Announcer: The producers of the following program Future Tense would like to advise all United States-based podcasters that today's edition contains much discussion of your current inadequacies. We'll be talking about you, not with you, a discussion about your future, or perhaps lack thereof. Should you feel annoyed, incensed or simply left out, facilities have been provided for you to comment or tweet. Failing that, please sit back, listen and suck it up.

Journalist: President Barack Obama has held talks with congressional leaders in a bid to end the government shut-down, but with no positive result. Both sides ended up blaming each other…

Barack Obama: I am confident that as commander-in-chief I have the authorities to engage in the acts that we are conducting currently, but I don't want to put the cart before the horse, we don't have a strategy yet. I think what I've seen…

Charles Krauthammer: The world has been waiting to hear what the President of the United States is going to say about this major crisis, and he comes out and says, 'I'm thinking about it and I'll have a decision in a couple of days.'

Journalist: The shut-down fight is a rapidly merging with a higher stakes battle due later this month over the government's borrowing power.

Antony Funnell: The United States usually likes to put forward a confident face, but the US has a long history of talking down its future. Since the early years of European settlement, Americans have regularly predicted their own demise, only to bounce back again better and stronger than ever.

Pundits say the US is currently in the grip of yet another bout of introspective gloom: 'American declinism' they call it. But with political deadlock in Washington, a hapless president, frustrated allies, and a failing sense of national self-confidence, some are now starting to suggest that this time the decline might be for real.

Hello, Antony Funnell here, welcome to Future Tense.

So, is American power really on the wane? Today we'll hear the views of three expert US watchers; Nick Bryant, Joseph Nye and Tom Switzer.

Let's start with Nick Bryant and that idea of a superpower that regularly loses faith in its future. At the turn of the century, Nick was Washington correspondent for the BBC. He then moved to Australia, but he's now back in the US as the BBC's man in New York and at the UN.

Nick Bryant: Warnings of American decline are by no means new. They actually provide a common thread for much of American history. The national conversation, which is pretty gloomy now, was just as gloomy in the aftermath of sputnik, that's when the Soviets managed to get a satellite into space, the war in Vietnam, the inner-city race riots in the late 1960s, Watergate, the Iranian hostage crisis. But America has always rebounded. The wit and commentator Andy Rooney has put it very well, he said it's amazing how long this country has been going to hell without ever having got there.

Antony Funnell: It's a very unusual thing, in a way, to have this sense of recurring impending doom built into the national psyche.

Nick Bryant: Well, America is a very optimistic place, and yes, as I say, the history of America has been punctuated with the idea that America is falling behind other nations. At the turn of the 20th century it was the fear that American cities were nowhere near as efficient as German cities, for instance, and that led to the progressive era, which is when a lot of new regulations came into effect, a lot of new public health came into effect, a lot of education reforms took effect in the great American cities like Chicago and New York.

The Great Depression obviously caused a great deal of a national despondency. After the war it was the fear of the rise of the Soviet Union that was so problematic, and Sputnik was seen as this great representation of a Soviet power, that the Soviets were winning the technological Cold War.

In the late 1980s the Americans believed that Japan was taking over, that it was being superseded by Tokyo. And now there are concerns obviously that China is becoming the big threat as well. And China is different than Japan and the Soviet Union. China has a population and an economic model that is big enough to challenge America. The sense was that Japan had an economic model but it never had the population. The Soviet Union had the population but it never had the economic model. The worry now is that China has both.

The American dream really has meant something for successive generations of Americans, they really have grown up to believe that their lives will be made better if they work harder, and crucially their children's lives will be more abundant as well. And I think that's what makes this current national funk a bit different from national funks in the past. There is this concern right now that people don't have the same sense of belief in the American dream.

Antony Funnell: So American declinism is, in a sense, the flipside to the American dream. And as Nick Bryant has suggested, while American declinism is a negative thing, it has in the past served as a recurring wake-up call, a prompt to action for the US government and the populous.

