After Empire

Studies of the rise and fall of great powers pay great attention to the period in which those powers are first-tier actors – and little to their management of the final dissolution of their empires. Britain's conduct of international affairs, for example, gets a lot of attention during the period from the late sixteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, and very little after 1945.

This is not unreasonable when the central concern is the state of the international system as a whole, but it has resulted in a neglect of some not unimportant factors, and some aspects of recent history. After World War II, Britain and France, and after the Cold War, Russia, all sought to preserve something of their old position. Their particular approaches varied greatly, but there were similarities in their objectives and efforts, five of which seem especially worth discussing:

1. Working to Retain Relationships With Old Colonies and Vassals.
Britain has had the Commonwealth of Nations, France Francophonie, Russia the Commonwealth of Independent States. A significant dimension of this is the retention of a military presence in areas where it seems this can be done at low cost (as with Britain in the Middle East prior to its withdrawal "east of Suez," France's post-colonial role in western and central Africa, and Russia's interventions in "Near Abroad" countries like Tajikistan, Moldova and Georgia since 1991), and special efforts to retain sites of particular strategic value (as with Britain in the cases of Singapore, Suez and Cyprus, and Russia in the energy-rich Caspian Sea basin).

2. Placing a Special Emphasis on Select Military Resources.
The most noteworthy example of these is strategic nuclear weaponry, which all three of these countries possess, and on which have played special roles in their foreign policies. France developed its nuclear deterrent to assure itself an independent foreign position outside of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In the 1990s, with the deterioration of Russia's conventional military capability, it was widely recognized that Russia relied more heavily on its nuclear capability for its international status, and its capacity to defend its interests.

However, less dramatically, all three countries strove to preserve a defense industrial base, even where they have eschewed meaningful industrial policies in other ways (Britain the outstanding example of this). As a result they remained major producers of the kinds of high-end arms which only a few countries are capable of building – armor, aircraft, naval vessels, and anti-aircraft systems. Their ability to produce saleable weaponry not only gives them the measure of additional independence that comes with meeting a larger part of their military needs domestically, but through their exports makes them a larger factor in international questions – as seen in the issue of Russian sales of arms to Iran in recent years.

3. Utilizing Old Privileges in International Institutions.
Their leading roles in the British Commonwealth of Nations and its French and Russian counterparts aside, Britain, France and Russia all became permanent members of the United Nations Security Council at a time when they were still plausibly regarded as Great Powers, and retained those seats long after they ceased to be such. The use of those seats, however, has given them disproportionate influence and prestige, and often been their principal means of responding to American initiatives – as with French and Russian efforts to deny the U.S. a UN mandate for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

4. The Promotion of Regionalism.
Britain, and especially France, have both participated in the development of a European Union, in part as a way of compensating for their diminished positions. In 2001, Russia was a founding member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which brought together several former Soviet republics with China in a common organization.

5. The Cultivation of Close Relationships With Ascendant Powers.
The best known example of this is Britain's "special relationship" with the U.S.. However, France has also relied on close relations with the U.S. (as in its war to retain Indochina as a colony in the late 1940s and early 1950s), and with the Federal Republic of Germany (which was crucial to its activity in the European Union). After 1991, Russia has reconciled with China and cooperated with it on a number of international issues (like the questions raised by the break-up of Yugoslavia, the Iranian nuclear program, and most recently, the unrest in Syria).

Such strategies have tended to achieve only limited results, and to be decreasingly tenable over time. A former metropole's magnetism for lost colonies fades quickly after the loss of formal empire, and the material power that supported it (as has been the case with the British Commonwealth), while the costs of preserving a place in seemingly low-cost regions tends to go up over time (as Britain discovered in the Middle East, and France in Africa).1 Their ability to invest in even limited areas of military capability does not match that of other more affluent powers, and reflects the fact. (Britain's nuclear deterrent was already reliant on American-made missiles by the early 1960s, and the country's weapons programs are increasingly dependent on foreign partnerships – as with every British fighter since the Lightning.) Their special status in international institutions increasingly seems dubious (the retention of permanent Security Council seats by Britain and France has long seemed to many a relic and an injustice, especially with countries like Japan, India, Brazil and Germany lacking such places), while yielding few practical returns (given the limited effect of UN votes, as seen in the case of Iraq). Meanwhile their cultivation of regional blocs tends to dilute their voice (as has happened with the expansion of the EU) while frequently falling short of crucial objectives (like a coherent EU foreign and defense policy), while their "junior partner" role in such associations leaves them followers rather than leaders (as has arguably been the case with Britain).

