Much has been said about the ongoing American military crisis. According to Juan Quiroz, a US Army Civil Affairs officer writing for Foreign Affairs, the American military faces a “personnel crisis”. Ethan Brown, in turn, a senior fellow at the Mike Rogers Center for Intelligence and Global Affairs at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, talks about a “recruiting crisis”. All of that is quite serious in itself but must also be seen as part of a larger picture, one that has been vividly drawn by Niall Ferguson, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution (Stanford University) and at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs (Harvard University). The picture this expert paints is one of a falling empire.
Ferguson does not have, by any means, an “anti-imperialist” or “anti-Western” bias. In fact he, as a historian, holds positive views on the British Empire, and has been known to regard (in principle) the concept of a so-called “pax Americana” as a natural successor to the pax Britannica. However, about twenty years ago, in the aftermath of the post-September 11 jingoism, in his book “Colossus: The Rise and Fall of The American Empire”, he made the case that the US, albeit an empire (one “that dared not speak its own name”), has in fact not been up to the task, and drew attention to what he described as its “three fundamental deficits”, namely, economic deficit, manpower deficit, and the “attention deficit”. This analysis has not become outdated.
The first deficit has to do with American large debt (“if you want to run the world, it helps to own much of it — rather than to owe it”, he writes).
Regarding the “manpower deficit”, suffice it to say most US Americans lack the “enthusiasm” to risk their lives fighting wars for Washington, which, we might add, explains why the Atlantic superpower has to recur to proxy wars so often.
As I wrote some months ago, the US currently faces a military crisis, with a shortage of recruits: only 23% of young Americans (aged 17-24) are “eligible for military service without a waiver”. In addition, merely 9% of young US citizens would seriously consider military service. This is of course a disaster for the 50-year old so-called “all-volunteer force” (AVF), which had its last draftee in 1973.
Finally, the “attention deficit”, the “most serious one”, according to Ferguson, pertains to a lack of focus, planning, and political will. Writing in his aforementioned book, in the early 2000’s, the scholar highlights that, “American troops patrol the streets of Kosovo, Kabul and Kirkuk… each U.S. incursion has led to a change of political regime… euphemistically described as nation building. But where will the money come from to make these undertakings successful? How many Americans will be willing to go to these places to oversee how that money is spent?And how long will the American public at home be prepared to support a policy that costs not only money but also lives?”
This is not, mind you, a moral or ethical denunciation of American wars or foreign interventions. Ferguson believes, in his own words, that “most history is the history of empires; that no empire is without its injustices and cruelties” but views the “English-speaking empires” as being, “in net terms, preferable for the world to the plausible alternatives.” Ferguson’s critique is a cold “technical” analysis of American weaknesses as a failing (and falling) empire.
In his recent piece for Bloomberg the historian argues that, twenty years on, much of the above description still applies, even more so now, with the American “electorate” and its elected politicians losing “interest” in “any foreign enterprise that takes longer than a few years to complete” (he regrets). Thus, the American empire’s “appetite” for “nation-building” in Iraq, which arguably can be described as a neocolonial policy”, and the Middle East failed to outlast George Bush’s presidency.
Considering the larger societal and civilizational crisis faced by US Americans today (which includes epidemic opioid abuse, a collapsing healthcare system, a baby food shortage scandal, and a mental health crisis, to name just a few), it is no wonder at all the public increasingly loses interest in foreign wars and most youth either do not qualify or do not want to be part of the military. As Ferguson highlights, “at 452,000 active-duty soldiers, the US Army is the smallest it has been since 1940.” Hence the “military deficit.”
Back to the financial and fiscal deficit, he adds, in 2003, American total federal debt was 59% of GDP; in 2022 it doubled that, reaching 120% of GDP. On the “attention deficit”, the military campaign in Ukraine, Ferguson laments, has just ceased to be front-page news in the US. The plausible scenario of the election of Donald Trump, he notes, could be the fatal blow.
It is not just Ukraine that the US is apparently giving up as an arena for proxy wars (or, in some cases, for direct occupation): Washington has failed in Iraq, as already mentioned, and has withdrawn from Afghanistan. And yet, it wants to commit to a larger regional war in the Middle East now (on the side of Israel) and to the “containment” of China in Taiwan and elsewhere.
The problem is that, according to Ferguson, “the lesson of history is that when such commitments are made, it is extremely hazardous not to sustain them.” To sum it up, in his words, “The pax Americana seems to be ending.” One could add it was never much of a pax, to being with. The emergence of a multipolar and polycentric global order, albeit bringing challenges and some initial instability, could provide much of the Global South with fruitful opportunities for non-alignment and multi-alignment. Even Europe can have a chance to finally exercise some of that “strategic autonomy” that has been talked about so much lately – to the best of European interests. And even the US population in turn could benefit from a change in budgeting priorities to address all the domestic crises mentioned above, by bringing back that old American tradition of mild isolationism to an overburdened superpower. This is the bigger still picture Niall Ferguson seems to be missing.
