U.S. Decline and Future World Orders

Manufacturing is the main pillar of the national economy, the foundation of the country, tool of transformation and basis of prosperity. Since the beginning of industrial civilization in the middle of the 18th century, it has been proven repeatedly by the rise and fall of world powers that without strong manufacturing, there is no national prosperity.  -- Introduction to 5-Year Plan, Chinese Communist Party [2]

The peace and disarmament community generally focuses upon specific topics such as nuclear weapons policy, the wars in Ukraine and Israel-Palestine, and various UN-based or NGO-driven security initiatives.  This article aims to step back and look at the broader system of world order in which all such developments unfold.  Paul Kennedy’s 1987 book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers provides a suitable historical context for understanding our current system of world order.  Kennedy identifies four systems of military hegemony that structured European and global affairs since the 16th century: successively, the Spanish, French, British, and US empires.  Most recently the US hegemony, which occurred from the period after World War II to the present, is now in decline, even as China is becoming the new great power shaping an emerging world order.

Contrary to the saying that “history is just one damned thing after another” (attributed to Arnold Toynbee), Paul Kennedy provides a deep analysis of the large-scale political-economic process that accounts for the rise and fall of great powers.  At the core of his analysis is the role of the manufacturing economy in underpinning military power.  Each of the hegemonic great powers that he examined rose on the basis of manufacturing, and declined along with the loss of manufacturing, often when imperial overreach diverted resources from the manufacturing economy.[3]  This is seen today in the decline of US manufacturing since the 1970s, and the emergence of China as a manufacturing powerhouse beginning in the 1980s.

As indicated in the opening quote, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) understands what most countries have understood, at some level, since at least the start of the Industrial Revolution: global power depends, ultimately, on the productive capacity of a country, which is the most important source of economic and military power – and even ‘soft’ power.  This productive capacity has increased manifold since the start of the Industrial Revolution, mainly because of advances in manufacturing technology. In turn, advances in manufacturing technology boil down to advances in the industrial machinery that is used inside factories to produce goods. The rise and fall of the subset of nations that collectively control the international system--the Great Powers--can be tracked with remarkable precision just by understanding the relative production capacity of nations with respect to industrial machinery.

What happens when the relative power of various countries changes? Since relative power is constantly changing, we must constantly revisit this question. During some historical periods, the relative power may not change much, even as the various countries change their absolute power. For instance, during the high-growth period after World War II, even though most countries grew quickly, the relative power among the Great Powers did not change considerably; or at least, it did not appear to change very much with respect the top two Great Powers, the US and the USSR.

When the Soviet Union ceased to exist, an important change in relative power among the Great Powers was the result, with the US considered the most powerful. However, history rarely stays still, particularly when the dynamism of modern technology is involved. Ironically, because of modern industrial technology, a very old international pattern is reasserting itself – as was the case for much of recorded history, China is re-establishing itself as the most powerful country, and India may be in the process of reclaiming its status as number two.

International relations theorists like to ask whether an international system that has one power (unipolar), two powers (bipolar), or many Great Powers (multipolar), is more or less ‘stable’ – by which they generally mean: does such an international system have a greater chance of deteriorating into the chaos of large-scale wars, and especially, world wars? In the age of nuclear weapons, this can be an existential question. However, there are other ways to understand the stability of any particular system, which takes into account the nature of the individual Great Powers. Sometimes a theorist might propose that some Great Powers are ‘revolutionary’ or somehow are more aggressive (e.g., Kissinger on the USSR). Another theory, advanced by the much lesser known Ludwig Dehio, proposes that some powers are more ‘satisfied’ than others, e.g., China is large enough that it really doesn’t pose a threat of expansion, the way, say, Germany did within the more ‘natural’ unit of Europe.

Wolfgang Streeck proposes that some Great Powers seek a ‘universalist’ international system. In the case of the US, that system involves international capital being able to do whatever it wants, whenever and wherever it wants, which can be summarized in the term ‘neoliberal.’ In any case, the decline of the US, and the rise of China, should be expected to bring with it great changes. 