Britain and France's transition away from great power status essentially ran their courses decades ago. By contrast Russia, which suffered in similar ways even after the resurgence in energy prices after 1998 permitted a partial recovery from the Soviet collapse (as former satellite countries entered NATO, Russia turned to foreign partners for support for its fifth-generation fighter program, and so on), remains in the midst of that process, which seems almost certain to continue (quite in contrast with the predictions some have made about a "mini-Cold War" between Russia and the U.S.).

In the end, where the game of great powers is concerned, there is simply no substitute for broad-based military strength, and the broad-based economic strength required to sustain it.

NOTES
1. In the Middle East pillars of British strategy like client relationships with local monarchies, the Suez base and the Baghdad Pact did not last long in the face of local nationalism; the U.S. and Soviet Union soon eclipsed Britain as external presences; and on top of that, many Middle Eastern countries became significant military powers in their own right – all as Britain had to repeatedly cut its defense spending. Likewise, France's confrontation with Libya over Chad in the 1980s showed the limits of "Jaguar diplomacy," while the 1990s brought additional setbacks (particularly the loss of friendly client regimes in Rwanda and the former Zaire).

The Myth of Decline?

Neoconservative pundit Robert Kagan's essay in the New Republic "Not Fade Away: Against The Myth of American Decline," has made something of a stir as of late. Among other things, it has been credited with influencing this year's state of the union speech, as noted on the page at the Brookings Institute where it has been republished, with the result that, once again, Kagan has spun a small book out of it.

In the original piece, at any rate, Kagan makes reasonable arguments about the limits to the influence of countries like Brazil, Turkey, India and even China (given its low per-capita income and constraining geopolitical position); the appearance of seemingly daunting challenges for primacy (like the Soviet Union and Japan), and serious frustrations on the international scene (like the "loss of China" and the Vietnam War), in the past, which proved to be less consequential than was first assumed; and the sheer distance of other actors from anything comparable to the military capabilities the U.S. enjoys.

However, his examination of the U.S.'s economic and fiscal problems is conveniently superficial, all but ignoring such issues as the country's deindustrialization, balance of payments problems, and mounting foreign and central government debt, problematic trends which are interconnected, long-running, well advanced and not easily ameliorated, let alone reversed.1 The result is that, while Kagan puts some of the recent exaggerations in perspective, he remains overoptimistic in his reading of the situation, as is evident when he (all too predictably) trots out the old analogy between the United States and the British Empire, and offers as his final judgment a rough equality between the United States' present position, and Britain's circa 1870--a reading which makes little sense when one crunches those numbers. That this is not more evident owes much more to the weaknesses of other actors (the European Union, China) than the irrelevance of the issues he fails to address.

1. Indeed, Kagan has some of his facts wrong. The U.S.'s share of world GDP has not remained constant during the past few decades as he claims, but slowly eroded, from 31.3 percent of Gross World Product to 23.2 percent between 1970 and 2008, according to United Nations data (cited here). This 26 percent drop in its share is not an insignificant difference in itself, but milder than another, sharper change: that of the U.S.'s share of world manufacturing, which has fallen from 28.4 to 17.6 percent of the global total--a 38 percent drop--in the same time period, one result of which has been China's overtaking the U.S. as the world's biggest manufacturer.

Fourth Reich Rising?

I remember recently thinking of how quickly the depictions of a newly imperialistic Germany after the Cold War's end (for a while, popular with thriller novelists like Larry Bond and Harold Coyle) proved passé. However, the news coverage of European economic affairs during the past year increasingly seems to echo this, with alarmed talk of a "Fourth Reich" becoming a commonplace, and not at all limited to countries like Greece facing harsh austerity measures as the price of a bail-out. British right-wingers are now routinely publishing such rhetoric in mainstream venues, as in these pieces by Simon Heffer and thriller writer Frederick Forsyth, who claimed that Germany is creating a new empire in which countries like Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland are turned from manufacturing competitors into colonies (his term) which will "provide cheap labour, raw materials, agricultural produce and a ready market for the trinkets" produced in the German metropole. Quite rightly, historian Richard J. Evans recently wrote in The New Statesman that "We haven't seen this kind of language since the 1990s, when German reunification led to a spate of Germanophobic commentary in politics and the media."

The hysterics point to Germany's economic strength, the popular view of which represents quite the turnaround from the disdain once fashionable among orthodox economic thinkers. Germany, of course, is not just the largest national economy in the EU by a significant margin (more than a third larger than the number two country, Britain), but in per-capita terms, the biggest manufacturer among the major economic powers ($9,300 per head, compared to $8,200 for Japan, and $6,000 for the U.S. in 2009), and by far the biggest manufacturing power in the EU in aggregate terms (out-producing the next two largest manufacturers, Italy and France, combined) – but so it has been for a long time.

