tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10875994.post5686389977408723619..comments2023-07-20T01:37:08.382-07:00Comments on ideas in motion: They Have SpokenfChhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08007305273044171670noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10875994.post-15003633643145873042010-12-29T20:18:29.261-08:002010-12-29T20:18:29.261-08:00[...]a point made almost 20 years ago by the Harva...[...]a point made almost 20 years ago by the Harvard scholar Joseph Nye, that America’s strength and influence in world affairs was like a sturdy three-legged stool; that is, the nation’s unchallenged place rested upon the mutually reinforcing legs of soft power, economic power, and military power. In all three dimensions, Nye suggested, the United States was comfortably ahead of any other competitor. Global shares of relative strength were being diffused, perhaps, but in no way enough to shake America’s dominant role.<br /><br />How does this assessment look today? Of the three legs to Nye’s stool, soft power—the capacity to persuade other nations to do what America would like—looks the shakiest. <br /><br />As to the weakening of the second leg of the stool, America’s relative economic and foreign-currency heft, well, a person would have had to have been blind and deaf not to observe its obvious deterioration in recent years. If anything surprises me, it is how fast and how large the relative weakening has been: A truly competitive great power should not have its trade deficits widening so fast, nor its federal, state, and municipal deficits ballooning at such a pace, literally, into the trillions of dollars. It is unsustainable, although that fact has been obscured by the thousands of American economists and investment advisers who emit positive noises to their clients and who themselves simply cannot think strategically. <br /><br />America’s military strengths are, by contrast, still remarkable; at least this one leg of the stool is sturdy. But how sturdy? Well, almost half of the world’s current defense expenditures come from the United States, so it is not surprising that it possesses a gigantic aircraft carrier Navy, a substantial Army and Marine Corps that can be deployed all over the globe, an ultra high-tech Air Force, and logistical and intelligence-gathering facilities that have no equal. This is the strongest leg of the three. But it is not going unchallenged, and in several regards.for Paul Kennedyhttp://www.tnr.com/article/magazine/79753/normalcy-american-decline-decadence?passthru=MDM2OWMyMDViNjYxNzkxMWYzOTMxNTZjMGEzY2U3NGMnoreply@blogger.com