On the other hand, we can move beyond the mode of simply being observers of current forces--a natural history approach--and ask ourselves what might make for a more just and peaceful world order. This is particularly relevant now, as climate change is likely to profoundly change the nature of global civilization, and it is imperative that we prevent the worst of what is in store. If the worst happens, it may not matter who is on top: a Hobbesian war of all against all will be unpredictable and unwanted.

Measuring the relative capability of nations

When people generally think about the power of their country, they think about the power of their military. That is why the military-industrial complex in the United States has been able to thrive: conservative politicians constantly threaten that without more money, our military will not be powerful enough to win wars. In this scenario of power being judged according to military capability, the current state of the military is assumed to be all-important; there is an assumption that if a war takes place, it will be short enough that there will not be a serious need to rebuild or even expand the military during the war.

However, people can understand that national power also has an economic component. As I write this, Elon Musk is busy explaining to Trump voters that the US is ‘strong’ because it can create new technologies, with the help of foreign engineers. It is assumed that a ‘strong’ economy, one which can produce goods and services, particularly at the cutting edge and for a decent price, will dominate, or at least be competitive, in the ‘global marketplace’.

In the long-run, however, the fate of both military and economic power is based on the capability of a nation to manufacture goods, as the opening quote from the CCP makes clear. In the case of the military, military equipment has to be manufactured. In the case of the economy as a whole, the intellectual discussion has become muddled since WWII.

Until the 1970s, whenever anyone talked about economics, they were generally talking about manufacturing. It was understood that, for instance, domination in steel-making would be essential if a country was to be one of the most powerful. Economists would use the factory as a typical example of an economic unit. Terms like ‘Newly Industrialized Country’, or even the concept of ‘development’, as in ‘developing’ and ‘underdeveloped’ countries, assumed that the more ‘modern’ country would have a strong manufacturing sector.

However, the economics profession, in particular the current hegemonic ideology of neoclassical economics, would have none of it. Manufacturing was just one among many industries, and it didn’t really matter whether a country had a strong tourist industry or a strong steel industry, since money is fungible. Unfortunately, none of the theories or writers from the period up to the 1970s – during the rise of the term ‘post-industrial’ – had bothered to create a theory based on the idea that manufacturing was, indeed, central to the economy.

Countries certainly continued to think manufacturing was central, and that explains much of the story of the rise and fall of Great Powers since WWII (as I explain further in Part 2 of the book, Manufacturing Green Prosperity). The US was a colossus of manufacturing after WWII (and before), and Japan and Germany, in particular, rose in power as their manufacturing, and in particular, their industrial machinery sectors, thrived. By the 1980s, the four ‘tigers’ of Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong, joined the manufacturing parade. And finally, the biggest of them all, China, grabbed global leadership to become the ‘workshop of the world’, much as the UK in the 19th century, and then the US in the 20th century, had become.

The USSR, on the other hand, was going into decline, along with the US, by the 1970s and 1980s. Both the US and USSR diverted so much capital into military production that they allowed their civilian production to deteriorate. Before World War II, by using aggressive (and brutal) Five-Year plans, the Soviets had built up the second largest industrial economy in the world, which explains why they became the 2nd most powerful country after the US after WWII. However, they allowed their civilian sector to deteriorate to such an extent that their industrial machinery sector started to collapse. The elevation of Gorbachev was an attempt to stem that decline, but it was too late.

We can look at all the various rising and falling of Great Powers, and try to draw lessons and analogies depending on aspects of the international system. For instance, over 2,000 years ago, the Greek writer Thucydides argued that the Peloponnesian wars started because Sparta was afraid that Athens was becoming more powerful than Sparta; around 1900, the rise of Germany led to two world wars. So it is assumed that as one power wanes in relation to a rising power, that this is inherently a threat to world peace – even without inquiring as to the foreign policy or internal dynamics of the various Great Powers.  This dynamic is currently seen in the relationship between the US and China.