What is more novel is the country's export performance in the last decade, which has made it the world's second-largest exporter (after only China, and actually ahead of the U.S.), and given it a consistently favorable balance of trade. One might also add that its central government budget deficits and unemployment have been (relatively) low in recent years, even after the outbreak of the 2008- crisis (the two figures put at 1.7 percent of GDP and 6 percent of the work force for 2011 according to the CIA's World Factbook, figures the United States can only envy).

Looking at such data one might forget that Germany's economic and industrial weight has actually receded since the early 1990s, both globally and within the EU – a fact reflecting the country's slow economic growth (less reflective of the "Eurosclerosis" theory than the broad stagnation of the world economy since the 1970s), the ascendancy of East Asia (and especially China), and the frantic expansion of the European Union (which has seen Germany "offshore" much of its production to Eastern Europe).1 One might forget, too, that the largest part of those trade surpluses comes from trade inside of the EU, and that here at least, this export-led strategy (which has led some to compare Germany with China) is bumping up against its limits, as the debt crisis shows how unsustainable those surpluses really are. And of course, one should remember that Germany is itself the bearer of one of the world's largest external debt burdens, behind only the U.S., U.K. and France in this regard, equal to more than 150 percent of the country's GDP – making it bigger than the U.S.'s in relative terms (if considerably smaller than those of the other major EU economies).

As this situation suggests, Germany's present position on the continent seems at least as much a question of the weakness of its European partners as its sometimes exaggerated strengths. While Germany, like other mature industrial states, has seen manufacturing fall as a share of employment and Gross Domestic Product (down to 21 percent now, from 24 percent in 1992), its neighbors have suffered deeper deindustrialization (the figures for Italy, Britain and France are 17, 12 and 11 percent, respectively) – too much, as the trade imbalances demonstrate. It also seems to me that the celebration of Germany's export boom reflects an overeagerness on the part of some to find validation for neoliberal prescriptions in the country's recent steps in that direction (or what at least look like such steps, as some interpret the matter differently) – the same neoliberalism that, far more than some predatory mercantilism, seems to be the defining feature of the austerity packages the European Central Bank is imposing on countries like Italy and Greece.2

The result is that while Germany has been more successful than most in holding on to its position as an industrial power (not a minor or unimportant accomplishment), its current position is no basis for the fantasies of German empire so many writers are spinning out – even if that were an actual object of the country's policy - and a questionable one even where lasting prosperity is concerned. In its emphasis on advanced manufacturing Germany has the prescription only half-right; there needs to be a commitment to full employment and rising wages as well, such as prevailed in the first half of the post-World War II era, not just in Germany, but in its trading partners also - and no plausible increase in exports to China can substitute for this, especially given the country's own internal challenges. Unfortunately, I think that is exactly what we are least likely to see in the foreseeable future.

1. According to the UN data I cited in my Parameters article last year, Germany accounted for 8.3 percent of Gross World Product, and 9.7 percent of world industrial output, in 1992. By 2008 those figures had fallen to 6 and 7.4 percent respectively – a drop of roughly 25 percent.
2. This is not to dispute the fact that such policies have generally worked against developing nations, and favored developed ones, but the beneficiaries have tended to be selected economic interests in the latter, rather than countries as a whole (just as the developed world has seen its economic growth stagnate and its living standards eroded in the same neoliberal rush stunting, or even reversing, the development of poorer countries).

2011 Round-Up, Part II: The Year's Biggest Security Stories

With the end of 2011, many news outlets have proffered their lists of the year's biggest stories.

The list from the Wired Danger Room includes the killing of Osama bin Laden and other setbacks to al-Qaida; the "Arab Spring" in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya (and the international intervention there); the "end" of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, and the withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Iraq - while a substantial force of private contractors remains behind and the covert, "shadow" side of the War on Terror intensifies; and the revelation of startling anti-Muslim ignorance and bigotry in FBI training materials.

As these stories demonstrate, the list is rather focused on the War on Terror and the Middle East, but it also includes problems with high-tech aircraft programs (the grounding of the F-22 fleet, the beleaguered F-35 program), the revelations of previously secret programs (like the stealth helicopter used in the operation against bin Laden, and Pentagon research into crowdsourcing), the activities of Mexican drug cartels, and the U.S. armed forces' reaction to the massive budget cuts facing them in the coming years.

