Just how badly has America been hurt by eight years of the Bush administration? Let us consider these words:

AMERICA IS in unprecedented decline. The self-inflicted wounds of the Iraq War, growing government debt, increasingly negative current-account balances and other internal economic weaknesses have cost the United States real power in today’s world of rapidly spreading knowledge and technology. If present trends continue, we will look back at the Bush administration years as the death knell for American hegemony.

We’ll have more in a moment but try and guess where those words were published, The Nation, Harper’s Magazine, Mother Jones, Atlantic Monthly, New York Review of Books, New Yorker, or other liberal publication?

Nope, not even close. Those words were written by political scientist Robert A. Pape of the University of Chicago and appear in the current issue of The National Interest. TNI’s honorary chairman is Henry Kissinger. This is not a place known for its sympathy for antiwar protesters. So, it is revelatory, to say the least, to see them publish Pape’s article.

When a group like TNI publishes an article that echoes the like of Paul Kennedy’s famous 1987 book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 8 it is the equivalent of the memorable phrase from the Apollo 13 moonshot, “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

Let’s return to Pape. For those who have watched with dismay over the past eight years the hubris and arrogance of the American unilateralists and hegemonists he comes across as a refreshing gin and tonic.

For nearly two decades, those convinced of U.S. dominance in the international system have encouraged American policy makers to act unilaterally and seize almost any opportunity to advance American interests no matter the costs to others, virtually discounting the possibility that Germany, France, Russia, China and other major powers could seriously oppose American military power. From public intellectuals like Charles Krauthammer and Niall Ferguson to neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz and Robert Kagan, even to academicians like Dartmouth’s William Wohlforth and Stephen Brooks, all believe the principal feature of the post-cold-war world is the unchallengeable dominance of American power. The United States is not just the sole superpower in the unipolar-dominance school’s world, but is so relatively more powerful than any other country that it can reshape the international order according to American interests. This is simply no longer realistic.

Right now, to paraphrase a real estate saying the key is economics, economics, and economics. So consider what Pape writes regarding America’s economic strength:

Advocates of extending America’s unipolar dominance are well aware of the central importance of the economic foundations of American power and routinely present detailed statistics on the U.S. share of world product. The basic notion is simple: take U.S. domestic product in any year and divide it by the aggregate total of the gross domestic product of all states in the world. To measure gross domestic product, the unipolar-dominance school prefers to compare every country’s output in current-year U.S. dollars, a method that tends to show America is much further ahead of other countries than alternative measures. Indeed, the most recent call for America to exploit its hegemonic position (published in 2008) rests on the presumption of U.S. dominance based on the current-year dollar figures.² By this metric, in 2006 the United States had 28 percent of world product while its nearest most likely competitor, China, had 6 percent. Looks pretty good for America, right?

Alas, single-year “snapshots” of America’s relative power are of limited value for assessing the sustainability of its grand strategy over many years. For grand-strategic concerns—especially how well the United States can balance its resources and foreign-policy commitments—the trajectory of American power compared to other states is of seminal importance.

For the sake of argument, let us start with the unipolar-dominance school’s preferred measure of American hegemony, but look at the trajectory of the data over time. According to GDP figures in current U.S. dollars from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the United States increased its share of world production during the 1990s, reached its apogee in 2000, and then began to steadily lose ground during the eight years of the Bush administration, with its relative power ultimately falling by nearly a quarter in the first decade of the twenty-first century. At the same time, the relative power of China, the state many consider America’s most likely future rival, has grown consistently. If we look out as far as the IMF can see (2013), things get even worse—with the United States expected to continue declining and China to continue rising. The United States has been going through the first decade of the twenty-first century not stronger than before, but substantially weaker.

But wait, it gets worse:

The erosion of the underpinnings of U.S. power is the result of uneven rates of economic growth between America, China and other states in the world. Despite all the pro-economy talk from the Bush administration, the fact is that since 2000, U.S. growth rates are down almost 50 percent from the Clinton years. This trajectory is almost sure to be revised further downward as the consequences of the financial crisis in fall 2008 become manifest.

…over the past two decades, the average rate of U.S. growth has fallen considerably, from nearly 4 percent annually during the Clinton years to just over 2 percent per year under Bush… Worse, America’s decline was well under way before the economic downturn, which is likely to only further weaken U.S. power. As the most recent growth estimates (November 2008) by the IMF make clear, although all major countries are suffering economically, China and Russia are expected to continue growing at a substantially greater rate than the United States.

But is it fair to blame the Bush administration for this? You bet.

These estimates suggest that roughly a quarter of America’s relative decline is due to U.S. economic weaknesses (spending on the Iraq War, tax cuts, current-account deficits, etc.), a sixth to China’s superior performance and just over half to the spread of technology to the rest of the world. In other words, self-inflicted wounds of the Bush years significantly exacerbated America’s decline, both by making the decline steeper and faster and crowding out productive investment that could have stimulated innovation to improve matters.

Still, America has weathered economic hard times before. After all, as bad as things currently are it is not remotely like the Great Depression. So aside from economic hardship things aren’t so bad. It’s not like we are under attack. Well, at least not yet.

The United States has always prided itself on exceptionalism, and the U.S. downfall is indeed extraordinary. Something fundamental has changed. America’s relative decline since 2000 of some 30 percent represents a far greater loss of relative power in a shorter time than any power shift among European great powers from roughly the end of the Napoleonic Wars to World War II. It is one of the largest relative declines in modern history. Indeed, in size, it is clearly surpassed by only one other great-power decline, the unexpected internal collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Most disturbing, whenever there are major changes in the balance of power, conflict routinely ensues. Examining the historical record reveals an important pattern: the states facing the largest declines in power compared to other major powers were apt to be the target of opportunistic aggression. And this is surely not the only possible danger from relative decline; states on the power wane also have a history of launching preventive wars to strengthen their positions. All of this suggests that major relative declines are often accompanied by highly dangerous international environments. So, these declines matter not just in terms of economics, but also because of their destabilizing consequences.

…

The balance of world power circa 2008 and 2013 shows a disturbing trend. True, the United States remains stronger than any other state individually, but its power to stand up to the collective opposition of other major powers is falling precipitously. Though these worlds depict potential power, not active counterbalancing coalitions, and this type of alliance may never form, nonetheless, American relative power is declining to the point where even subsets of major powers acting in concert could produce sufficient military power to stand a reasonable chance of successfully opposing American military policies.

Indeed, if present trends continue to 2013 and beyond, China and Russia, along with any one of the other major powers, would have sufficient economic capacity to mount military opposition at least as serious as did the Soviet Union during the cold war. And it is worth remembering that the Soviet Union never had more than about half the world product of the United States, which China alone is likely to reach in the coming decade. The faults in the arguments of the unipolar-dominance school are being brought into sharp relief. The world is slowly coming into balance. Whether or not this will be another period of great-power transition coupled with an increasing risk of war will largely depend on how America can navigate its decline. Policy makers must act responsibly in this new era or risk international opposition that poses far greater costs and far greater dangers.

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