The Twenty-First Century Will Not Be a “Post-American” World

One of the refreshing aspects of Christopher Layne's work over the years has been his willingness to challenge conventional wisdom. But now, he is in the awkward position of being part of a new conventional wisdom. Recent polls show that in 15 of 22 countries surveyed, most people say that China either will replace or has replaced America as the world's leading superpower. Even Americans themselves are equally divided about whether China will displace the United States. Layne is correct that such views reflect the slow growth and fiscal problems that followed the 2008 financial crisis, but one should be wary of extrapolating long-run trends from short-term cycles. Such moods are not historically unprecedented. Americans have a long history of incorrectly estimating their power. After Sputnik, the Soviets were 10 feet tall; in the 1980s, it was the Japanese. Now it is the Chinese. Layne is also right that enthusiasts for the “unipolar moment” badly over estimated American power a decade ago, but not all skeptics about American decline believed in American hegemony. For example, I argued in The Paradox of American Power that the prevailing concepts of polarity and hegemony led to confused analysis and poor policies. After the collapse of Cold War bipolarity, power in the global information age became distributed in a pattern that resembles a complex three-dimensional chess game. On the top chessboard, military power is largely unipolar, and the United States is likely to retain primacy for quite some time. But on the middle chessboard, economic power has been multi-polar for more than a decade (well before the 2008 financial crisis that Layne cites), with the United States, Europe, Japan, and China as the major players, and others gaining in importance. The bottom chessboard is the realm of transnational relations that cross borders outside of …