In the Shadows of the American Century

the loss of clout thanks to a shrinking share of gross world product; the decline of American technological innovation; and the possible end of the dollar’s privileged status as the global reserve currency.

1 So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly wrong, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, eleven years for the Ottomans, seventeen years for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, just twenty-seven years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003.

left with just three grandmasters of geopolitics: Elihu Root, the original architect of America’s rise to global power; Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser to President Carter who shattered the Soviet Empire and made Washington the world’s sole superpower; and Barack Obama, who tried to defend that status by offering an imperial blueprint for how to check China’s rise.

Forget everyone’s nominee for master diplomat, Henry Kissinger, who was as inept as he was ruthless—extending the Vietnam War by seven bloody years to mask his diplomatic failure, turning East Timor over to Indonesia for decades of slaughter until its inevitable independence, cratering US credibility in Latin America by backing a murderous military dictatorship in Chile, and mismanaging Moscow in ways that helped extend the Cold War by fifteen years.

Obama set out to correct past foreign policy excesses and disasters, largely the product of imperial overreach, that could be traced to several generations of American leaders bent on the exercise of unilateral power. Within the spectrum of foreign policy options, he slowly shifted from the coercion of war, occupation, torture, and other forms of unilateral military action, toward the more cooperative realm of trade, diplomacy, and mutual security—all in search of a new version of American supremacy.

Lacking the geopolitical vision of Mackinder and his generation of British imperialists, much of America’s leadership in these years has generally failed to grasp the significance of the radical geopolitical change being worked inside the Eurasian landmass. If China succeeds in linking its rising industries to the vast natural resources of the Eurasian heartland, then quite possibly, as Sir Halford Mackinder predicted on that cold London night back in 1904, “the empire of the world would be in sight.”

From 1820 to 1870, Britain increased its share of global gross domestic product by 1 percent per decade; the United States raised its share by 2 percent during its half-century ascent, 1900 to 1950; at a parallel pace, Japan’s grew about 1.5 percent during its postwar resurgence, from 1950 to 1980. China, however, raised its slice of the world pie by an extraordinary 5 percent from 2000 to 2010 and is on course to do so again in the decade ending in 2020, with India not far behind.

From the start of colonial conquest in August 1898, the Philippines served as the site for a seminal experiment in the use of surveillance as an instrument of state power. To break a nationalist revolution, the US Army plunged into a protracted pacification program, forming its first field intelligence unit that combined voracious data gathering with rapid dissemination of tactical intelligence. At this periphery of empire, freed from the constraints of courts, the Constitution, or civil society, the US colonial regime fused new technologies, the product of America’s first information revolution, to form a modern police force and fashion what was arguably the world’s first full surveillance state.

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, the relentless advance of military technology has created the potential for great power conflict across all five domains of modern warfare—air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace.

Just as the conjuncture of World War II and the Cold War made America a nuclear-armed superpower, so the war on terror developed new technologies for the preservation