Still, there is much that the quick recaps of those items misses. The discussion of the Arab Spring is far from complete without mention of events in states besides the three North African nations that got so much press – like Bahrain (which responded with a brutal crackdown, in which it was backed by Saudi and UAE forces, events which were underreported, and which Western governments generally shied away from criticizing) and Yemen (where events have also turned bloody), which are not even mentioned in the Danger Room round-up. Additionally, the U.S. is not the only country recently forced to make sharp cuts in defense spending by its economic difficulties. (In relative terms, Britain's cuts seem far more dramatic, and are not irrelevant to the U.S. given the import of British participation in American-led interventions in the past two decades.)

One might add that during 2011 China reached two milestones in the modernization (repeat, modernization, not build-up) of its forces – its testing of a fifth-generation fighter, the J-20, and the maiden voyage of its first aircraft carrier. (The significance of these events – which represent only an early stage in the development of both those capabilities - has been grossly exaggerated by scare-mongers, but I can't help feeling that an overview of the year would not be complete without mention of them.)

Offering a more global view (in contrast with the strongly American outlook of the Danger Room), as well as greater attention to less "traditional" (but arguably more important) issues is the list of The New Security Beat's most-viewed posts. Six of the top ten explicitly discuss demographics in some way (among other things, the role it played in the revolution in Tunisia, the implications for food security, and the revelation of a new, higher UN estimate about where population growth will go in the 21st century), two deal with water security issues, and one with the interaction between the two ("Peter Gleick: Population Dynamics Key to Sustainable Water Solutions"). There is also an attempt at developing a big picture ("In Search of A New Security Narrative").

However, the items presented by The New Security Beat is less news-y and more analytical than the Danger Room, so that while the pieces discussed above certainly demand attention, they do not quite function as a comprehensive round-up of the year's events. Indeed, two of the biggest stories in energy and environmental security during 2011 are not mentioned in it – the Fukushima nuclear disaster (the most dramatic nuclear energy incident in a generation, which will profoundly affect our handling of this energy source) and the 2011 United Nations Climate Change Conference (the agreement produced by which represents a step further than we have gone before, but even on paper is short on both the commitment and ambition needed to tackle the problem, while in real life carbon emissions continue to shoot up).

At the same time, there is the matter of the world's financial system, which remains deeply troubled as one G-7 member after another sees its credit rating suffer (the U.S. got downgraded in August), and the Eurozone crisis tediously drags on and on and on – simply some of the more conspicuous signs of the continuation of the 2008 economic crisis. It would be simplistic to set this problem above the others – economic security is hardly extricable from the kinds described above – but it seems to me the area of greatest short-term vulnerability. Unfortunately, as recent events show, nothing significant has been done about any aspect of this (not trade imbalances, or income inequality, or stagnant consumption, or the destabilizing overfinancialization of the world economy). Indeed, the problem hardly seems to have been acknowledged – precisely because such acknowledgment flies in the face of the neoliberalism that remains the orthodoxy, even as it has been shown to be bankrupt again and again, and the fact seems unlikely to change anytime soon.

SOPA Blackout Protest

I found out about the protest against SOPA (H.R. Bill 3261, innocuously named the "Stop Online Piracy Act") too late to participate properly. So I'm posting this message to indicate my solidarity with the protestors - and offering this link to blackout participant Wikipedia's FAQ on the subject.

Until tomorrow, please regard this site as also blacked out.

This blog will resume its normal operations then.

A Sixth-Generation Fighter: Artificial Intelligence?

One possibility that has appeared in discussions of the sixth-generation fighter is that it might be unmanned. The advantages of such an approach are obvious. Eliminating the pilot means being able to do away with the space and weight needed for human accommodation, while the aircraft's performance would no longer be constrained by human endurance. Additionally, this eliminates the risk of human losses in aerial operations. That at least some of the next generation of fighters might be remotely piloted seems plausible enough, given the increased use of such aircraft in reconnaissance and strike missions.

More radical, however, is the question of aircraft which are fully autonomous. Doing away with remote control would reduce the reliance on a vulnerable communications link, on the inevitable time-delay and disruptions to the data transfer between the aircraft and a distant operator, and human reflexes. Additionally, a fully autonomous aircraft would greatly simplify the trouble and expense of training operators.

However, this mode of operation is far less common at this point, requiring as it does more advanced artificial intelligence than anything available. Yet, those who are bullish on this issue speculate that human-grade artificial intelligence might be available by the 2020s, just in time to be an option for the designers of the first crop of sixth-generation fighters. And of course, assuming continued progress on AI past that point, better-than-human artificial intelligence would set the standard, pushing human beings out of the cockpit once and for all.

