It’s not often that I find myself agreeing with op-eds in the Los Angeles Times, but a piece by Christopher Layne and Benjamin Schwarz, “The Twilight of Pax Americana” is must reading. In a nutshell: The United States is on a fiscally unsustainable path that will undermine its ability to continue playing the world’s policeman. We cannot long maintain our military commitment to allies, much less continue fighting endless wars overseas. As our power recedes, regional powers will fill the vacuum. The era of global U.S. dominance is coming to an end.
The decline of American power will have severely negative economic consequences (and not just for us). Write the authors:
Although the weakening of the Pax Americana will not cause international trade and capital flows to come to a grinding halt, in coming years we can expect states to adopt openly competitive economic policies as they are forced to jockey for power and advantage in an increasingly competitive security and economic environment. The world economy will thereby more closely resemble that of the 1930s than the free-trade system of the post-1945 Pax Americana. The coming end of the Pax Americana heralds a crisis for capitalism.
Many – the kinds of people who create posters like the one shown above — will cheer to see the U.S. humbled. But the world will see (this is me speaking now) that the U.S. was the most benign hegemon in world history. We maintained a world order based on relatively free trade to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. The end of American dominance will lead to more military conflict, more anarchy, more disruption of trade, more poverty and a greater slaughter of innocents. We will see more Somalias, more Congos, more Afghanistans and more Dafurs as vast swaths of the globe revert to barbarism.
This is the world that is unfolding — the world in which Virginia is a part. Speaking parochially, the most immediate impact will be the contraction of the military sector, upon which our state’s economy is so dependent. As Layne and Schwarz write: “This will mean radically scaling back defense expenditures, because discretionary nondefense spending accounts for only about 20% of annual federal outlays.” But that’s only the beginning. When federal insolvency comes, the federal civilian sector will contract as well. World trade flows will be disrupted. Refugees will seek asylum. But the new world order won’t be entirely negative. Financial and human capital will seek safe havens.
If we’re not thinking ahead and preparing ourselves for this world, we Virginians are living in la-la land.
