As Samuel Huntington has noted, US power “flows from its structural position in world politics…geographically distant from most major areas of world conflict” as well as from “being involved in a historically uniquely diversified network of alliances.” Natural resources are another area of enduring advantage for the United States. America’s farmers and producers have never been more efficient or productive than they are today. Agriculture has been “a bastion of American competitiveness.” Energy resources are another advantage. The media have lavished a great deal of attention on the United States’ dependency on imported oil, a true strategic liability, but they have neglected coal and gas resources. In fact, the United States (combined with Canada) trails only the Middle East in the wealth of its energy resources. Industrial capacity is an area where the decline of the US manufacturing sector has been seen as a surrogate for broader US decline. The United States’ transition to a post-industrial, information-technology-oriented and heavily financialized economy was an important part of avoiding the predictions of “imperial overstretch” in the 1990s. In the wake of the Great Recession the post-industrial transition is seen as perhaps an Achilles’ heel of the US economy. These views probably underestimate a few factors that should help the United States navigate the current transition from the first unipolar era to whatever follows it.
Openness to innovation can play an important role in extending the United States’ leading role in the world. Some scholars believe that innovation is the key to countries emerging as system leaders in sectors that power long waves of economic activity and growth. Failure to maintain system leadership in these sectors is a key cause of decline. Another factor that may propel the United States to a more rapid recovery is the so-called “American creed,” which includes a very heavy dose of hostility to the role of the state in the economy. A larger private sector may well continue to provide entrepreneurs and innovators the scope to prolong America’s leading sector primacy in the international economy.
An additional, and extremely important, long-term factor underpinning likely continued US global economic leadership is demographics. The US fertility rates are among the highest in the developed world and are virtually at replacement. With a growing population that will be more youthful than other developed countries (or China) the United States would appear to be in a favorable position. One could also add to the long list of US advantages the political and social stability that has made it the safe haven for global investors. None of these advantages, however, including the United States’ military power, mean that the United States is destined to remain the preponderant power or that unipolarity will continue to characterize the international system indefinitely. Bad policy decisions in a number of areas could negate or squander US advantages. In addition the United States faces many of its own challenges. Despite its demographic health the United States will have to meet the unfunded pension liabilities represented by the aging of the baby boom generation. The nation’s standing has also suffered from the mismanagement of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Without a concerted effort by the United States, the international system could move in the direction of nonpolarity or apolarity with no nation clearly playing a leading role in trying to organize the international system. The result would be a vacuum of leadership unable to manage the plethora of contemporary problems besetting the world like terrorism, nuclear proliferation, ethnic and sectarians wars, humanitarian disasters, crime, narcotics trafficking, pandemic disease and global climate change to name just a few.