Still, even if the optimists are right about this trajectory, it is unlikely to come about all at once. We might see intermediate steps, such as smarter aircraft systems, like the "intelligent flight control system" currently under study in some research programs, and sufficient automation to enable designers of strike aircraft like the F-15E Strike Eagle and F-18F Super Hornet to dispense with Weapons Systems Officers. This is not the limit of present ambition, however; Russian publicists for the PAK-FA promise the aircraft will have an expert system with near-human capability. And capability which is merely "near-human" might still be seen as adequate for an autonomous aircraft because of the other advantages it offers.

Reliving British Decline?

History may repeat itself, but it never does so exactly, one reason why historical analogies often mislead. (Consider, for instance, what scholar Jeffrey Record has to say about the "Munich" analogy in American policymaking.) Yet, the same can be said of just about any intellectual tool used improperly – or disingenuously.

The analogy so often drawn between today's United States and the British Empire is no exception to the pattern. Certainly the analogy has often been misused – in recent years, by the neoconservatives in particular. Yet, the parallels between their trajectories are well worth considering nonetheless, and one way of making such a comparison more useful might be (as I suggested in a previous posting) to not simply ask whether the U.S. is comparable to Imperial Britain, but, remembering how both have evolved, to ask which point in British history parallels the present moment.

Given the renewed prominence of declinism in current debates, it makes sense to start with the moment in which the United States was most prominent internationally. This is generally recognized as having been about 1945. At that time, like Britain after the Napoleonic Wars, it was the victor in a conflict that established it as the global hegemon, putting it in a position to shape the international order (politically through the United Nations, North Atlantic Treaty Organization and other American-led institutions, economically through the Bretton Woods system). In part because its economy had boomed while Europe and East Asia were savaged by the conflict (another parallel with Britain circa 1815), its economy is widely reckoned to have accounted for a third of world output. Additionally, its armed forces enjoyed (until 1949) a monopoly on nuclear weaponry, as well as a preponderance of air and sea power, and unmatched power projection capabilities (much as the Royal Navy ruled the waves through the nineteenth century).

Just as Britain continued to prosper in subsequent decades, enabling it to recover from the staggering debt it had accumulated (268 percent of GDP by 1822, according to Niall Ferguson's The Cash Nexus), the United States enjoyed a generation of rapid growth after World War II (an amazing 4 percent a year from 1950 to 1973), sharply reducing the burden of the debt it had amassed winning its war (which shrank from 121 to 32 percent of U.S. GDP between the end of World War II and 1980).

Nonetheless, the Cold War, which is so often thought of as an unalloyed triumph for the American system, started to take its toll from right after World War II. Massive U.S. expenditures on the conflict accelerated the running down of the Bretton Woods economic system (inevitable given the rebuilding of Europe and Asia, and the spread of development beyond these regions). This led to the suspension of the gold standard in 1971 (ending the convertibility of the dollar to gold, just as Britain did with the pound in 1919). The U.S. entry into the Vietnam conflict with large forces (1964-1973) resulted in a protracted, costly, confidence-shaking trauma (arguably paralleling the Boer War in many respects). The U.S. defense build-up of the 1980s contributed powerfully to the quadrupling of the U.S. national debt in twelve years, and the U.S.'s prioritization of its defense sector came at the expense of its broader economy, not so well-served by military Keynesianism as had once been the case. And in the course of it all, the U.S. lost its industrial edge, all but ceding critical sectors to foreign competitors (like machine tools), while shortsightedly concentrating on finance, just one way in which it reflected vested interests rather than the interests of the nation as a whole (a tendency common to great economic powers in decline, Britain included). Unsurprisingly, the U.S. from the 1970s on began its pattern of running trade deficits year in and year out, and the American dollar weakened substantially against the yen and the mark, leading to the currency devaluation of the 1985 Plaza Accord (a parallel to the devaluations that have marked British decline as a hegemon), and made the U.S. the world's largest international debtor (such as Britain became as a result of World War I).

It might be suggested, then, that by the end of the Cold War the position of the U.S. was not unlike that of Britain in 1918, when it had defeated its principal rival, Germany (and even extended its empire, mainly through the acquisition of former Ottoman territories), but at great cost to itself. After World War I, it seemed that Britain was due to pass the position of international leadership to another power, the U.S. (which declined to assume such a role), while in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it seemed that the U.S. was likely to cede world economic leadership to Japan or a German-led Europe (though neither actor proved able to take on that role).

