Читаем After America полностью

Smith’s view is correct for a lot of European countries: The “deal of ruin”—incremental decay—is seductive. In some ways, the most pleasant place to live is a colossus in gradual decline. Great powers aren’t Sudan or the Congo, where you’re sliding from the Dump category to the Even Crummier Dump category. Genteel decline from the heights can be eminently civilized, especially to those of a leftish bent. Francophile Americans passing through bucolic Provençal villages with their charmingly state-regulated charcuteries and gnarled old peasants wholly subsidized by the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy can be forgiven for wondering if global hegemony is all it’s cracked up to be. Okay, the empire busted up, but the capital still has magnificent architecture, handsome palaces, treasure houses of great art, a world-class orchestra, fabulous restaurants, stylish women…. You still have the opera house, but it’s easier to get a parking space. Who wouldn’t enjoy such “decline”? To be sure, everything new—or, anyway, everything new that works—is invented and made elsewhere. But still: you benefit from all the cultural inheritance of greatness without being troubled by any of its tedious responsibilities. Much of Europe feels like that: a sidewalk café, chestnuts in blossom, have another coffee and a pastry, and watch the world go by. Life is good, work is undemanding, vacation’s coming up, war has been abolished. Somewhere beyond the horizon is a seething Muslim ghetto of 50 percent youth unemployment, whence the men swagger forth at sundown to torch the Renaults and Citroëns of the infidels.³¹ But not in your arrondissement. And not even on the Friday afternoon drive to your country place. What’s to worry about?

There may be a deal of it, but in the end ruin is the natural condition of the nation-state: three of the five permanent members of the Security Council have endured revolutionary upheaval and/or constitutional collapse since their “permanency” was established by the United Nations in 1945. Four of the G7 major economic powers have constitutions dating back barely half a century.

And, even if you escape (as most nations do not) coups, invasions, civil wars, and/or occupations, there arrives the moment when ruin comes to close the deal. Whether decline will seem quite so bucolic viewed from a Jersey strip mall rather than the Auvergne remains to be seen. But, either way, gradual decay is not the way it will go. American ruin will not be like France’s or Austria’s.

The exception to the Smith rule, and something closer to Huntington, is this: for dominant powers, ruin comes by the express lane. Unlike AIG, Fannie Mae, Detroit, and Greece, the United States is big enough to fail, spectacularly—and big enough to drag much of the world down with it.

Most citizens of advanced western democracies haven’t read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but they figure they get the general idea. The “decline” bit of the title suggests you’ve got a bit of time before you get to the “fall,” and actually, given that he took six volumes and covered a millennium and a half, that may be all the time you need. In fact, once the key elements were in place, the fall was very swift. By the time Odoacer took Rome in 476, the city’s population had fallen by 75 percent in barely half a century—or the equivalent of the Beatles to now. Within a few years, a prototype “globalization” of European commerce had reverted to a subsis-tence economy of local agriculture.

The question to ask is: What’s holding the joint up? A second- or third-tier nation—Iceland, for example—is generally resting on modest assumptions about its resources and economic outlook. There is a deal of it in a nation, but a superpower relies on subtler stocks, like image and credibility.

If you’re on a train going uphill and you’re out of fuel, you’ll still move forward—for a bit. By the time you notice you’re slowing down, the coal’s already gone. What comes next? You roll backwards, downhill, fast.

It starts with the money. For dominant powers, it always does—from the Roman Empire to the British Empire. “Declinism” is in the air these days, but we full-time apocalyptics are already well past that stage. In the space of one generation, a nation of savers became the world’s largest debtors, and a nation of makers and doers became a cheap service economy.