However, things are never so tidy. In The Precarious Balance, the German writer Ludwig Dehio argued that some powers are ‘satisfied.’ For Dehio, the fact that Europe is in many ways a ‘natural’ economic and political unit, can help explain why there were constant wars to bring it under one nation’s dominion. Europe, as we have seen with the institution of the European Union and its predecessors, makes for a ‘natural’ economic unit – it makes sense for all the countries of Europe to trade with each other, to produce goods and services for themselves and others in Europe, and to do so assuming they can depend on the production, capital and labor they need from their neighbors.

So when a ‘natural’ region is not united, some of the subunits will be tempted to try to incorporate as much of the regional economy as possible, by force if necessary. The reason goes back to the conception of manufacturing as central to the economy – each natural region of the world is big enough to encompass all of the various subunits of a manufacturing ‘ecosystem’, and thereby take advantage of the various virtuous circles (positive feedback loops) that close proximity brings, while not being so big – as a global market is – that the links among subunits become so weak that positive feedback loops cannot even form, or form more weakly.

Let’s take the United States and China as examples. Both are large enough to encompass the full suite of industries of a manufacturing ecosystem, and the US rode this ecosystem to world dominance.  But now, the United States has ceded a substantial fraction of its manufacturing ecosystem to China. China is too far away to ignite the positive feedback loops that are the lifeblood of manufacturing ecosystems. For instance, in the discussion of why Apple continues to prefer manufacturing its iPhones in China, it becomes clear that since there are so many firms in one relatively small area, it is easy to switch around, experiment, and use a variety of firms’ output. This was summed up by the idea that if they need a particular screw for the iPhone, they can just walk down the street of an industrial area in China and try many different kinds of screws.

Or this is the way Apple CEO Tim Cook put it:

And the tooling skill is very deep here. You know, in the US, you could have a meeting of tooling engineers, and I am not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields. It's that vocational expertise that is very, very deep here," to which Elon Musk commented, ‘true’.

At one time, the US could have ‘many football fields’ of the appropriate level of engineers. Instead of trying to reconstruct this wealth, many in the US are saber rattling towards China. The US state has lost the capability to reconstruct a healthy manufacturing ecosystem. On the other hand, since China has a manufacturing base, it no longer needs to expand militarily to bring within its orbit a complete manufacturing ecosystem.

Another way in which this dynamic has been discussed, but from a different perspective, is the idea of ‘divide and conquer.’ That is, if you can take a natural economic unit and divide it into pieces, the sum will be too weak to fight the domination of the stronger Power. This is exactly what happened in the Middle East and Africa, where the European Great Powers chopped up a natural economic region, partly with the goal in mind of preventing a new Great Power from developing. And what is a “Great Power?” A part of the planet that is politically unified and makes up a natural economic unit, which can then create wealth for its people and thereby engender support, while also having the capability to create a large enough fighting force to either dominate others or prevent others from dominating.

One can further define the Great Powers collectively as the set of countries that control the change in political boundaries among nations, and can collectively defeat any other nongreat power.  For instance, when Iraq tried to increase its power by gobbling up Kuwait and threatening other countries – and thereby threatening to become a Great Power itself – the Great Powers collectively reversed Iraq’s gains and slowly strangled its economy.

Indeed, it has been fashionable in US international policy circles to conceive of American foreign policy’s main goal as preventing the emergence of another Great Power, or of a Great Power that can challenge the US. They can accomplish this in the Middle East, to some extent, because the countries have been divided for a long time. They can’t do this to China and India, however, because they have long been unified.

The folly of trying to prevent the rise of a Great Power becomes even more apparent when we look at the last 2,000 years: during that time, China has generally been ‘number one,’ owing to its largest population in the world and relatively competent state, with India often at number two, again with a large population and varying levels of unity and competent state management. (Janet Abu-Lughod’s book Before European Hegemony, is an excellent source on the state of the world from 1000 to 1500). If one area of the globe is close to the technological edge and has four times the population of another advanced country – as China and India have four times the population of the US – then it is highly likely that China and India will eventually make their way back to the top of the international power structure, a development that already seems to be occurring.