Just like the 1920s were for Britain, the experience of the 1990s and early 2000s was an ambiguous one for the United States where its direction was concerned, ambiguous enough that the idea of American decline (and indeed, substantive debate about the U.S.'s direction) was marginalized after 1995, not least because of the economic boom the U.S. enjoyed in the latter part of that decade. Additionally, the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, made talk of global American empire newly popular (with the recent boom making such a course seem economically bearable to those optimistic about such a path).

Still, as the memory of the boom of the '90s receded and the economy returned to its earlier, mediocre performance, and the costs of the War on Terror (particularly the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan) mounted, and the old problems(deindustrialization, debt, etc.) worsened; as the distribution of international economic power continued to change, shifting away from the U.S. to China, and in less dramatic ways, to the European Union and to oil exporting countries like Russia, change reflected in the continued weakening of the dollar; such a stance increasingly seemed unrealistic, opening the door to new questions. Is the 2008 financial crisis analogous to the Wall Street crash, the global economic crisis that followed an analog to the Great Depression, many wondered? Is the War on Terror, so often compared to World War II by pundits, taking a toll on the U.S. comparable to that which the Second World War took on Britain? For the time being, this is rather less clear, but perhaps we are in some ways reliving Britain's experience in the 1930s, or the 1940s – or even, as Dan Goure of the Lexington Institute suggests, the 1960s.

Of course, even assuming that this is the case, there is plenty of room for disagreement about the implications. Those anticipating a repeat of the 1930s might wonder about the prospect of a new round of great power warfare with fascist revanchists or others of their ilk. This seems to me rather unlikely now, and I find myself instead thinking about the disparity between British resources and foreign policy ambitions in those times, the preoccupation of much of its elite with unrealistic fantasies of the empire's continuation - and the country's need to get its house in order. Simply put, the most pressing security threats at the moment, and through the foreseeable future, are not the traditional ones, making the need to focus on the latter the really relevant lesson for our time.

A Sixth-Generation Fighter: Flight Control Systems?

The first sixth-generation fighter remains a long way off, and at this point, much of the talk about them remains pure guesswork, far too much of it wish lists of improvement in familiar areas of performance (like greater stealth or connectivity) unconnected with a technical basis for such improvements, or the realization of science fiction-al concepts (like hypersonic, laser cannon-firing invisible jets). Still, it is worth noting that virtually all of the features regarded as standard on the fifth-generation fighter, after all, actually appeared in earlier aircraft, if in a less sophisticated form: stealth (in the F-117 and B-2); super-cruising capability (seen in the British Lightning interceptor); thrust-vectoring engines (seen in the Harrier and Yak-38 Forger); phased array radar (seen in the MiG-31); infra-red search and track systems (seen in the MiG-29, MiG-31 and SU-27 fighters); and helmet-mounted sights (as in the MiG-29 and SU-27).

It therefore stands to reason that many of the features that will be standard on sixth-generation fighters will appear in other aircraft long before the first generation six jet goes on its first test flight, and this seems especially likely to be the case with the flight control systems for this next generation of aircraft. The fly-by-wire controls all but standard on today's fighters may be replaced by other systems, such as fly-by-optics, which substitutes optical fibers for wires, permitting faster data transmission and greater security against electromagnetic interference, such as will be seen on the Mitsubishi ATD-X fighter, Japan's fifth-generation fighter; or fly-by-wireless, dispensing with wiring of all kinds to relay information to the actuators controlling the flight surfaces, an approach seen in the experimental Portuguese UAV known as AIVA. The hydraulic actuators which actually control the flight surfaces might also be replaced by electric circuits ("power-by-wire"), an approach the designers of the F-35 are using in that aircraft. (Both fly-by-wireless, and power-by-wire, are expected to reduce aircraft weight and reduce the maintenance burden.)

Even more exotic are approaches which integrate flight control systems into an aircraft's wings to reduce mass and cost, as well as improve performance, and at least two are objects of interest at the moment, namely flexible wings, with which NASA has experimented using a modified F-18 (dubbed the X-53); and fluidics, which British researchers are experimenting with in the Demon drone that first flew last year.

We might also see the advent of intelligent flight control systems, which would enable onboard computers to automatically compensate for the failure of particular aircraft systems, or for damage incurred in flight. (This too is reportedly planned for the ATD-X.)

For the time being, though, it remains to be seen which, if any, of these approaches will set the next generation's standard.

"Twenty Years After the Cold War: A Strategic Survey": A Short Version

My article "Twenty Years After the Cold War: A Strategic Survey" appears in the current issue of the U.S. Army War College Quarterly Parameters. Below is a short version.

