Michael Auslin has tackled some of the responses (including mine) to his Fox News piece about a potential American retrenchment abroad:
I have no idea exactly how Russia, India, or China would act in a world in which the United States was but one power, nearly equal to others. However, the balance of the current global system has been favorable for far more for far longer than any other in recent history. Watching it potentially degrade, therefore, should raise great caution in everyoneâ??s eyes. If I had to hazard my own guess, a world without an imperfect America acting in a global manner as it has done would be closer to a post-Rome than a post-Britain scenario: bits of the current system slowly flaking off, numerous local conflicts threatening to impinge on the higher interests of bigger powers, a number of regional powers jockeying for influence, and the onset of decades of attempts to come to a new balance, one that may not necessarily privilege openness and freedom as its highest goods.
I think there's a lot to this. The coming decades will require the U.S. to be a lot more skillful in balancing various rising powers so that the international system continues to serve our interests. We may fail. This is, as Auslin suggests, new territory for a U.S. grown accustomed to thinking that the "unipolar moment" was going to simply last forever on the strength of our "exceptionalism." But I think there are two important caveats to keep in mind:
1. The U.S. is the victim of a lot of unforced errors, such as the Iraq war and the debt-financed guns-and-butter economy under the Bush II and Obama administrations, that have hastened a relative decline in power. There's no reason, on paper at least, why the U.S. can't right the fiscal ship and be more circumspect with the use of its military. We can't prevent a relative shift in the distribution of national power, but we can still maintain a relative advantage long into the future.
2. The biggest threat to the well being of Americans and the international system is not military in nature. The U.S. may leave small security vacuums in its wake that regional powers will jockey to fill, but none of that is a threat to the international system. It's on the financial and economic fronts that we face the most urgent threat. On Thursday of last week, $1 trillion in wealth vanished in five minutes (mercifully much of it was restored). One need only look at a retirement account or mutual fund statement from 2008 to understand that whatever may be occurring in Russia's near-abroad is a second-order concern to stabilizing and reforming the global financial system. Over the medium term, getting the U.S. and Europe back on a stronger growth track, and balancing their respective budgets, is going to be the order of the day. In light of that, some scaling back of America's military commitments isn't an impediment to the nation's power, but essential to sustaining it.
