
when necessary.
D
on’t get me wrong. The United States
is not finished as a major power. Nor
is it destined to become just one of sev-
eral equals in a future multipolar world.
To the contrary, the United States still has
the world’s strongest military, and the U.S.
economy remains diverse and technological-
ly advanced. China’s economy may soon be
larger in absolute terms, but its per capita
income will be far smaller, which means its
government will have less surplus to devote
to expanding its reach (including of the
military variety). American expenditures
on higher education and industrial research
and development still dwarf those of other
countries, the dollar remains the world’s re-
serve currency and many states continue to
clamor for U.S. protection.
Furthermore, long-term projections of
U.S. latent power are reassuring. Popula-
tions in Russia, Japan and most European
countries are declining and aging, which
will limit their economic potential in the
decades ahead. China’s median age is also
rising rapidly (an unintended consequence
of the one-child policy), and this will be a
powerful drag on its economic vitality. By
contrast, U.S. population growth is high
The National Interest 16 The End of the American Era
compared with the rest of the developed
world, and U.S. median age will be lower
than any of the other serious players.
Indeed, in some ways America’s strategic
position is actually more favorable than it
used to be, which is why its bloated military
budget is something of a mystery. In 1986,
for example, the United States and its al-
lies controlled about 49 percent of global
military expenditures while our various ad-
versaries combined for some 42 percent.
Today, the United States and its allies are
responsible for nearly 70 percent of military
spending; all our adversaries put together
total less than 15 percent. Barring addition-
al self-inflicted wounds, the United States is
not going to fall from the ranks of the great
powers at any point in the next few decades.
Whether the future world is unipolar, bipo-
lar or multipolar, Washington is going to be
one of those poles—and almost certainly
the strongest of them.
And so, the biggest challenge the United
States faces today is not a looming great-
power rival; it is the triple whammy of ac-
cumulated debt, eroding infrastructure and
a sluggish economy. The only way to have
the world’s most capable military forces
both now and into the future is to have
the world’s most advanced economy, and
that means having better schools, the best
universities, a scientific establishment that
is second to none, and a national infrastruc-
ture that enhances productivity and dazzles
those who visit from abroad. These things
all cost money, of course, but they would do
far more to safeguard our long-term security
than spending a lot of blood and treasure
determining who should run Afghanistan,
Kosovo, South Sudan, Libya, Yemen or any
number of other strategic backwaters.
The twilight of the American Era is not
an occasion to mourn or a time to cast
blame. The period when the United States
could manage the politics, economics and
security arrangements for nearly the entire
globe was never destined to endure forever,
and its passing need not herald a new age of
rising threats and economic hardship if we
make intelligent adjustments.
Instead of looking backward with nos-
talgia, Americans should see the end of the
American Era as an opportunity to rebal-
ance our international burdens and focus
on our domestic imperatives. Instead of
building new Bagrams in faraway places of
little consequence, it is time to devote more
attention to that “shining city on a hill” of
which our leaders often speak, but which
still remains to be built. n
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