Amen.

That summed up my initial reaction to this post from Kindred responding to John Quiggin on the decline of the US.




Reasonable people can (and often do) disagree about the normative implications of the particular ways in which the US exercises its influence, and may disagree about whether it would be desirable for the US to possess even greater influence.  But I would argue that the US continues to have considerable impact on the international system, and it may be easy to underestimate this influence when current events remind us that possessing greater military capabilities than the rest of the world (combined) is no guarantee that one will always get one's way. 

Nonetheless, it is worth asking whether the rate at which greater expenditures on military capabilities translates into a greater ability to influence political outcomes fully justifies the costs (both direct and indirect, as a dollar spent on the military is a dollar not put toward some other purpose).  It is far from obvious that the optimal level of spending for the US is as high as current spending.

UPDATE: Edited for more neutral language.  See also the comments below.


UPDATE II:  This post has been getting a lot of traffic from other people's links, while two posts I've since made that were intended to follow up on this conversation aren't.  So anyone who's arriving here from elsewhere, please do also read here and here.

One more thought, in response to Dan Drezner's conjecture that we may be seeing the End of Power (very cool title).

Even if it is true that the costs of engaging in interstate war have increased (which I think many scholars would inclined to agree has happened/is still happening), it need not follow that power does not matter.

Deterrence models, which typically assume goods are indivisible, would tell us that if a defender's threat to defend the status quo with force becomes less credible, attempts at compellence become more attractive.  Yet compellence becomes less attractive as the attacker's threats to use force become less credible due to their costs of war increasing as well.  Simply saying both costs go up doesn't tell us what to expect, unless we further specify which effect is bigger.

In a bargaining framework, one typically finds that conflict is less likely as the costs of war increase.  Which may explain the decline of conventional conflict and the increasing tendency of states to outsource violence to non-state actors (see this paper by the incredibly awesome Navin Bapat).  But when the good in dispute is assumed to be divisible and the terms of agreements largely respond to the expected outcome of war, the fact that war is less likely to occur only tells us part of what we want to know.  Power would still matter for what peace looks like. 

So it's not obvious to me that military might is less useful just because the costs of war have increased.  It's one thing to observe that the US has had trouble forcing democracy on Iraq and Afghanistan.  It's another to ignore the fact that many US allies in many different regions of the world (Colombia, Israel, South Korea, for example) have neighbors who would love to upset the regional status quo (Venezuela, Syria, North Korea), yet nonetheless are doing pretty well for themselves.  Ask these states how irrelevant US power is.

Should the US taxpayer be mad that they are being made to foot the bill for the many effects of US power (which I think continue to be overlooked), when they could instead have either lower taxes, a smaller deficit, or more spending on health care and education?  Maybe.  Probably.  But that's a different beast than the claim that power no longer matters or that the US no longer has much of it.