Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

An American century – again?
In 1941 Time magazine announced the arrival of the ‘American Century’.
A world dominated for centuries by the European great powers would now
see its future shaped by the US. It is easy to see why such a claim should
have been made at that particular time, and equally easy to see why it was
false, or, as it will be argued here, premature. In 1945 the US stood alone
as the only major industrial power not devastated by the war – indeed, it has
been estimated that the US was responsible for over half the world’s total
product at that time. In response to Nazi and Japanese military aggression
the US had turned this productive capacity into a great and powerful mili-
tary machine, with the world’s largest navy and air force, a large high-tech
army, and sole possession of nuclear weapons. America’s allies in the Second
World War were became increasingly dependent on the US to run their own
military machines; the Soviet soldiers who won the great battles on the east-
ern front relied on US lend–lease trucks to keep their supply-lines open, and
the British divisions that formed a decreasing proportion of the armies on
the Western Front in 1944/45 were spearheaded by American-made tanks.
Moreover, the new global institutions born in and immediately after the war
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were shaped and dominated by the US, which used its predominance to
create a congenial international environment, promoting its version of
collective security and liberal economic relations (Ikenberry 2001). American
society was widely admired for its freedom and envied for its prosperity and
relative security – American movies dominated world cinema and created
an image of the US as a land of opportunity (albeit a society confident
enough to be self-critical, as the popular genre of noir films demonstrated)
and American popular music was everywhere to be heard; Willis Connover’s
jazz broadcasts on Voice of America influenced several generations of
European listeners, including the present writer – he was arguably the most
important cultural ambassador for the US in the immediate post-war era.
In short, the US in 1945 possessed in abundance both the traditional
forms of power as well as what later came to be named ‘soft’ power (Nye
2004). And yet the American century failed to materialize. The reasons for
this failure are clear enough. First, although the US possessed enormous
military power, so did its putative main rival, the Soviet Union; the USSR’s
military capacity was mostly based on its formidable army and was vulner-
able to US air-power, as were Soviet cities, but the strategic location of the
Soviet Union, on the doorstep of America’s fellow liberal democracies in
Western and Central Europe, gave it a potential advantage once it recovered
from the exertions of 1941–5. The possibility that the Red Army might
occupy Western Europe in response to an attack on the Soviet Union, or as
an act of pure aggression to match the USSR’s attack on Finland in 1939,
horrified Western observers, and once the Soviets developed their own
nuclear weapons, and, after a longer interval, the means to attack the US
with them, some kind of rough and ready balance of power – perhaps, as
Churchill suggested, a ‘balance of terror’ – was established, and US military
hegemony disappeared, even though the US retained a unique capacity to
project its power everywhere in the world. The rise of Red China added to
this relative decline, while decolonization led to the creation of a great num-
ber of relatively unsuccessful states which were open to Soviet or Chinese
penetration.
Second, partly as a Cold War strategy, and partly to create markets for its
products and capital, the US used its economic predominance to help to
rebuild the capitalist economies of Western Europe and Japan, via aid pro-
grammes such as the Marshall Plan, by direct military subsidies and by
stimulating the flow of US investment to these areas. The result was, at one
level, highly gratifying; within a remarkably short period of time the devas-
tated European economies were rebuilt and surpassed their pre-war levels
of prosperity – under American leadership the twenty years from the early
1950s to the early 1970s saw the greatest increase in global wealth in human
history. But, perhaps predictably, the newly successful capitalist economies
began to compete successfully with the US, and America’s partners, as they