We Have Been Lucky With Our Superpower, and We Should Say So

There is a fashion, in the parts of the world that are not America, of treating American decline with something between indifference and satisfaction. The country is arrogant, it lectures, it has spent decades printing money instead of making things, and its troubles look like a comeuppance. I understand the mood and I think it is badly mistaken. Whatever is wrong with America is about to be everyone's problem, and the alternative to it is worse.

The Shape of the Trouble

Let me first grant the case against, because it is real.

The American economy has for a long time run on the privilege of issuing the currency the world saves in. That privilege lets it consume more than it produces and settle the difference with money it creates, which is a tax on everyone who holds dollars, most of whom never voted for it. The country's manufacturing has hollowed out while its finance and its data platforms have grown, so that a large part of the world's banking and nearly all of its stored information now run through American firms under American law. And behind all of it stands a military establishment of a size that has to be fed to be kept, and that deters anyone who might object to any of the above.

That is not a healthy configuration. A state that lives on seigniorage, hosts everyone else's data, and defends the arrangement with the largest army in history is a state whose problems cannot stay at home. If its currency fails, the world's savings fail. If its politics fail, the platforms fail with them. This is the sense in which we should hope, quite selfishly, that America finds a way out of its difficulties: because if it does not, they will arrive at our door with no return address.

Why the Alternative Is Worse

Now the part the fashionable mood ignores.

For the whole of living memory there has been one superpower, and it has been a democracy. Not a good one; I have spent a good deal of this blog arguing that representative government is a poor instrument, and the American version has all the defects of the species. But it is a system that has to lie to itself. It has to hold elections, tolerate a press, pretend to a constitution, and justify its wars in the language of freedom even when the wars have nothing to do with freedom.

That sounds like a small thing. It is an enormous thing. A power that has to lie about what it is doing is a power that has to limit what it is doing to what can be lied about. There are actions that a democracy, however cynical, cannot take in the open, and the requirement of openness rules them out or at least slows them. A superpower that had no such requirement would have no such limit.

We have never lived in that world. We came close, twice, and the outcome was not certain either time. The fact that the one country with the capacity to do anything it liked has been, for seventy years, a country that had to at least pretend to ask its citizens first is the single luckiest fact about the era, and it is treated as though it were natural.

Imagining the Other Case

Try the exercise. Picture one superpower, alone, with no rival, run by a small group that answers to nobody and does not have to pretend otherwise. Its data platforms host your correspondence. Its currency is what your pension is denominated in. Its navy decides what crosses the oceans. Nothing about it needs to be justified in any language you recognise, because there is no electorate to justify it to and no press to notice.

That is not a hypothetical about a specific country. It is a structural description of what a non-democratic hegemon would be, and it is what the cheerful observers of American decline should be picturing when they picture what comes next. The dislike of American arrogance is fair. The assumption that whatever replaces it will be less arrogant is not; it will merely be under no obligation to hide it.

What Caring Means

I am not asking anyone to admire America, and I have no interest in its self-image. I am asking for a colder calculation.

The problems it has are systemic, and I have argued elsewhere that they come from the same defects of representative government that afflict every such state. But those problems are being worked out, badly and loudly, in public, by a country that still has to persuade its own people of things. That is the process we want to succeed, not because the country deserves it but because the world that follows its failure would not have that process at all.

Hoping for the superpower to solve its problems is not sentiment. It is the only version of the future in which the problems remain its own.