Until quite recently (two years ago) Nick was one of those who believed that current talk of decline was nothing serious, just part of the historic cycle. But he's been back in the States now for more than a year, reporting on American politics and the national mood, and now…well, now he's not quite so sure.

Nick Bryant: I'm certainly far more pessimistic than I was two years ago, even 10 years ago when I lived here. America still boasts powerhouse universities like MIT and Harvard, which are some of the best in the world. It still has the technological smarts of Silicon Valley, it still has the financial acumen of Wall Street, it has an abundance of creative talent that is focused in New York and Hollywood. The US military spends more than the next 10 highest national defence budgets combined.

But what I think has changed is the American spirit, that's something much harder to quantify, but it no longer seems, to me at least, to be anywhere near as optimistic or as hopeful. And you see it in poll after poll. Recently for instance there was a poll conducted by a group called the Public Religion Research Institute that showed that only 42% of respondents agreed that the American dream still holds true, and that compares to 53% two years ago.

There was a Wall Street Journal poll that found that only a fifth of respondents felt confident that life of their children's generation would be better than our own. When CBS News asked whether people thought their families would be better or worse off, only 23% thought the standards of living would improve. So there really is a middle-class funk at the moment and, as I say, the belief in the American dream, which has always been this great animating and energising force in American society, is nowhere near as strong, it seems, as it used to be.

Antony Funnell: How much of an issue is inequality in that change in mindset among the American people? We've heard lots of talk about growing inequality in the western world but particularly in the United States. Is that one of the reasons for this pessimism?

Nick Bryant: Yes, I think that has really dampened spirits. Income inequality in the United States has increased dramatically in recent years. The share of income going to the top 1%, for instance, has more than doubled since 1980. I think there are a couple of other factors as well, which has undercut the strength of the American dream. One of them is an income freeze, and another is this perception of an opportunity gap. I mean, since 2000 for instance, earnings for low and middle income families have been stagnant. For the first time since the Great Depression the average US family makes less than it did 15 years ago.

Opportunity actually…some of the big studies that have been taking place recently suggest that the rates of social mobility in America haven't changed that much since the early 1970s. But crucially that's not the way that ordinary Americans see it themselves. Their consciousness is of something very different. There was a Gallup poll last year that suggested that fewer Americans see their country as a land of plenty and economic opportunity, it was just 52%, that's barely a majority, and that compared with 80% in 1998. So these three things—income inequality, wage stagnation, and a sense that America isn't a society with so many opportunities—have really contributed to this sense of middle-class malaise and national malaise.

Antony Funnell: What should we make of the fact that America is still being called to take a lead in international issues? Ebola, ISIS in the Middle East, Ukraine and Russia. There is still an initial expectation that America should lead whenever there is a crisis. Do you expect that to diminish over time?

Nick Bryant: I sense that that expectation will continue because few other countries are stepping forward to lead themselves. I mean, President Obama made this point himself very strongly only the other week. He said the world doesn't call China, it doesn't call Europe, it still calls America. As I say, the American military will be unrivalled for years to come, its spending is so huge, the big technical advances in military weaponry generally come from America. But it's this fatigue I think. There is definitely this sense of national exhaustion. After the two long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq specially, there is no longer such an appetite to project American power abroad. And in a way America is still dealing with these three great national convulsions that it's had since the beginning of the century. The first was 9/11, the second was the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the great recession that followed it, and also that long war in Iraq that sapped morale and took up so many American resources.

Antony Funnell: So if things are different this time, if America truly is now in a period of decline, as much because of its own mental state as anything else, it's still going to be a long decline, isn't it, it's still going to be a while before it's not the power that it has been or that it is still today.

Nick Bryant: Look, I think America will be the number one nation for a good many years to come. But I think if you look at a lot of the spirit of the country, a lot of the economic indices, they are heading downwards at the moment, and that is a big concern.

