The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [86]
This difference between America and Britain can be seen in the burden of their military budgets. Britannia ruled the seas but never the land. The British army was sufficiently small that the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck once quipped that, were the British ever to invade Germany, he would simply have the local police force arrest them. Meanwhile, London’s advantage over the seas—it had more tonnage than the next two navies put together—came at ruinous cost to its treasury. The American military, in contrast, dominates at every level—land, sea, air, space—and spends more than the next fourteen countries put together, accounting for almost 50 percent of global defense spending. Some argue that even this understates America’s military lead against the rest of the world because it does not take into account the U.S. scientific and technological edge. The United States spends more on defense research and development than the rest of the world put together. And, crucially, it does all this without breaking the bank. Defense expenditure as a percent of GDP is now 4.9 percent, lower than it was for most of the Cold War. (Under Eisenhower, it rose to 10 percent of GDP.) The secret here is the denominator. As U.S. GDP grows larger and larger, expenditures that would have been backbreaking become affordable. The Iraq War may have been a tragedy or a noble endeavor, depending on your point of view. Either way, however, it did not bankrupt the United States. The war has been expensive, but the price tag for Iraq and Afghanistan together—$125 billion a year at its peak—represents less than 1 percent of GDP. Vietnam, by comparison, cost 1.6 percent of American GDP in 1970 and tens of thousands more soldiers’ lives.
American military power is not the cause of its strength but the consequence. The fuel is America’s economic and technological base, which remains extremely strong, even in the wake of the worst recession since the 1930s. The United States does face larger, deeper, and broader challenges than it has ever faced in its history, and the rise of the rest does mean that it will lose some share of global GDP. But the process will look nothing like Britain’s slide in the twentieth century, when the country lost the lead in innovation, energy, and entrepreneurship. America will remain a vital, vibrant economy, at the forefront of the next revolutions in science, technology, and industry—as long as it can embrace and adjust to the challenges confronting it.
The Future Is Here
When trying to explain how America will fare in the new world, I sometimes say, “Look around.” The future is already here. Over the last twenty years, globalization has been gaining breadth and depth. More countries are making goods, communications technology has been leveling the playing field, capital has been free to move across the world. And America has benefited massively from these trends. Its economy has received hundreds of billions of dollars in investment—a rarity for a country with much capital of its own. Its companies have entered new countries and industries with great success and used new technologies and processes, all to keep boosting their bottom lines. Despite two decades of a very expensive