American Hegemony, Continued...

My good friend Ottavio, from Down Under, has a great post up, "U.S Declinism Theories Are Nothing New."

As he notes, "America will remain the sole superpower even if not quite as powerful as in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War ..."

Also, Ottavio's entry gives me an opportunity to finally post Michael Lind's contrarian recent essay, "The Next Big Thing: America":

There will be no winners from the prolonged and painful economic emergency. But some countries will lose more than others. The United States is likely to emerge less damaged than most, as unfair as that will seem to a world that blames it for triggering the crisis. For one thing, it is much easier for a chronic trade-deficit country such as the United States to rebuild its battered export sector than it is for export-oriented countries like China and Japan to rebalance their economies toward more consumption and social insurance. For another, the United States, alone among the world’s leaders, is potentially an industrial superpower, a commodity superpower, and an energy superpower at the same time.

The United States will also continue to benefit from the inward flow of foreign money, talent, and labor. Others may grumble about the creditworthiness of Uncle Sam in light of emergency-driven deficits, but in the foreseeable future what places will be a safer haven for investments? A fragile and politically unstable China? Japan, with a shaky economy and aging population? A Europe of squabbling nation-states, riven by cleavages between natives and Muslim immigrants? Authoritarian petrostates where assets can be confiscated without warning?

The crisis has reduced the flow of immigrants into the United States along with the demand for their labor, but both should recover, putting the country back on its pre-crisis path of immigration-fed population growth and leading to a population of 400 to 500 million by 2050 and as many as a billion people by 2100. Whether the U.S. economy can grow rapidly enough to maintain a high standard of living for all those people remains to be seen (though prophets of Malthusian gloom about alleged U.S. overpopulation have been refuted many times before). The bottom line is: The populations of Europe, Russia, and Japan are declining, and those of China and India are leveling off. The United States alone among great powers will be increasing its share of world population over time.

Otto von Bismarck observed that God favors fools, drunkards, and the United States of America. The U.S.A. has been a lucky country, and despite its present suffering it is unlikely that America’s luck has run out. Relying on the import of money, workers, and brains for more than three centuries, North America has been a Ponzi scheme that works. The present crisis notwithstanding, it still will.