Barack Obama: Obviously Republicans had a good night and they deserve credit for running good campaigns. Beyond that I'll leave it to all of you and the professional pundits to pick through yesterday's results. What stands out to me though is that the American people sent a message, one that they've sent for several elections. They expect the people they elect to work as hard as they do. They expect us to focus on their ambitions and not ours. They want us to get the job done. All of us in both parties have a responsibility to address that sentiment. Still…

Nick Bryant: There's another huge problem that America isn't showing any signs at the moment of getting out of and that's this poverty of American politics. There has been public revulsion at this era of frenzied partisanship which we've seen on Capitol Hill. And if you look at American confidence in its democratic institutions, whether it's Congress which has an approval rating now of 7% which is the lowest on record, the Supreme Court which has a historically low approval rating, and also the presidency, which approval has slumped to 29% which is a six-year low, there is a real crisis of faith in American democracy at the moment. And one of the people that was seen as the symbol of hope and symbol of national renewal of course is Barack Obama. And six years into his presidency he looks exhausted, he looks weary, he looks like a politician who has almost run out of the will to govern.

Announcer: The American founding fathers built their nation on strong principles, bravery and sacrifice, now it's up to the next generation to assume the responsibility…unless something else came up and they wanted to take delivery now and promised to pay for it later…this is The Decline of the American Empire, hosted by John Oliver. It's your patriotic duty to watch.

John Oliver: For America, let's admit it, the numbers don't look good. Over 9% unemployment, $14.3 trillion in debt. But you know what, those are just facts. And at its best America has never been about facts. It's been about belief, it's about looking at a fact and saying…

Antony Funnell: Comedian John Oliver telling an audience of Canadians exactly what they want to hear.

It's easy to talk down America. They do it, as we've heard, and having a shot at the Yanks has long made for good laughs. But whether or not American power really is in decline, in the same way that Britain's was in 1956 after the Suez crisis, remains a moot point.

Harvard University's Joseph Nye knows all the arguments in favour of a diagnosis of decline, but he doesn't accept them. In fact, he's currently finishing a book, due out in March next year, titled Is the American Era Over?

And the answer to that question, he says, is no. But Professor Nye does acknowledge that what lays ahead for the United States will be a very different era.

Joseph Nye: Yes, but the United States always has problems and it always has this, as you said, cyclical concern about decline. In the 1960s or the late '50s everybody thought the Soviets were 10 feet tall. Well, that didn't turn out to be the case. In the 1980s it was the Japanese who were 10 feet tall. Now it is the Chinese who are 10 feet tall. I think China is doing well but I don't think that even when it passes the US in total size of its economy it won't pass the US in per capita income for decades to come, and per capita income is a better measure of the sophistication of an economy.

Antony Funnell: You've argued that people talking about America's decline confuse absolute and relative decline. What do you mean by those two terms?

Joseph Nye: Well, absolute decline is what happened to Ancient Rome. Basically it wasn't another country that passed Ancient Rome or another empire, Rome decayed from within, and it succumbed to hordes of barbarians. That's absolute decline. Things go wrong inside, you just go downhill. Relative decline is what happened, let's say, to the Netherlands in the 17th century. The Netherlands continued to do well, but Britain did even better, they passed them. So absolute decline is clearly not the American problem. We are not like Ancient Rome.

Relative decline I think is more appropriate, but even that is not appropriate in the sense that it's not that the Americans are going down so much as others are coming up. You can call that relative decline, but it's better phrased as 'the rise of the rest'.

Just to put some numbers on it, the United States had about 23% to 25% of the world product or world GDP at the end of the 20th century. The IMF, the International Monetary Fund, projects that that may go down to about 17% by 2020. That's still going to be a very large capacity. And in per capita income the United States is still going to be well ahead of China, and in military power the United States is going to be well ahead, and in soft power, the ability to attract rather than coerce or pay, the United States is going to be ahead. So in overall power I think the United States is still going to be the largest power.

Antony Funnell: It's one thing to be able to lead the world or to be a leader in the world, it's another thing to want to do it and to have the taste or I guess the stamina to continue to do it. And we saw with the British Empire, particularly after World War II, that Britain lost…you know, it wasn't just countries wanting self-determination, it was also Britain losing its will to be a predominant power.

