KEYNOTE ADDRESS BY
YALE HISTORY PROFESSOR
PAUL KENNEDY
FRIDAY, JUNE 23, 2006
Tonight, I’m going to talk about something which has interested me for a long, long time: the measure of American power in world affairs.
I’ve always been fascinated and puzzled by how so many of my academic colleagues follow a particular strand of their discipline and rarely, if ever, look at the interactions of the strands – suffering from a kind of tunnel vision, if you will. Yet, every time I go back to a topic that has interested me, namely that rise and fall of the great powers since the formation of the first nation states in the modern world around 1500, I’m struck by the total impossibility of separating the economic and financial dimensions of power from the military, strategic, and diplomatic dimensions of power. The British did not win the Seven Years’ War or the Napoleonic War because their finances went in one direction and their Royal Navy went in another direction. They went hand in hand. It made sense at the time; it makes sense right now.
I’m going to offer some reflections on the financial and military aspects of American power in today’s world and see how these aspects feed into the larger question of how America should deal with the changing world in which it finds itself today.
Key to this discussion is the nature of U.S. military power in the world today – both in terms of how we understand it and the context in which we should understand it. Take, for example, a Nimitz class, nuclear-powered aircraft carrier of the U.S. Navy. I don’t know whether you’ve ever been in a harbor in San Francisco or been in Gibraltar or Naples when one of these comes in, but if you haven’t been close to one, let me give you some sense of their scale.
The Nimitz displaces over 100,000 tons. It’s more than 4.5 football fields long, 200 feet across and 20 stories high. It has a crew of 3,200 to keep the thing going. Add in the pilots, the navigators, and the repair crews of the aircraft and helicopters and that’s another 3,400. So these carriers are medium-sized towns of about 6,000 odd people. Only, they’re not towns that stay still. They move, or can move all of the time with their nuclear-fueled energy systems at a speed of 34 knots or 34-35 miles per hour, and don’t need refueling for up to two years. They have room for about 70 very modern aircraft on board.
Moreover, these vessels never go out alone. They’re always surrounded by 3 or 4 frigates, destroyers, Aegis class missile cruisers. Underneath it would probably be an attack submarine, so you can’t get at it anyway. Overhead will be an AWAX plane, so there’s not going to be anything around in the air within 800 miles of it. If you put together the budget, the cost of this aircraft carrier and the aircraft, and threw in the cost of the frigates and the Ticonderoga-class cruiser, the total cost would approach about $28 billion. That’s a sum larger than the entire defense budget of Italy.
But the U.S. has 13 of these carriers scattered all over the world and that’s just part of the U.S. Navy and the Navy, after all, is just one of our armed services.
And then you start to think about what Robert Kaplan calls “the imperial grunts,” that is to say, the guys on the ground. The Army and the Marine Corps. The U.S. Army currently has 368,900 soldiers deployed in 120 countries, a force divided between troops in small units, anti-drug units in places like Columbia. anti-insurgency units in the southern Philippines, and about 150,000 in southwest Asia, if you’re including the Afghanistan, Iraq, and Kuwait bases.
What can you say about all of this? First of all, if a Martian came to try to take a tally of what was going on, I suspect he would think that he was looking at an empire at work – a country on which the sun never sets, as was once said about another empire. A country which has bases all over the globe, from the North Atlantic to the Middle East. Some of those bases we’ve now been at for 50-60 years, so we’re not just talking about bases which we’ve opened up in the past 3 or 4 years. And a Martian who is a bit of a joker looking at the actions of this enormous military presence in different parts of the globe, would say, “Look Professor Kennedy, if it acts like an empire and it talks like an empire, it probably is an empire.” That’s what we would call it. You Americans might not like to call it an empire because you think you have a national tradition, going back to the Revolution, which makes you inherently anti-imperialist. Therefore, I hope those of you who think that have not been too deeply troubled by the “global attitudes” report on global public opinion issued by the Pew Institute three days ago, which revealed that most of the people in the rest of the world think that the U.S. is, in fact, an empire.
