Book Review 159: The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE GREAT POWERS, by Paul Kennedy. 678 pages. Vintage paperback, $18

“The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” generated quite a bit of heat when Paul Kennedy published it in 1987, mostly because in the naive euphoria of Reaganism it seemed to foretell the diminution of America -- even if Kennedy himself said he was agnostic about whether the United States would necessarily repeat the decline of China, Venice, Holland, France, the Ottomans and Britain. Well, and who was to say that a nation that could (although just barely) defeat 600 construction workers in Grenada wasn’t the master of the globe?

Reading it at this distance, the book seems slighter, nothing much more than an extended footnote on Marshal Turenne’s observation that God (or Providence, as Turenne said) always favored the big battalions. The jest is usually attributed to Napoleon, but Kennedy, bizarrely, gives it to Stalin.

In fact, Kennedy completely missed the real threat in the modern era to hegemonic states, a threat that did not face earlier empires. He was fixated on Great Power clashes, and for the 1980s, on the standoff between Russia and America. Unluckily for him, Russia collapsed not long after, an event that could have been (and was) predicted long before and had nothing to do with the inability of the USSR to compete with Star Wars, since Star Wars turned out to be a Potemkin Village of militarism; and the Russians never spent any meaningful amounts of money trying to catch up.

But before getting to the real threat, Kennedy’s main argument needs to be summarized. It is not incorrect. The supremacy of a power was due not to its absolute power but to its relative power relations to its enemies -- not a single enemy, since during the 500 years surveyed by Kennedy all defining conflicts were coalition wars. Why anybody thought it necessary to write 550 pages about this is obscure, and how anybody could write 550 pages about coalition warfare without mentioning Clausewitz is impossible to determine, but here it is: 550 pages and one reference to Clausewitz, but that not to his observations on coalitions, about which he was expert.

Coalition wars turn into wars of attrition, and therefore the side with the most resources prevails. The resources must be men -- to fight and work and grow food -- and factories and access to raw materials; and favorable borders help. States, however great, that have to fight or defend two, three or four fronts generally lose. (Except, a point missed by Kennedy, that Germany prevailed over Britain by stripping her of her financial assets in two grinding campaigns, out of which Germany, with bigger battalions, emerged more powerful, although by that time the Europeans had [apparently] learned to stop fighting over provinces, just as, in 1648, they learned at long last to stop fighting over religious superstitions.)

The key point here is not coalition, as Kennedy would have it, but attrition. If a small power can cheaply force a large power to defend itself expensively, the small power may prevail.

This was the winning strategy of the Vikings and the Mongols, who did not have big battalions.

In gunpowder warfare, for a long time it was usually impossible for small powers to pull off that trick. If nothing else, the large power, able to go where it wanted within the range of its muskets, could exterminate the small, less well-armed power's members. This is how the English colonists destroyed the southern Indians in Georgia and Tennessee, even if they could seldom catch them in a stand-up fight.

Given a certain level of technology and organization, a small power can bleed a large one to death. This was neatly demonstrated in the Boer War. The English had no trouble dealing with the backward Mahdists in Sudan, wiping them out in a single morning at Omdurman with a small force. But against the Boers, who had repeating rifles and knew how to use them, half a million British troops could not prevail by military means and only finally put down the Boers by killing their women and children in concentration camps.

Mesmerized as he is by clashes of great armies, Kennedy ignores the Boer War. I do not mean he treats it as a minor episode. I mean he ignores it. Only half a sentence in 550 pages even mentions the Boers.

Had he noticed the Boers, Kennedy’s passages on the American adventure in Vietnam would not have been as silly as they are. In particular, since the force the Americans opposed to the Vietnamese was no larger than the British army deployed against the Boers, while there were over 50 million Vietnamese as against a few hundred thousand Boers, the inadequacy of the American effort should have been manifest, not only to Kennedy in hindsight but to American commanders -- civilian and military -- at the time.

A few people did notice it. One was I.F. Stone, who observed in 1969 that the reason the North Vietnamese were not going to exchange prisoners was that most of their prisoners were pilots, each of whom had cost the Americans $600,000 to train. More generally, while the United States was rich and Vietnam was poor, even the United States could not afford to swap helicopters for bicycles, which is how the exchange worked out.

The terms of trade are much more unfavorable now than they were in 1970. Today, Somali teenagers who cannot afford a whole pair of pants have Kalashnikovs. The only possible way to prevail against insurgents is either to wean the masses away from them -- not generally a workable strategy in Muslim societies -- or to lay waste to the whole society, no longer acceptable by western standards, although it was as recently as 1945.

The United States spends trillions against an enemy that spends millions. This thousand-to-one attrition rate is unsupportable. As long as the Muslims do not waver, they win under the present terms of exchange and engagement.