The irony of the situation is becoming evident in the US; at the time of this writing, a battle is breaking out, with much of Donald Trump’s base wanting to stop H-1B visas, and the ‘tech oligarch’ faction wanting no such outcome. But the vast majority of H-1B visa holders, and many other US software engineers, are graduates of one of the world’s great university systems, the India Institutes of Technology. Meanwhile, many of the goods imported into the US, even the ones used by the US military, come from China. In this context, the US is already close to becoming number three on the world stage.

Machiavelli tried to warn the various Italian states of his era that it was foolish to rely on mercenary armies to do their fighting; now we are in a situation in which the alleged top power, the United States, is making itself dependent on two rising powers, China and India, for its very economic survival. US saber rattling is just that; it does not have the capacity to challenge China, and soon, India.  If the US continues to undermine its own industrial economy, its demise as a Great Power will be complete.

From War Among Humans to War against Nature

In fact, the real security problem for the Great Powers, if by ‘security’ we mean the ability to prevent massive loss of life and wealth, is not war among nations. The objective problem now is the war against nature, against the quilt of natural ecosystems and the climate that humans have been engaging in, accelerating exactly as inter-human conflict has moderated. It is as if humans decided, “hey, our technology is so powerful that we better stop trying to kill each other. Instead of gaining wealth by taking other nations’ wealth, let’s gain wealth by stealing as much as we can from nature.”

Oil is the most obvious example here. The planet literally cooked millions of gallons worth of organic material for millions of years, thus preempting the need for processing by humans; corporations, using better and better technology, are able to suck more and more out of the Earth, and by doing so make incredible profits; they then use those profits to warp the entire political system to tear down the state, so that the state will not regulate them; and their emissions, as they have known for over 50 years, will doom the planet to chaotic global warming.

However, the harm does not stop at oil. Forests, which have been the main ecosystem of the planet for tens of millions of years, are destroyed to make way for cattle ranching, agriculture, and for using wood. Mining destroys whole ecosystems. Many companies, including oil companies, attempt to prevent the regulation of pollution, which thereby costs them nothing but has a horrible effect on national health costs and ecosystems.

On top of the existential threat to ecosystems and a human-friendly climate, we also confront the limits on the availability of raw materials and land that must occur if the world continues to grow in the particular way it has been growing.

The list can go on, and these problems are all solvable by using alternative methods of production. We see that production, particularly in the form of manufacturing, is critical to understanding the rise, fall and dynamics of Great Powers; but production is also critical to understanding how to prevent the entire international system from collapsing, by providing us with a panoply of solutions.

Most analyses of the consequences of these ecological problems focus on trying to figure out which nations would gain, relatively, from some particular set of environmental outcomes. The US Defense Department engages in such studies. They may be useful as a short-term practical matter, but they are useless in the long-term because the entire planet’s ecosystems will start acting in a chaotic, unpredictable way, and thus so will the human international system.

Instead, let us look at possible ways out of this impending crisis. This will also mean touching on the subject of how countries, and in particular Great Powers, can cooperate, as opposed to understanding how they will compete.

The Architecture of a Civilization

Civilizations use the technology and social systems that exist at a particular period of time, and organize production and distribution, including how and where people live, and how they fight wars, in a particular system of interlocking parts. I call this an architecture of a civilization.

In the era we are discussing, after World War II, many aspiring countries wanted to emulate the United States. That meant, to a large extent, pursuing the “American Dream,” which consists of the centrality of the automobile, a single-family home, and decentralized suburbs, all of which put oil at the center of international political economy. In addition, the central economic unit was designated to be investor-owned corporations; the state, while burdened with a large military sector, was meant to be as weak as possible in order to let those corporations do what they want. Right after World War II, furthermore, the United States produced a majority of the world’s capital goods and industrial machinery. Trade was supposed to be as open as possible, which was convenient for the US since it could export its superior goods all over the world – except for the Soviet bloc. Outside the Soviet bloc, democracy was supposed to be dominant, at least within the Great Powers.

