. . . the interesting subject of the finances of the declining empire.
-Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Book I, CH. XVII
Toppling three tyrannies-that of Slobodan Milosevic, the Taliban and now Saddam Hussein-within four years is no mean achievement by the standards of any past global empire. What makes this achievement so remarkable is that it comes little more than a decade after a wave of anxiety about American "overstretch" and decline. In The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Paul Kennedy warned that the United States was running "the risk . . . of what might roughly be called 'imperial overstretch.'" America, he maintained, was spending too much on its overseas military commitments, to the detriment of the U.S. economy. Under such conditions, "The only answer to the question", as to whether the United States could remain a superpower, was "no."
As John Maynard Keynes once said, when the facts change, one ought to change one's opinion. Writing last September about America's subsequent ascent from superpower to "hyperpower", Kennedy invoked the deus ex machina of the "revolution in military affairs" to explain why his predictions of overstretch had not been fulfilled. All that investment in military research and development of which he had been so disapproving back in the 1980s had paid an unforeseen dividend. Not only did the Soviet Union collapse as it strained to match the Reagan-Weinberger arms extravaganza; the United States also went on to collect a triple peace dividend in the 1990s: falling defense spending as a share of GDP, accelerating economic growth and a quantum leap in military capability that left all other states far behind.
