Bad News for American Doomers

It’s once more springtime for America doomers, those who believe the United States will soon lose its global top-dog status. Much of this is in reaction to the poorly considered ramblings of President Trump. The Economist, for example, suggests that “the actual land of the free” has moved from America to Europe, with the Continent epitomizing “moral norms” on the climate, free trade, and rule of law.

These prophecies — or dreams — of America’s downfall conflate the United States, a people and place, with the US government. The difference between the two things isn’t well-understood, especially in Europe. Whoever controls the White House and Congress has an effect, to be sure, but the true power of America lies not with its elected leaders, but in the ambitions of its people, its remarkable physical endowment, and the constraints of its constitutional order (Trump is learning about that last — to his chagrin).

Great empires don’t fall easily. Often, they rebound from the worst setbacks. Rome suffered under the misrule of Caligula, Nero, and Commodus, but resurged under more enlightened leaders well until the fifth century AD. In the East, the Roman imperium lasted for almost a millennium longer than that. Britain, too, didn’t fade after losing American Revolutionary War; the country simply moved on, incorporating much of the world into its imperial system for the next 150 years.

Likewise, the United States emerged as the victor in the Cold War a couple of decades after the disaster of Vietnam, the social upheavals of the Sixties, and mass deindustrialisation.

Today, Europeans, having permanently lost their empires, may be tempted to console themselves with thoughts of inevitable American decline. Hence, the new talk about Europe being the best place for the “pursuit of happiness”. Yet in the real world, Europeans are far from happy. As Gallup International found in 2022, the world’s top-five most pessimistic populations are all in Europe, including Italy and France; others like Britain are similarly distressed.

This may reflect the fact that Europe has consistently lagged behind the United States in adjusting to changing economic trends. Over the past 15 years, the eurozone economy grew about 6%, measured in dollars, compared with 82% for the United States, according to International Monetary Fund data.

To view this another way, consider that the most powerful economy on the Continent, Germany, is barely bigger than that of my adopted home state, California. America’s industrial giants have faded, victims of their own incompetence and shortsightedness in Washington. But they were replaced in large part by aggressive new firms, something Europe hasn’t produced in a long time.

Two decades ago, one could legitimately see Europe as a determinative third force on the global stage. But this is no longer the case. The most obvious weakness is in technology: of the top 50 tech firms, only three are based on the Continent. The rest of the list is dominated largely by the United States, including in artificial intelligence, with China coming in a firm and ascendant second. This gap may widen as massive new chip and computer plants open up in Texas and Arizona, steps encouraged under both Joe Biden and Trump.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Chris F.