This, then, was the civilizational architecture coming out of WWII. The Soviets were surprisingly similar - except for the lack of democracy - having embraced what was called ‘Fordism,’ that is, the mass production of manufactured goods using assembly line methods that deskilled workers. Instead of corporations, their ministries controlled output and did whatever they wanted to the environment. Suburbs and automobiles were out of the picture, but later in the post-WWII period, the sale of oil kept the USSR afloat, so they were just as integrated into the car-centered civilization as any other power.

The United States has since the beginning of the 20th century been a major oil producer and consumer, and devotes much of its military budget and foreign policy to guaranteeing the flow of oil, particularly from the Middle East. As Andreas Malm shows in White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism, oil, cars and suburbs have always been an important source of power for the right-wing. The fossil fuel companies want to make sure that the popular will does not impede their profits, and they want to make sure that the state cannot create the conditions for alternatives to oil and other fossil fuels to arise – much as Great Powers try to prevent the rise of new Great Powers.

Oil “fuels” Great Power rivalry, both literally because it is the fuel of choice for military equipment, but also metaphorically because the Great Powers use the need to control oil fields, or at least their output, as a major reason for maintaining large military budgets. When a critical resource like oil is distributed unequally around the globe, then control over territory becomes a necessary goal.  Since control of territory is the main task of a military, then the unequal distribution of critical resources contributes to an increase in military spending and international tension. Exhibit A is the Middle East.

The immense project of creating suburbs, which all around the world has been spearheaded by the state, has created a situation where the ‘sunk assets’ are so high that, practically speaking, the Great Powers cannot think about decreasing oil use without losing legitimacy and popular support – even in dictatorships like China. That is why, despite all of the discussion of global warming and electric vehicles, oil production has only now leveled off, at world historical heights

I will show how an alternative architecture of civilization could get us out of this mess, but first we must confront an ideological element in the current architecture, which helps prevent the state from making the necessary changes: neoliberalism

Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism we can define as the belief that the government should stay out of the economy as much as possible, and in particular, should not be involved with economic planning. Economic planning does occur, and in particular in the US, the Federal government constructed what may be the largest infrastructure system ever built, the Interstate Highway System, even during the period of anti-government Republican dominance in the 1950s, because the importance of the automobile was greater than the aversion to planning. But in general, the intellectual and economic power of corporations has been devoted to convincing the public that they know best and the government knows least.

But planning has always been necessary in order to increase the wealth and power of the state. The state’s competence to plan can be a large factor in its rise or fall. China has quite competently planned its rise, partly by building state-of-the-art infrastructure systems, such as high speed rail, and using those projects to encourage the development of its manufacturing sector. This use of infrastructure planning to encourage the production side of the economy is as old as civilization itself, and was used in the United States as well.

Throughout American history, starting with the slave-holding class and continuing now with the extreme right-wing, large-scale national infrastructure building by the government has been resisted because it is seen as giving the government too much power, which could translate into preventing the business class from doing whatever they want with their labor or to the environment or to their competitors. In this sense, neoliberalism is the same outlook in a new bottle – keeping the state weak.

As Wolfgang Streek shows in his book Taking Back Control?: States and State Systems after Globalism, a main goal of neoliberal ideology is to weaken the state even further by enforcing a global free trade policy on the rest of the world. Without control over foreign economic interactions, the state cannot really control how its economy works.

So we have a global predicament in which, for the US and Europe at least, the state is too weak to solve big problems, so that global corporations are able to impoverish much of the working class and middle class by transferring much of the wealth generation to a country with a very strong state, China. China, acting as the rising Great Power, is only too happy with this situation, because its control over manufacturing leads to its rise as the top Great Power in the world. For the unfortunate denizens of weak states, we see the rise of proto-fascist or fascist-adjacent regimes which appeal to the diminished working and middle classes with fantasies about the evil immigrants and Others, well-funded by fossil fuel and other companies, who do not want to see the state gain any control over them, and who like the world architecture the way it is.

