Degrowth causes fatal decline economically and strategically – ensures Chinese hegemony.

That gloominess is now back among many in American strategic circles, and the conversation between Zumwalt and Kissinger fifty years ago could just as easily have happened today. Then, as now, the United States was facing enor- mous domestic strains while a rising power loomed over the horizon. And then, as now, some believed that US policy should be less provocative and competi- tive, reflect the fact that “historical forces” were supposedly arrayed against the country, and seek the best deal possible with an ascendant rival. A refashioned version of Kissinger’s argument today might point out that China dominates global manufacturing, increasingly rivals the United States in high-technology, boasts an economy larger than the American one in purchasing power terms, fields the world’s largest navy, and has weathered a once-in-a-century pandemic better than most others—the only great power to avoid recession in 2020. The United States, by contrast, seems to many in Beijing and even in Washington hopelessly divided and gridlocked, with its governance and institutions deteriorating. As of this book’s publication, it confronts a years-long pandemic, industrial erosion, burgeoning debt, a wounded democracy, and a diminished global reputation. Might Kissinger’s pessimism be warranted?8

A descent into fatalism is likely premature. American declinism is a tradition with a rich but often inaccurate history, and there have been four declinist waves in the last century. In each of them, the country displayed what the political sci- entist Samuel Huntington once called “an unusual capacity for self-correction,” with declinists ironically playing “an indispensable role in preventing what they are predicting.”9

The first wave of American declinism began during the Great Depression in the 1930s. Kissinger and many others may have seen the postwar period as the American high point, but the economic calamity only years before—from which Germany and Japan seemed to emerge more swiftly than the United States— had stirred American doubts about the country’s system of self-governance. The United States rebounded through innovative New Deal programs that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used to reshape the US economy, and by the postwar era, an America that seemed down and out was back in prime position. Then, in 1957, the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik satellite, provoking a second wave of declinist handwringing. But the muscle memory of the New Deal remained: the United States built federally supported institutions for research and education that made the country a technological leader for decades.

Declinism crested in a long, third wave in the 1960s and 1970s that tested the faith of Kissinger, Zumwalt, and countless others in the country’s resilience. The United States went through social unrest and political assassinations; the collapse of Bretton Woods and the arrival of stagflation; the impeachment of President Richard Nixon and the fall of Saigon—all set against the backdrop of Soviet advancement. But eventually even these developments brought adjust- ment and renewal. Social unrest propelled civil rights reforms, impeachment reaffirmed the rule of law, Bretton Woods’ collapse brought eventual dollar dom- inance, defeat in Vietnam ended the draft, and the Soviet Union’s Afghan inva- sion hastened its collapse.

A fourth declinist wave marked by industrial erosion, trade deficits, and rising inequality rattled American leaders in the 1980s and early 1990s, prompting Senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts to declare that “the Cold War is over, and Japan and Germany won.” But despite those pressures, the United States success- fully harnessed the information technology revolution. Less than a decade after Tsongas’s comment, the United States was heralded as an unrivaled superpower.

The United States is now in its fifth wave of declinism—one that began with the global financial crisis in 2008 and accelerated through Trump’s norm- breaking presidency, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the storming of the US Capitol by extremists. All of this has been set against China’s continued rise. And as this book has demonstrated, China has had a grand strategy to displace American order and build its own order at both the regional and global level. It now seeks to be the world’s leading state.

Despite their popularity in Beijing, narratives on American decline are often incomplete. Declinists point to forces—such as inequality, polarization, disinformation, and deindustrialization—that are real and formidable in the United States, but they forget these same forces are also global in nature rather than uniquely American. At the same time, they overlook US advantages over China, which has a fast-aging population, enormous debt, slowing growth, and a currency still far from rivaling the dollar. In contrast, the United States still retains enviable advantages: a young population, financial dominance, abun- dant resources, peaceful borders, strong alliances, and an innovative economy. Moreover, it is hardly incidental that throughout most of China’s four-decade rise, the United States has consistently held a quarter of the world’s GDP.10

Declinists also underestimate the power of the United States’ appeal. American openness attracts the allies that sustain the global liberal order, the immigrants who fuel American growth, and the capital that sustains dollar dominance. US soft power flows from the country’s open society and civic creed, not from the state. The protests that followed the killing of George Floyd, which China saw incorrectly as a sign of decline, instead reflected a public struggle to realize the founding values of the United States—values whose appeal was so universal that the struggle for them captivated global audiences and inspired marches abroad. The United States attracts more criticism than other great powers “precisely be- cause it holds itself to a higher standard,” argues the South Africa–based jour- nalist Dele Olojode. “Nobody holds China to that kind of standard.”11

For the United States, decline is less a condition than a choice. The downward path runs through the country’s polarized political system. The path away from decline, meanwhile, may run through a rare area susceptible to bipartisan con- sensus: the need for the United States to rise to the China challenge.

As this book has shown, this challenge is in most respects not a choice. China’s scale and its increasingly global ambitions are geopolitical facts, and the country seeks to set the terms for the twenty-first century in the same way that the United States set them for the twentieth. The last chapter discussed a policy response to China’s ambitions, one that strengthens the “forms of control” upon which American order depends while undermining those that Chinese order will soon require. The United States can and should avoid competing dollar-for-dollar, ship-for-ship, or loan-for-loan, and could instead adopt an asymmetric approach that blunts Chinese advances at lower cost than China expends in generating them, all while reinvesting in the sources of American order and power.

The imperative for reinvestment is particularly urgent. Meeting the China challenge will require the kinds of reinvestments in American competitiveness and innovation that are also critical to domestic renewal and working-class prosperity. Policymakers can link these two agendas, not to amplify American anxieties but to make clear that accomplishing the country’s most important do- mestic tasks will also have salutary effects abroad. At the same time, policymakers must resist the common declinist tendency to see US competitors as ten feet tall and instead calibrate a response that spurs innovation without stoking fear and prejudice. The arrival of an external competitor has often pushed the United States to become its best self; handled judiciously, it can once again. During the Cold War, US politicians endeavored to leave foreign policy differences “at the water’s edge.” In this time of partisan gridlock, domestic consensus may once again begin beyond America’s shores.

With a constructive China policy that strengthens the United States at home and makes it more competitive abroad, American leaders can begin to reverse the impression of US decline. But they cannot stop there. They must also find affirmative ways to rebuild the solidarity and civic identity that make democracy work. An effort to stress a shared liberal nationalism, or what the historian Jill Lepore calls a “New Americanism,” has been part of our civic culture and can be again.12

As a presidential candidate sixty years ago, when Americans were still reeling from the Sputnik shock, John F. Kennedy addressed a municipal auditorium in Canton, Ohio. The country faced serious crises, and Kennedy enumerated them: low wages, high housing costs, a growing risk of conflict, the gradual shrinkage of industry, and the rise of a new rival that appeared to be on the march while the United States stood still. “What we have to overcome,” Kennedy said then, is “that psychological feeling in the world that the United States has reached maturity, that maybe our high noon has passed, maybe our brightest days were earlier, and that now we are going into the long, slow afternoon. . . . I don’t hold that view at all, and neither do the people of this country.”13