Michael Mandelbaum, professor at Johns Hopkins University and a respected foreign policy expert, is no noisy neocon. Nor is he one of those Americans who can't wait for their country to become just one more pole in a multi-polar world. The message of this cool and concise book is: irrespective of whether you approve of US foreign policy, what matters is her shrinking financial ability to carry it out.
It isn't often that you see foreign policy, healthcare and pensions discussed in the same breath, but it makes you sit up when you do. As ageing baby boomers qualify for ever-growing entitlements, the US government is in the process, the author says, of becoming a domestic insurance company with a sideline in foreign policy. In 20 years' time, servicing the national debt, for example, will exceed the entire defence budget. "Leadership on a shoestring" will be the result.
Penury will bring benefits for the US and for others, Mandelbaum admits, since an era of scarce resources will make the country less prone to mistakes. Recent ones include, in his view, Bill Clinton's expansion of Nato too far eastwards, a policy that would later lead to the Georgian crisis, and George W Bush's incompetent occupation of Iraq. What the two fiascos had in common is best expressed, Mandelbaum suggests, by the narrator of The Great Gatsby, who says of Tom and Daisy Buchanan: "They were careless people… They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or into their vast carelessness."
Those who say the less US foreign policy the better should remember that there will be losses for non-Americans, too. When the world cries: "Someone must do something!", the first and most generous response may no longer be from Washington. Other policies of international benefit, such as securing global access to oil, could suffer, too. There will, of course, be limits to America's retraction from the world, and Mandelbaum is careful not to overstate his case. And though he cites Paul Kennedy's theory of "imperial overstretch" in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, he adds: "The American empire will not disappear… because America does not have an empire."
Those who prefer their foreign policy debates hot and frothy will be offended by the book's sobriety. According to the Chomsky tendency, when the prime source of evil in our lives is less able to influence events, the world can only be a better place; for those who find it impossible to conceive of anything worse than US hegemony, don't-let-go-of-nurse is a meaningless adage.
Whether the countries who could take up the slack as the US retrenches will behave in a wiser and more altruistic fashion seems a reasonable question, however. By and large, they are non-democratic or partially democratic regimes, such as China, Russia and Saudi Arabia.
And what if Russia's concept of her "near abroad" were to expand westwards, and a policy of containment became necessary? With their own welfare budgets weighing them down, Mandelbaum doesn't see the Europeans rushing to contribute. Nor should we depend on the US to keep an eye on China: "It is not easy for a country to be on harsh terms with its banker."
Responses to a less active US would not, of course, be uniform. The notion that the Middle East would be a happier and more progressive place if only America left it alone would appeal to Moscow, though less perhaps Beijing. Mandelbaum's view is that oppressive Arab dictatorships will continue to blame the region's woes on the US no matter what. The road towards a lesser and more sustainable US role in the region he sees as beginning with a serious reduction in its oil consumption via a massive increase in tax.
Much of the redistribution of global influence will depend on whether China and the rest have the cash as well as the inclination to take over US responsibilities. Delicacy of conscience may not prove to be their distinguishing characteristic, and as China's population ages, there will be higher domestic costs there, too. So while the US will have fewer foreign policy resources, others may not have more.
It would have been fun to hear Mandelbaum discuss the possibility of Ban Ki-moon at the UN taking up America's baton to cudgel the world into improved behaviour. But then his book is not an exercise in satire, though he does remark that the arrival of the European superpower is likely to coincide with that of Godot.
America has for years been acting as the world's de facto government, he writes, and the first duty of governments is to keep order. As it conducts itself more like an ordinary country, "the world will now get less governance". He must have been tempted to add: "Let's see how the world likes it." Instead, he concludes with a kind of upbeat warning: "The 21st century seems tilted towards peace, but this tilt is scarcely irreversible, and if it should be reversed, America's fiscal position will hamper efforts to cope with that reversal."
George Walden's China: A Wolf in the World? is out in paperback, published by Gibson Square.