I’m not so worried about whether we are or are not an “empire,” as this is merely a title. We are, however, clearly a great power, as I noted in selecting the title of my book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.
What else might we say about this military power? An examination of world defense expenditures is an illustrative starting point. There are 191 member countries in the United Nations. Of those 191 countries, one country’s defense expenditures last year totaled close to 50% of the whole. And remember that because of the shadows, mists, and dodgy accounting of Mr. Rumsfeld, the $85-95 billion a year which the Iraq war is costing us, is not in the defense budget. It’s as if President Roosevelt and General Marshall were fighting the Second World War, but there was a whole lot of fighting going on which we weren’t paying for or, at least, we weren’t admitting we were paying for.
Never before in history, not with the Roman Empire, not with the Pax Britannica, has any country’s defense expenditure been up to half of the total spent by human society.
There are a number of other questions that flow from this. One of them the issue of what’s called “imperial overstretch,” a concern that arises when you see the number of divisions and troops we’ve got everywhere from Bolivia, to Germany, to Kuwait, and points between. Have we got enough troops, at least under present configurations and the present volunteer Army and Marine Corps recruitment patterns, to keep this up? We’re now sending certain units back to Iraq for their fourth tour of duty, something we assured them just three years ago would never, ever happen. Even if we can afford this in financial terms, can we afford it in personnel terms? Can we afford it in terms of our long-standing political culture and traditions?
Then there’s a fourth question of whether our military expenditures are going to the right things. The U.S. is spending an inordinate amount of money on inordinately expensive weapons platforms, but not enough for dealing with what we call asymmetrical warfare like the dispersed attacks that have given rise to the war on terror. For example, Congress just passed legislation for the construction of more Sikorsky helicopters, an aircraft that the Marines don’t want. Connecticut’s Groton Yard, which was closed down in the early 1990s, was just reopened in order to build two new nuclear submarines a year, without there first being any significant debate as to why we want these additional subs or why we want them in preference to heavier investment in intelligence, detection, human intelligence, building up our run down Foreign Service, and a whole number of instruments of State which might help us better in the present struggle and war against asymmetrical attacks and enemies of the United States.
So there are questions to be asked about whether, when we measure our power simply listing the attributes of an enormous aircraft carrier or simply observing that we are spending up to nearly 500 billion a year on defense, is an adequate way of seeing our position in the world and seeing where our strengths and weaknesses are.
This brings me to my second cluster of remarks and to the argument I advanced in that book of mine, the Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, whose subtitle was Military Conflict and Economic Change Since 1500. It is no use having large armies and large navies and large palaces for your kings and dukes if they rested on sand: if they rested on lousy national finances; if you didn’t have a flourishing economic base; if you didn’t have a surplus in your trades to pay for your armed services, year after year; if you didn’t keep your expenditures down in peacetime. The two are inextricably linked.
Why was it that the small island nation of Britain rose to win battle after battle and war after war for two or three hundred years? Admiral Nelson and the Royal Navy? Well, yes. Wellington and Marborough and the troops that marched all over Europe? Yes. But they would have been nowhere without the establishment of the stock market in the 1680s, without the creation of the Bank of England in the 1690s, and without a Parliament which insisted that every additional expenditure request be offset by additional taxes that would pay for things like extra frigates. There was none of the monkey business financing that’s going on in Washington right now. There was no asking Congress for $85 billion for the Iraq war and saying it’ll be paid for somehow. If you wanted to do it, you paid for it. This meant that Britain had a consistent reputation among the world’s bankers for hundreds of years and the lowest interest rates of any government issuing bonds because it always paid the money back.
