"NOTHING HAS consumed foreign-policy thinkers over the years more than the question of whether the United States is in irreversible decline as a world power....

"Much about America and the world remains the same as it was in the 1980s when I was writing “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” (Random House, 1987). It is also true that there were periods in the past 40 years when America’s relative position seemed to have picked up again—in the mid-1990s after the Soviet Union’s collapse and in 2003 after the crushing of Saddam Hussein, the leader of Iraq. Yet such recoveries were always short-lived, compared with several big things that have changed—and not to the advantage of the United States. Consider three significant and longer-term shifts: in international relations, military strength and economic power.

The first is that the strategic-political constellation of forces has changed since the bipolar, cold-war world of a half-century ago when America faced only a fading Soviet Union. The international system now comprises four or maybe five very large states. None of them can, either through hard power or soft power, compel the others to do what they don’t want to do..

There was already evidence of this shift towards a multipolar world when I was drafting the last chapter of “Rise and Fall” in the mid-1980s. But now, in the third decade of this century, the global landscape looks much more varied, with several large nation-states at the top (China, America, India and Russia), followed by the European Union and Japan, and even Indonesia and Iran.

This marks a very significant redistribution of world power, so it simply is not enough to claim, if it is correct, that America remains number one: for even if it is the biggest gorilla in the jungle, it is only one of a bunch of gorillas! ...

The second change is that America’s armed forces are considerably smaller and older than they were in the 1980s. Just how long, really, can
the Air Force keep patching up and flying its remarkable 70-year-old B-52 bombers, which are older than all its active officers? And how long can the Navy keep refurbishing its 30-year-old Arleigh Burke destroyers? Even if it was only a temporary embarrassment to have the western Pacific denuded of aircraft-carriers last May when the USS Eisenhower group was covering the start of the Afghan withdrawal, the fact is that the Navy today has fewer operating carriers than it had 40 years ago.

As the Pentagon regularly deploys its ships to different regions, the country may simply not have enough of them to match its numerous global commitments. To the historian, then, America is looking rather like the old Habsburg model, possessing large though weary armed forces, stretched across too many regions. And America’s defeat in Afghanistan, leaving military equipment strewn across much of that country, also has a Habsburgian ring to it.

Meanwhile, China seems to be flexing its muscles everywhere. And behind the question of the size of America’s armed forces lurks a bigger issue: whether the era of weapons such as manned aircraft and the large surface warship is not passing and may be gone by 2040. One gets the hunch that, in some drone-dominated battlefield or pulsar-controlled ocean of the future, the odds between America and adversaries like China, Russia or Iran may shift because the advantage from its own better-trained soldiers will be no more. Military revolutions in the past tended to benefit the United States; the next one may not.

Can America afford the price of staying ahead? It needs to candidly ask itself what percentage of its gross domestic product might it take to have a military that fulfills the country’s many obligations (it currently spends around 3.5%). Even 4% of GDP would not be nearly enough and while 6% might do it, that would be such an enormous price tag that one can hear both economists and Congress screaming.

But what else could a future American administration do if—nasty thought, scarcely discussed—China decided to spend much, much more? What if its autocratic leader, Xi Jinping, decided that the time had come for China to allocate 5% or more of its rising GDP to its armed forces? This is a scenario that simply wasn’t present a half-century ago, and nobody in Washington seems to want to talk about it.

This raises the third change and a critical factor of power: relative economic strength. The biggest global transformation since the 1980s has been in the sheer size of the Chinese economy today as compared to America’s.
....
Here, with a vengeance, would be yet another episode in “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers”. Perhaps all that President Xi needs to do, imitating Deng, is to avoid missteps and let China’s economy and military capacity grow, decade after decade. This would present the biggest challenge that America may ever face: another guy on the block as big as itself."

https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2021/09/01/paul-kennedy-on-whether-chinas-rise-means-americas-fall

China's rise will not mean America's fall. China will rise, but will not, in
their usual Chinese way of humbleness, want to place themselves as number 1
over US.

In any case, China knows they have zero war experience, whereas US has 100
years of war experience.

China's military will continue to rise, but in the course, will exceed the
number of military assets than US.

However, China expects US to honour them well,

"ltlee1" wrote in message
news:6b928c77-4586-4568-b4c4-f9a94054f85dn@googlegroups.com...

"NOTHING HAS consumed foreign-policy thinkers over the years more than the
question of whether the United States is in irreversible decline as a world
power....