In looking at the development of the international system during the last two decades, six trends appear paramount:

1. Great power conflict, as it has manifested in arms races, proxy conflicts and armed confrontations, has receded, not only from Europe after the end of the Cold War division, but Asia as well, with improved relations among Russia, China, India and Japan. Indeed, the number of objects which might plausibly produce such situations has tended to shrink, with disputes over the remaining issues growing less intense (as has been the case with the issue of Taiwan since the mid-1990s, let alone the 1950s).

2. The shift from interstate warfare to intrastate warfare as the dominant form of political violence has continued. Even as the outbreak of war has become more frequent, interstate warfare has grown less frequent, increasingly confined to the margins of the international system, and more limited in length, scale and intensity.

3. Neoliberal globalization has only deepened, but has proven problematic, contributing to the stagnation of global economic growth (which may have worsened every decade from the 1970s on), as well as increased financial instability; sharper inequality; and the social and political stresses feeding ethnic and sectarian conflict.

4. Global output, world manufacturing and the balance of trade have shifted toward East Asia, and especially China (more than offsetting the impact of Japan's relative decline on the region's overall position), while the consolidation and extension of the European Union have conduced to the preservation of Europe's economic weight (despite Germany's relative decline). Meanwhile, the U.S.'s changed – likely, weakened – position is understated even by its smaller share of Gross World Product, given its more rapidly shrinking share of world industrial production (perhaps already eclipsed by China), and its trade imbalances.

5. Resource politics have only grown more pressing, rather than being diminished, a problem highlighted by the politics of energy, which have seen energy exporters (like Russia and Venezuela) enhance their wealth and status, while energy importers (like the United States) have seen their trade balances and their economic growth suffer.

6. International cooperation on global issues has proven consistently disappointing, compared with the high hopes seen in the early 1990s regarding a more powerful United Nations, and action on alleviating global poverty and environmental problems (symbolized by the Rio Summit, the Kyoto Protocol and the Millennium Declaration), and nuclear nonproliferation.

The result has been a more complex, diffuse international distribution of economic and political power (even as the U.S. remains in a class of its own militarily, and to a lesser extent, economically), while the international community as a whole faces a host of problems (like climate change) requiring unprecedented levels of cooperation – with the results of the efforts made to date underwhelming. The 2008 financial crisis has exposed key vulnerabilities in every actor – China's unsustainable export-oriented path, and Europe's troubled finances and lack of political cohesion for instance – while offering a reminder that the "declinists" of the '80s and '90s were essentially correct in their reading of the U.S.'s situation. Not only has the country seen the mediocre growth observed since the 1970s continue, but its deindustrialization, balance of payments problems and mounting debt have only worsened, inside a context of greater economic integration and ecological strain, and it all poses bigger problems for the U.S. than "traditional" security considerations. The article goes on to advocate a focus on addressing these problems (the rebuilding of the country's infrastructure and manufacturing and energy bases in recognition of the new realities), while cooperating with other nations in a "broader, sustained effort to redress the imbalances and vulnerabilities of the international economic system."

Twenty Years After the Fall

In 1991 Robin Blackburn published the anthology After the Fall: The Failure of Communism and the Future of Socialism (London: Verso, 1991), offering a round-up of responses to the demise of the Soviet/Communist camp and the end of the Cold War from a wide array of prominent leftist thinkers, touching on everything from the role of the peace movement in bringing the Cold War to an end, to the condition of women in the Soviet Union.

Nonetheless, it might fairly be said that the question dominating the book is the one implicit in the subtitle--"the Failure of Communism, and the Future of Socialism." In acknowledging the failings of twentieth century Communist parties in and out of power the authors are unanimous in recognizing the Soviet-style combination of a one-party state with a command economy as a deeply flawed approach, time and again resulting in repressive, stagnant, bureaucratic regimes that never approached Western levels of economic and technological development--with the gap widening after the onset of the "information age." Many of them also agree with the conventional wisdom that the Soviet Union not just failed to cope with computerization and the newer communications technology, but that this was a challenge it was intrinsically incapable of meeting or even surviving, and that the impetus for the overthrow of the system came principally from below.1

However, this should not be confused with a simplistic vindication of the pieties of orthodox economics, let alone of conservative triumphalism more generally. While highly critical of the Soviet system and its imitators, these writers do not equate the Cold War with a meaningful test of "capitalism against socialism," or take the failings of Soviet-style socialism as some proof of the intrinsic irrelevance, futility or evil of the socialist project, or the Marxist critique of capitalism. Nor do they slight the role of Communism in such progress as the twentieth century did see. In "Reflections on the Crisis of Communist Regimes," Ralph Miliband discusses the unpromising circumstances of the establishment of Communist governments, which virtually without exception took place in underdeveloped countries without a substantial history of democracy or even independence, often at a point in which they were badly traumatized by civil and foreign war, and forced to contend with the hostility of the non-Communist world from this position of weakness through their history (Russia, China, Vietnam). Fred Halliday observes in "The Ends of Cold War" that, despite those problems, many Communist states still made significant advances over their earlier material condition, industrializing and modernizing their countries, and elevating the living standards of their populations.