Joseph Nye: Well, Britain lost the capacity before it lost the will, as we know from Suez in 1956. I don't see the Americans losing the capacity. Over time American foreign policy cycles between what is called maximalism—Vietnam, Iraq—and retrenchment. But it's not the same as isolationism. For example, President Eisenhower presided over retrenchment, he refused to send troops to save the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, '55. But he was not an isolationist. So the polls show Americans feel that Iraq is a mistake and I think that's correct. It doesn't mean we are about to turn inward and not pay attention to the rest of the world. Notice that in the most recent polls, if you asked a year ago, 60% of the Americans said in answer to a poll 'don't use force in the Middle East'. After the beheadings of the American journalists by ISIL, that poll turned around to 60%, saying 'yes, do use force'.

Antony Funnell: So we've heard discussion about the response of the West to ISIL, strengthening ISIL's hand, but are you suggesting that ISIL's rise in the Middle East might have galvanised American support or American feelings to once again take up a leadership role in the international community?

Joseph Nye: I think it has definitely changed. The opinion polls show that it has definitely swung the centre of American opinion. It doesn't mean the Americans want to send combat brigades but it does mean that you will have a willingness to do what the president has done, which is bombing, but probably I imagine they'll wind up using a certain amount of special forces for training and intelligence and so forth.

Antony Funnell: Is there a sense with this idea of declinism, returning to that idea of American declinism, if it is a real feature of the American psyche, that cyclically the country talks about its own decline and sees its own decline coming, is there a danger at some point of that becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Joseph Nye: Well, my former colleague at Harvard, Sam Huntington, used to say that it was self-curing rather than self-fulfilling, that the worry about decline would make the Americans try harder. That may be a bit too optimistic. But what we do know is that worry about decline hasn't had much to do with what actually turns out or what happens. These polls are better as an indication of psychology than they are of capacity.

Barack Obama: American power can make a decisive difference, but we cannot do for Iraqis what they must do for themselves, nor can we…

Mike Rogers: His foreign policy is in absolute freefall. If you look at China, you look at ISIS, you look at Russia, you look at Iran, North Korea…

Charles Krauthammer: But on foreign affairs I think he is simply so much over his head he doesn't know what to do, and when he doesn't know what to do he does nothing, he talks.

Mike Rogers: And our traditional allies are now standing up and saying, well, maybe America is not the best ones to lead us through these troubles. That is an issue that we are going to have to deal with.

Antony Funnell: America's traditional allies and the way they see the future of American power, particularly in an era that's increasingly being defined, as Joseph Nye said, by 'the rise of the rest'.

Tom Switzer is our final guest and he's a long-time student of American politics and society. He's the editor of American Review, published by the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.

Tom Switzer: I think the United States remains by far the pre-eminent power in the world. It still has enormous demonstrated capacity for change and renewal. Some economists believe the United States is on the cusp of a shale gas revolution, which could be a geopolitical game changer. But I think ultimately the American people themselves are tired of the world, and the big question I think over the next decade or so, Antony, is to what extent is this just a short to medium term phenomenon, or is it reflective of a more enduring reality? I suspect the latter. And if it is indeed the latter, then I think that has huge implications for American foreign policy in the next decade or two, and of course that also means big complications from many of its US allies around the world.

Antony Funnell: And it's the implications for those allies, particularly Australia, that I'd like to focus on in the last part of today's show. Australia, and other US allies in the Asia-Pacific region are now having to deal up-close with the rise of China.

And, according to Tom Switzer, they're all quite capable of reading for themselves the level of America's current fatigue and world weariness. But he also rightly points out that geo-politics is a complicated beast and nothing is ever quite as it seems. Or what we remember it to have been.

Tom Switzer: The Prime Minister Julia Gillard, when she addressed Congress in early 2011 she was teary eyed and she said that the Americans can do anything. Tony Abbott I think probably caught the American psyche better a year later when he addressed the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank in Washington when he said, America needs to believe in itself the way that others believe in it.