"Much about America and the world remains the same as it was in the 1980s
when I was writing “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” (Random House,
1987). It is also true that there were periods in the past 40 years when
America’s relative position seemed to have picked up again—in the mid-1990s
after the Soviet Union’s collapse and in 2003 after the crushing of Saddam
Hussein, the leader of Iraq. Yet such recoveries were always short-lived,
compared with several big things that have changed—and not to the advantage
of the United States. Consider three significant and longer-term shifts: in
international relations, military strength and economic power.

The first is that the strategic-political constellation of forces has
changed since the bipolar, cold-war world of a half-century ago when America
faced only a fading Soviet Union. The international system now comprises
four or maybe five very large states. None of them can, either through hard
power or soft power, compel the others to do what they don’t want to do.

There was already evidence of this shift towards a multipolar world when I
was drafting the last chapter of “Rise and Fall” in the mid-1980s. But now,
in the third decade of this century, the global landscape looks much more
varied, with several large nation-states at the top (China, America, India
and Russia), followed by the European Union and Japan, and even Indonesia
and Iran.

This marks a very significant redistribution of world power, so it simply is
not enough to claim, if it is correct, that America remains number one: for
even if it is the biggest gorilla in the jungle, it is only one of a bunch
of gorillas! ...

The second change is that America’s armed forces are considerably smaller
and older than they were in the 1980s. Just how long, really, can
the Air Force keep patching up and flying its remarkable 70-year-old B-52
bombers, which are older than all its active officers? And how long can the
Navy keep refurbishing its 30-year-old Arleigh Burke destroyers? Even if it
was only a temporary embarrassment to have the western Pacific denuded of
aircraft-carriers last May when the USS Eisenhower group was covering the
start of the Afghan withdrawal, the fact is that the Navy today has fewer
operating carriers than it had 40 years ago.

As the Pentagon regularly deploys its ships to different regions, the
country may simply not have enough of them to match its numerous global
commitments. To the historian, then, America is looking rather like the old
Habsburg model, possessing large though weary armed forces, stretched across
too many regions. And America’s defeat in Afghanistan, leaving military
equipment strewn across much of that country, also has a Habsburgian ring to
it.

Meanwhile, China seems to be flexing its muscles everywhere. And behind the
question of the size of America’s armed forces lurks a bigger issue: whether
the era of weapons such as manned aircraft and the large surface warship is
not passing and may be gone by 2040. One gets the hunch that, in some
drone-dominated battlefield or pulsar-controlled ocean of the future, the
odds between America and adversaries like China, Russia or Iran may shift
because the advantage from its own better-trained soldiers will be no more.
Military revolutions in the past tended to benefit the United States; the
next one may not.

Can America afford the price of staying ahead? It needs to candidly ask
itself what percentage of its gross domestic product might it take to have a
military that fulfills the country’s many obligations (it currently spends
around 3.5%). Even 4% of GDP would not be nearly enough and while 6% might
do it, that would be such an enormous price tag that one can hear both
economists and Congress screaming.

But what else could a future American administration do if—nasty thought,
scarcely discussed—China decided to spend much, much more? What if its
autocratic leader, Xi Jinping, decided that the time had come for China to
allocate 5% or more of its rising GDP to its armed forces? This is a
scenario that simply wasn’t present a half-century ago, and nobody in
Washington seems to want to talk about it.

This raises the third change and a critical factor of power: relative
economic strength. The biggest global transformation since the 1980s has
been in the sheer size of the Chinese economy today as compared to America’s.
....
Here, with a vengeance, would be yet another episode in “The Rise and Fall
of the Great Powers”. Perhaps all that President Xi needs to do, imitating
Deng, is to avoid missteps and let China’s economy and military capacity
grow, decade after decade. This would present the biggest challenge that
America may ever face: another guy on the block as big as itself."

https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2021/09/01/paul-kennedy-on-whether-chinas-rise-means-americas-fall

On Thursday, September 2, 2021 at 2:53:00 PM UTC-4, kool wrote:
> China's rise will not mean America's fall. China will rise, but will not, in
> their usual Chinese way of humbleness, want to place themselves as number 1
> over US.

Kennedy's article accurately points out what the US cannot sustained indefinitely. Namely,
global strategic-political constellation of forces, US arm force and economic preponderance.