Other contributors to the volume make the case that, in various ways, socialism played a crucial role to progress outside the "Second World." In "Goodbye to All That," Eric Hobsbawm points out the fact that the capitalist states incorporated a great deal of socialism into their systems in the form of Keynesian planning, welfare states and often national ownership of the "commanding heights" of the global economy (especially in their period of greatest success, from the 1940s to the early 1970s), without which they would be far less successful, and far less attractive places to live--while the handful of developing nations which succeeded in catching up to the industrialized world also followed strongly statist courses in doing so (contrary to the mythology propounded by neoliberal "Bad Samaritans," and of course, neoliberal disasters the world over, from Pinochet's Chile to contemporary Iraq). And in "Radical as Reality," Alexander Cockburn celebrates the role of Communism in such progress as the West has achieved in the areas of civil rights and social justice, and globally in the fights against colonialism and apartheid, while the Soviet Union, through its role as competitor and counterweight, made possible for the newly independent nations of the Third World a measure of autonomy they would not otherwise have enjoyed.

Moreover, the authors argue for the continued relevance of socialism given its capacity to address problems with which capitalism is ill-equipped to cope, like the protection of the environment, social inequality and the human values for which the market cares nothing, as Eric Hobsbawm notes in the volume's closing essay, "Up From the Ashes." There is, too, a sense that many of socialism's potentials have never been tapped. Robin Blackburn's excellent long essay "Fin de Seicle: Socialism After the Crash" offers a reminder that the command economy's weaknesses were recognized by prominent Marxists all along, from Karl Kautsky to Leon Trotsky to Che Geuvara, and that many of them wrestled with the problem of developing a "socialized market" combining market mechanisms with economic democratization and social imperatives--an idea Diane Elson and Andre Gorz explore in "The Economics of a Socialized Market," and "The New Agenda," respectively. Giovanni Arrighi's "Marxist Century, American Century" even offers an argument for why the twentieth century did not bear out Marx's predictions--and why the twenty-first century might prove closer to it.2 Edward Thompson's rejoinder to Fred Halliday's "The Ends of Cold War" even envisaged Eastern Europe pioneering a third way between its Stalinist past and the neoliberalism proffered by the West.

In short, the Soviet Union was finished, and with it the one party state-command economy approach to socialism, but according to all these authors, socialism (and Marxism) as such did not die with it. Still, the neoliberal wave continues two decades later. Certainly no advanced industrial country has accepted programs quite as radical as those routinely imposed on developing states, but even there privatization and deregulation (often of reckless kinds) have been the order of the day, organized labor has been weakened (in cases, virtually crippled), wages have been held down (or eroded), welfare states and public services scaled back (albeit, due to a chipping away by conservative reformers rather than shock therapy in these states) and tax systems become more regressive. If anything, the economic crisis that began (or perhaps, simply deepened) in 2008 seems to have perversely accelerated the trend, the political right making most of the gains in its aftermath, despite its policies' precipitating the crisis in the first place. And of course, what goes for the world's economic challenges goes, too, for the ecological ones, as the astonishingly tepid response to the energy-climate crisis makes all too clear.

All this seems unsurprising today, but it did not seem inevitable to the writers represented in this collection. The end of the confrontation between the superpowers also raised a genuine prospect of a peace dividend, and alleviated one of the weapons the right used against liberals and leftists: the claim that they were the agents or dupes of a hostile foreign power intent on world domination. This coincided with a questioning of the Anglo-American version of capitalism that was not be seen again until the 2008 crisis. That the left so thoroughly failed to capitalize on these opportunities, so completely failed to prevent a triumphalist right from defining the popular understanding of the Soviet collapse and the politics of the two decades that followed, has to be regarded by its sympathizers as a profound disappointment.

NOTES
1. For an alternative view of the role of the IT revolution in the Soviet collapse, see my blog post, "Reconsidering the IT Revolution's Place in History." For an alternative view of the dismantling of the Soviet system more broadly, see David Kotz and Fred Weir, Revolution From Above: The Demise of the Soviet System (New York: Routledge, 1997).