Fast forward to World War II. Again, we see the interaction of economics and finance and financial strength with military victory. Why did we win the battles in the Pacific and defeat Japan? Well, yes, it had a lot to do with leathernecks, carriers at Midway, and B-29 bombers. But it had an enormous amount to do with the fact that the U.S. gross domestic product doubled during the Second World War. We had accumulated all the financial reserves, all the foreign currency, and all the gold reserves of the rest of the world as payment for the weapons systems we sold them.
Today, the global landscape has changed. While the U.S. remains the dominant power – the 500 lb. gorilla, if you will – at the chessboard of global military power and influence, our position on the global economic, trading, and commercial chessboard is different. Whereas at the end of World War II in 1945, the U.S. share of the world product was 50 percent, we are now one of a number of two or three dominant players with a 21-23 percent share of world product. (Last year, the European Union and China had 20 percent and 14 percent of the world product respectively.)
Given the fact that we’re not the all dominant player on the world economic chessboard, our bargaining strategies have to be different; we cannot get away with anything we want.
Our increasing federal budget deficit and trade deficits make this lesson an increasingly important one for us to learn. The gap between what we buy and sell abroad each year is enormous. We’re suffering from a King Phillip of Spain syndrome. The current state of affairs in which China, Japan and Korea are purchasing as much as 65 percent of U.S. Treasury bonds is particularly troubling to me as a strategic historian. While various Chicago School and free-market economists say, “Oh, don’t worry about it; the Chinese will never pull out their dollars,” this thinking evidences a lack of understanding of the Chinese mentality. If it comes down to an issue of the Taiwan states or of national pride, China will not mind losing $200 billion or $400 billion. We will. I don’t think they will. I don’t think China has got a sense of the changed balance of calculation of power and the significance of the economic underpinnings. That worries me a lot.
Another question concerning U.S. global dominance troubles me deeply, given the interaction between U.S. population figures, our share of the world product, and our share of global military expenditures. In 2000, the total world population topped 6 billion. It’s now close to 6.5 billion people. However, only 4.6 percent of the world’s population or less than 1/20th are American citizens. As I mentioned before, the U.S. has a 21-23 percent share of the world’s gross domestic product. Our share of world military spending now tops 50 percent.
Now there’s several ways in which people can look at that. They can say “Wow! That’s really impressive. I’m really proud. Here is less than 1/20th of the globe’s population producing at least a fifth of its output and paying for half of its defense expenditures. That’s great. I like it.” I show this one at the Heritage Foundation and they love it.
But there’s another, more thoughtful way of looking at it, wherein asks how a country with 1/20th of the world’s population can continue to shoulder such a disproportionate share of the world’s military expenditures over the long-term, in the 21st Century landscape of fast-shifting technology and trading blocks?” If you don’t try to ask that question, I don’t think you’re being serious. All things being equal, at some time, there will be what economists call convergence, unless we find ever-newer and more inventive ways of keeping ahead in that middle pie chart of shares of productivity, of output, of new technologies.
Mid-Victorian 1850s Britain provides a sobering example of what might happen. In 1850, Britain produced over 50 percent of the world’s industrial output despite being home to less than 5 percent of the world’s population. And the mid-Victorian British were very proud of it. With the exception of one or two cautionary voices at the time (like Gladsen, who said “It isn’t going to last. It can’t last. One sour technology – of steam, of railways, of steel shipbuilding – once it moves elsewhere, they’ll start catching up, and the 50% will go down.”), the British were very proud of their dominance. However,, it only lasted another 40 years, until about 1890 when the United States and Germany usurped Britain’s mantle as the most productive nation on the globe.
How long will U.S. hegemony last? How clever can we be, if we want it to last, to make it last? How soon are we going to deal with those fiscal deficits to make it last, to avoid a collapse of the dollar? Some of you might remember Voltaire’s famous quip, his cynical question: “If Rome and Carthage fell, which great power is immortal?” And the answer was, none. We need a sight less hubris in Washington and a sight more intelligent long-term policy over the sustenance and maintenance of American power – militarily, technologically, diplomatically, commercially, and financially. ■
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