But bear in mind we've been here before. In the late 1960s, early 1970s it was, of all people, a Republican Cold Warrior in Richard Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger who publicly recognised limits to American power. And on several occasions Nixon himself not only called on US allies to do more to beef up their own defences and security but he actually said that the end of the American century had come about, that there was no such thing as a Pax Americana, that America was no longer the pre-eminent nation. And he said this is actually a welcome thing because it means that America can balance the power among other rising hegemons, not just the Soviet Union but Communist China and Western Europe and Japan. This is what Nixon was saying in the early 1970s. And allies around the world were very worried about this, especially here in Australia. Many prominent coalition ministers, not least the prime minister at the time John Gorton, believed that the Americans were in the process of withdrawing from Asia. Well, they were wrong then, I think they'll be wrong now. But what you'll see now more increasingly is America being more prudent, discriminatory, selective, and recognising limits to power. And all things considered, that is a healthy thing for any great power to do.

Antony Funnell: Australia is one of those middle-sized Western nations that has really sheltered under the umbrella of American power for a very long time, and it's clear that we will still see the United States as our protector well into the future. But things have become very complicated, haven't they, for a country like ours with the growth of China.

Tom Switzer: Indeed, for all of our history since the time of our independence in 1901 and even before then when we were a collection of colonies, Australia had broadly been under the security umbrella of what Robert Menzies called a great and powerful friend. For the first half of the 20th century that great and powerful friend was Great Britain, and since the end of World War II it has been the United States. So it has been a very simple narrative, all things considered, for Australian politicians and the people to understand.

But I think that the alliance, the centrepiece of our foreign policy and broadly supported on both sides of politics, I think it will change, and one of the reasons why it will change in the next decade or two is the rise of China. The rise of China means different things for the United States and Australia. For the United States it's the rise of a potential geopolitical challenger in the region. For Australia it is a rise of a commercial and investment partner, and I think increasingly this means that although the alliance will still be the centrepiece of Australian foreign policy, policymakers, politicians will increasingly need to learn to be more nuanced, ambiguous and, if you like, ride two horses simultaneously, and that is a very difficult diplomatic feat, particularly given our history.

Antony Funnell: A difficult feat because we are still going to be looking to the United States in the future for our military protection, but the protection for our economy, for our standard of living, is more and more being decided by China. And in a way that's very different from the situation that existed in the Cold War when there were two great powers, the United States and a rival in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was not really an economic power that had any influence on countries like Australia, but China certainly does, doesn't it.

Tom Switzer: Absolutely, and all the available public polling evidence in Australia makes it quite clear. The last Lowy Institute polling in mid-2014, which is arguably the most authoritative surveys on Australian public attitudes on foreign policy, showed that China was seen as Australia's greatest friend in East Asia, not Japan as the Prime Minister suggested late last year, but China.

But intriguingly the public opinion evidence is fairly complicated. It's ambiguous because a clear percentage of Australians also worry that China will emerge as the greatest threat to Australia in the next two to three decades. So this is a very, very difficult time I think for Australians. And I think that inadvertently our policymakers and our politicians are catching the significance of this.

David Johnston, the Defence Secretary, told Tony Jones on Lateline just before the President met Prime Minister Abbott in the Oval Office last June, that the ANZUS alliance, this is the US Security Alliance, would not apply in the event of a stoush between Washington and Beijing in East Asia. He actually said that publicly. I think he let the cat out of the bag. And to the extent that he's reflecting a broad consensus in Australia, that has huge implications for our security relationship with the United States because I think there is a sense in Washington that Australia, like we have in the past, will go all the way with the USA.

 

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Guests

Nick Bryant
Nick Bryant is the New York and UN Correspondent for the BBC.
Professor Joseph Nye
Joseph Nye is a professor of Foreign Policy, Harvard University, and former dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
Tom Switzer
Tom Switzer is the editor of American Review, published by the United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney.

Copyright Australian Broadcasting Corporation