America's Loss Will Not Be Europe's Gain

[Celerity]

Europeans are torn between fearing the vulnerabilities of American decline and seeing in it a chance to assert their own autonomy, yet Europe’s own challenges suggest this is more peril than opportunity.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/americas-loss-will-not-be-europes-gain



Europeans are deeply conflicted about the prospect of American decline. On the one hand, they remain dependent on the United States, especially in security terms, and American decline could make them more vulnerable. On the other hand, many Europeans have long resented American power and sought to create a Europe that would be able to assert itself against the United States—and even offer an alternative to it. Thus while Atlanticists fear American decline and worry that it will bring Europe down with it, some post-Atlanticists, who want a Europe that is independent of the United States—and could even act as a kind of counterweight to it—see an opportunity in a post-American world. However, there are good reasons to be skeptical that Europeans might somehow move into whatever space is created by American decline. First, Europe is also itself in decline—by some measures, perhaps at an even faster rate than is the United States. Second, the few big foreign policy successes that the European Union can claim have themselves depended on American power. Third, as current events in the Middle East illustrate, American decline may turn out to be quite messy—and it is far from clear whether Europeans, who remain divided, would be capable of collectively filling the gap left by any US retrenchment.

In order to think about the possible consequences of American decline for Europe, we need to start by thinking carefully and precisely about what decline even is and how to measure it. In particular, this means distinguishing between relative and absolute decline. Most discussions of American decline among foreign policy analysts have tended to focus on relative decline—that is, whether the gap in, say, economic or military terms between the United States and other powers, especially China, is closing. But there are some reasons to think that the United States may actually be in absolute decline too. One example: Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, life expectancy for Americans was actually decreasing. Typical of the way that foreign policy analysts have thought about American decline is the short book published by Joseph Nye in 2015, Is the American Century Over?, Nye defines relative decline as “a decrease in relative external power” and absolute decline as “domestic deterioration or decay” and says that “while the two are often related, they need not be.” The United Kingdom, with which the United States is often compared, declined relatively but not absolutely: Even as it lost its empire, quality of life improved. The Roman Empire, on the other hand, declined in absolute terms—it “rotted from within.”

To Nye it seemed clear that America was not like Rome. In other words, if America was in decline at all—and even that was debatable—it was in relative terms. He accepted that American might was likely to decline relative to that of rising powers like China, particularly in economic terms. But he was convinced that the United States would remain the world’s predominant power. He worried about economic inequality in the United States and the increasing gridlock in American politics. But he did not think that social problems were “getting worse in any linear manner”: After all, crime, divorce and teenage pregnancy rates were dropping. However, shortly after Nye’s book was published, things suddenly started to look somewhat different. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there was a small decline in life expectancy at birth in the United States between 2014 and 2017. This drop was mainly attributed to drug overdoses and suicide—what the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton called “deaths of despair.” Driven by the opioid epidemic, drug overdose deaths reached 72,000 in 2017; there were 88,000 deaths from alcohol. While the global suicide rate had been sharply falling, it was increasing in the United States—in 2017, over 47,000 Americans took their own life.

Such a fall in life expectancy is extremely rare, especially for an advanced economy. The last time life expectancy had fallen in the United States for three years in a row was exactly one hundred earlier. Between 1915 and 1918, there was an extraordinary decrease in life expectancy, from fifty-two years to thirty-seven for men and fifty-seven to forty-two for women. But that was a one-off caused by World War I and the influenza epidemic that followed. The question is whether the decline in life expectancy between 2014 and 2017 is a blip or the beginning of a long-term trend—and it is too soon to know the answer, not least because the pandemic has further complicated the picture by causing a big fall in life expectancy, at least momentarily. The situation in Europe is both better and worse than that in the United States. There is no reason to think that Europe is in absolute decline: Average life expectancy in Europe is higher than in the United States and is not falling. At the same time, a number of indicators suggest that Europe is in an even steeper relative decline than is the United States. Europe’s aging populations make the American population look young, and Europe’s economic stagnation (especially its lack of technological innovation) makes the American economy seem dynamic by comparison. In other words, even as the United States declines relative to China, Europe is declining relative to the United States.

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