The United States, having given away much of its economic power to China, is in no position to fight a long war against its rising challenger. That doesn’t mean it won’t, it just means that the objective reality is that it should not, because it would lose. It might do fine with a short war, because of its possession of a huge military; but the history of World War II shows that the nations that succeed are the ones with the best manufacturing base.

For instance, before World War II, the nations with the best steel-making machinery sectors were the United States, Soviet Union, Germany and Japan. Now, the US no longer makes steel-making machinery and China does. Germany, Austria, Italy and Japan also make steel-making machinery, which means that the US would have to go begging if its steel-making factories broke down or needed upgrading during a long war.

However, objectively, China and the United States face a much bigger problem than each other: the collapse of the climate and biosphere.

A Different Architecture

What kind of civilizational architecture would move the world in the direction of peace and general prosperity?  In this concluding section, I aim to envision a future world order that can work for all people and all species inhabiting our precious planet.  Some may dismiss this as a visionary and utopian exercise.  However, it is no more visionary and utopian than “general and complete disarmament,” which is what animated the founders of the United Nations.  And unlike billionaires’ dreams today of colonizing Mars, this is a vision for making the one planet that humanity actually inhabits a desirable and sustainable place to live for the eons of time remaining to us in the geological scheme of things.  I offer this vision of the future as a framework for political and policy discussion that can meet the environmental threats that may otherwise bring human civilization itself to an untimely end.  

It would be much easier to create a better planet without the automobile.  Of course, this would not be possible in the near future – it would take decades, mostly because so much of the world’s population believes in it due largely to massive advertising.  By sketching a best-case scenario, however, we can understand how to move towards a more sustainable future.

Without automobiles, there would be little need for oil, which would rectify the situation we reviewed above – no more wars over oil, no more dictatorships like Saudi Arabia with too much economic and political power, a much smaller funding base for the extreme right wing, much less need for a large military.  And of course, a huge reduction in carbon emissions.

It might be objected that we can switch to electric vehicles (EVs), but that will take many decades, will require massive amounts of resources, and will further enrich people who fund the extreme right wing, such as Elon Musk, who seems to be trying to continue from where the anti-Semitic and Nazi-friendly Henry Ford left off. But let us continue to consider the benefits of a post-automobile future.

Most important, and most jarring, would be the recentralization of populations into cities – by which I mean places with dense housing and commercial space. Most American “cities” are over 80% zoned for single family homes, so even American cities, except NYC, are not ‘cities’ in the sense I am putting forth here. Dense cities, however, are much more efficient than suburbs, and judging from housing prices, are in high demand. They will become more and more necessary as the effects of climate change become more severe. Like the medieval peasants who had to pack up and enter the gated towns when their lands were being invaded, so, more slowly but just as inexorably, suburban residents will have to move to denser areas that can be more easily protected and rebuilt after intense climate events like fires, floods, droughts, or whatever else will be thrown at us.

Suburbs are economically unsustainable, that is, they have such huge infrastructure needs – roads, sewers, water, electricity, emergency services, transportation – that they need constant inflows of resources from cities. They are much more resource and energy intensive than cities, per person, and thus they set up potential military confrontations between nations that want to keep the Ponzi scheme of suburbia running.

With most people living in dense cities, mass transit/bikes/walking will be adequate for intracity travel. An efficient high-speed rail network will be all that is needed for most intercity passenger and freight travel. Again, resources and energy needs will therefore go down.

It will be possible to feed most of the population, not from huge farms thousands of miles away, but in farm belts around urban areas. Clean manufacturing belts around urban areas could also be built, minimizing the need for intercity travel, and maximizing the virtual circles of economic units that are close together, a fundamental reason cities are richer than non-cities.

As I further explain in Part 3 of my book Manufacturing Green Prosperity, the areas between cities could contain large wind and solar farms, strategically placed to maximize electricity generation at all times; high-speed rail lines, which are generally more efficient and comfortable than planes and can use electricity; and much of the rest can be returned to wilderness, with a certain amount of ecotourism for the population which would not have to work quite as hard because the economy would be so much more efficient.