>
> In any case, China knows they have zero war experience, whereas US has 100
> years of war experience.
>
> China's military will continue to rise, but in the course, will exceed the
> number of military assets than US.
>
> However, China expects US to honour them well,
>
>
>
>
>
>
> "ltlee1" wrote in message
> news:6b928c77-4586-4568...@googlegroups.com...
> "NOTHING HAS consumed foreign-policy thinkers over the years more than the
> question of whether the United States is in irreversible decline as a world
> power....
>
> "Much about America and the world remains the same as it was in the 1980s
> when I was writing “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” (Random House,
> 1987). It is also true that there were periods in the past 40 years when
> America’s relative position seemed to have picked up again—in the mid-1990s
> after the Soviet Union’s collapse and in 2003 after the crushing of Saddam
> Hussein, the leader of Iraq. Yet such recoveries were always short-lived,
> compared with several big things that have changed—and not to the advantage
> of the United States. Consider three significant and longer-term shifts: in
> international relations, military strength and economic power.
>
> The first is that the strategic-political constellation of forces has
> changed since the bipolar, cold-war world of a half-century ago when America
> faced only a fading Soviet Union. The international system now comprises
> four or maybe five very large states. None of them can, either through hard
> power or soft power, compel the others to do what they don’t want to do.
>
> There was already evidence of this shift towards a multipolar world when I
> was drafting the last chapter of “Rise and Fall” in the mid-1980s. But now,
> in the third decade of this century, the global landscape looks much more
> varied, with several large nation-states at the top (China, America, India
> and Russia), followed by the European Union and Japan, and even Indonesia
> and Iran.
>
> This marks a very significant redistribution of world power, so it simply is
> not enough to claim, if it is correct, that America remains number one: for
> even if it is the biggest gorilla in the jungle, it is only one of a bunch
> of gorillas! ...
>
> The second change is that America’s armed forces are considerably smaller
> and older than they were in the 1980s. Just how long, really, can
> the Air Force keep patching up and flying its remarkable 70-year-old B-52
> bombers, which are older than all its active officers? And how long can the
> Navy keep refurbishing its 30-year-old Arleigh Burke destroyers? Even if it
> was only a temporary embarrassment to have the western Pacific denuded of
> aircraft-carriers last May when the USS Eisenhower group was covering the
> start of the Afghan withdrawal, the fact is that the Navy today has fewer
> operating carriers than it had 40 years ago.
>
> As the Pentagon regularly deploys its ships to different regions, the
> country may simply not have enough of them to match its numerous global
> commitments. To the historian, then, America is looking rather like the old
> Habsburg model, possessing large though weary armed forces, stretched across
> too many regions. And America’s defeat in Afghanistan, leaving military
> equipment strewn across much of that country, also has a Habsburgian ring to
> it.
>
> Meanwhile, China seems to be flexing its muscles everywhere. And behind the
> question of the size of America’s armed forces lurks a bigger issue: whether
> the era of weapons such as manned aircraft and the large surface warship is
> not passing and may be gone by 2040. One gets the hunch that, in some
> drone-dominated battlefield or pulsar-controlled ocean of the future, the
> odds between America and adversaries like China, Russia or Iran may shift
> because the advantage from its own better-trained soldiers will be no more.
> Military revolutions in the past tended to benefit the United States; the
> next one may not.
>
> Can America afford the price of staying ahead? It needs to candidly ask
> itself what percentage of its gross domestic product might it take to have a
> military that fulfills the country’s many obligations (it currently spends
> around 3.5%). Even 4% of GDP would not be nearly enough and while 6% might
> do it, that would be such an enormous price tag that one can hear both
> economists and Congress screaming.
>
> But what else could a future American administration do if—nasty thought,
> scarcely discussed—China decided to spend much, much more? What if its
> autocratic leader, Xi Jinping, decided that the time had come for China to
> allocate 5% or more of its rising GDP to its armed forces? This is a
> scenario that simply wasn’t present a half-century ago, and nobody in
> Washington seems to want to talk about it.
>
> This raises the third change and a critical factor of power: relative
> economic strength. The biggest global transformation since the 1980s has
> been in the sheer size of the Chinese economy today as compared to America’s.
> ...
> Here, with a vengeance, would be yet another episode in “The Rise and Fall
> of the Great Powers”. Perhaps all that President Xi needs to do, imitating
> Deng, is to avoid missteps and let China’s economy and military capacity
> grow, decade after decade. This would present the biggest challenge that
> America may ever face: another guy on the block as big as itself."
>
> https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2021/09/01/paul-kennedy-on-whether-chinas-rise-means-americas-fall

"kool" AKA "moses" AKA "dubenski" AKA "bobo" AKA "vonnie" AKA "starlet" AKA
"dean" wrote in message news:sgr6i9$j0d$1@dont-email.me...
>
> However, China expects US to honour them well,

We will: https://tinyurl.com/yde93h7y