LSE IDEAS has been churning out special reports at such a furious pace that I almost forgot to mention
this one concerning
The United States After Unipolarity. The title pretty much sums up what the contributions here say, although the various contributors do question the extent to which the--pardon the phrasing--globocop role will be outsourced to other nations or regions
if not relinquished altogether. In the latter sense, what we may have is not a "changing of the guard" but rather the removal of guard duties not only in security matters but also in global economic governance and so on. While some folks such as yours truly are convinced that movement to a multipolar, superpowerless world is (a) inevitable and (b) a good thing, LSE IDEAS head honcho Michael Cox is less optimistic. As usual with LSE IDEAS, there is no "house" opinion evident (not that we'd want to have one):
However
not all authors are equally pessimistic for America’s future. In a
foreword, Professor Michael Cox, Co-director of LSE IDEAS, suggests that
Europe’s debt crisis could strengthen the US by leaving it perfectly
placed to exploit the economic revolution in Asia and to be the
“strategic balancer to China’s rising power.”
Still, the dominant theme in the contributions is that America's debts will drown it in a sea of red on present course, diminishing its residual urges for playing globocop. Again, it's not necessarily a bad thing considering that they've spent an estimated $4 trillion on foreign misadventures--including Afghanistan which it's in the process of losing without ifs and buts. Anyway, back to the press blurb:
Professor
Morgan, from the University of London, writes that predictions for the
US to hit its highest ever debt level in 2023 mean that resources will
increasingly be eaten up by social security and medical benefits,
leaving the nation increasingly unable to exert power with military or
economic levers. He says: “From 2020 onward the future for US
military power looks bleaker without a domestic correction of fiscal
course. “The United States is slowly awakening to the
reality that growing public indebtedness represents the greatest threat
to its power and prosperity in the twenty-first century.”
Others authors in the study share this analysis: Dr
Adam Quinn, from the University of Birmingham, suggests America will
have to start making hard choices about areas in which it will leave
itself vulnerable as shrinking military budgets remove the luxury of
universal protection. The report points out that the final bill for US
involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan is estimated at more than
$4 trillion.
Alike with our other reports such as the one on
India not likely to become or even aspire to superpower status, PDFs of the individual contributions are available online, although you will have to purchase print copies for posterity. Here's the summary on our (LSE IDEAS, not the main LSE website)
page:
Much has been made over the last few years of the
prospect of a power transition taking place in world politics, as the
United States' dominance of the international system appears
increasingly under threat. If this narrative of American decline is at
least partially correct then the United States will be forced to
rebalance its foreign policy to a world that is no longer 'unambiguously
unipolar'.
In this report, we asked a selection of experts to
assess the challenges the Obama administration has faced in making that
adjustment across a series of policy areas, from redefining how America
funds and uses its military, through addressing global economic
imbalances, to changing how others in the world view and work with the
United States. The authors argue that the Obama administration has
attempted to adjust US foreign policy in recognition of changes in the
international order. They point to the domestic constraints and
political cleavages that stymie that adjustment, and to the
international difficulties that arise not just from pursuing a
post-unipolar foreign policy, but also from the realities of a
post-unipolar world itself.