This increase in efficiency, ideally, would be accelerated if corporations were converted to employee owned-and-operated firms, thus sidelining the investor class and many layers of management. Worker self-managed systems such as Spain’s Mondragon Cooperative Corporation have shown that this is viable and has many benefits.

Crucially, for each natural regional area, most of the manufacturing (including machinery manufacturing), energy and agricultural output will come from the natural region itself, not from inter-regional trade. For much of the post-WWII period, this sort of arrangement was described in harsh tones as ‘regional blocks’ that would lead to another set of wars; it was thought that trade would tie nations together, even though this clearly did not work to prevent WWI. But the pre-WWII international economic system broke apart into blocks, so the connection was made between a regional block architecture and war.

However, as was argued above, it is more efficient for a geographic area to contain a full suite of industries, so that the positive feedback loops that exist when production units are in close proximity, can be maximally exploited. This means that world trade would decline, at least among mostly self-sufficient regions; it would also mean that local workforces would increase in economic power, since their labor would be needed for production. In addition, if the state is strong enough to create the production systems outlined above, the state could also moderate and regulate prices to a much greater degree than currently. The result of increasing incomes, more leisure time because of greater demand for labor, and stable prices, would mean an increased support for democracy from the working and middle classes, and a decreased attraction to the siren songs of the extreme right wing.

The state is the only institution that can build this alternative architecture, by employing large swaths of the public to build new and sustainable infrastructure systems for energy, housing, transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and various others, such as health in the United States, to enable the civilization to produce and consume in a more efficient, sustainable and just manner.

The Great Powers collectively can cooperate to build out this alternative architecture as quickly as possible. They could thereby redirect the resources and labor that are used by the military. They could offer to help the other natural economic regions of the world to become ecologically sustainable by giving them the industrial machinery needed to make this alternative architecture possible; these regions could in return maintain their critical ecosystems (such as rainforests), with Great Power help if necessary. Disarmament could be sold as an integral part of a wider program of global renewal.

Indeed, the ecological crisis as an objective reality, and increasing global awareness of the near-term threat posed by climate change, deforestation, and other environmental disruptions, may compel a new era of global cooperation. The emergence in the peace and disarmament community of the concept of human security (as opposed to national security) may herald just the kind of integrated thinking needed to address the interrelated environmental, economic, and other global crises. With the decline of US hegemony and the rise of China and the BRICS bloc that it leads, the world faces a crossroads.

One fork in this road leads to continued militarization and continued reliance upon military hegemony as the organizing principle of world order. This would perpetuate the centuries-long pattern described by Paul Kennedy in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, with China taking the place of the United States as the new hegemon. However, Kennedy himself outlined an alternative path that humanity could take in another book, The Parliament of Man. Going down this path would mean strengthening and reforming the United Nations and regional security organizations, enacting verifiable, multilateral arms reduction and threat reduction agreements, and tackling the ecological crisis with the kind of new civilizational architecture I am outlining here.

Every Great Power has reasons for both optimism and pessimism for being able to cooperate to implement such an agenda. The United States is far along in the decline of the state, the formation of an extreme right wing and the loss of manufacturing. But it still has great wealth and democracy. China has a strong state and is aggressively moving to create green industries, but it is still reliant on fossil fuels and has little democracy. India is also moving towards green industries but currently using too much coal; like the US, it has democratic traditions, but is moving down the road of fascism, more so under Modi than the United States. Europe, like the US, has weak states dominated by neoliberal ideology and is experiencing the rise of fascism, but still has great wealth – and particularly in Germany, high quality manufacturing – and functioning democracies. Japan and other east Asian countries have retained their manufacturing, while Russia has lost much of its manufacturing compared to its Soviet heyday; the war in Ukraine has diverted scarce resources from Russian industrial development, a pattern that the United States has followed with our permanent war economy from World War II to the present. 

As global warming and ecosystem destruction lead to a deteriorating biosphere, time may be running out for a constructive cooperation to occur. On the other hand, sometimes crises bring about cooperation because there is no other choice. It is important to have an alternative architecture available if and when the international community decides that the old, destructive ways are no longer working.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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