Unrivaled - A Book By Michael Beckley

Latest Read -Unrivaled 

Why America Will Remain The World’s Sole Superpower By Michael Beckley*

There are many thinkers around the world who predict that China is going to become a “new hegemon,” . Economist magazine has an assessment that the “Chinese century is well under way.” It notes that Beijing accounts for roughly 45 percent of global economic growth since the onset of the 2008 financial crisis and 60 percent of the increase in global defense spending since 1990. 

During the past twenty years, we have seen pundits in world affairs talk about the United States as a declining superpower and why China will take its place. They have offered much evidence to support this theory. In the past decades, the US spent a trillion dollars in a futile war in Afghanistan only to retreat in defeat. Hundreds of billions went down in Iraq only to enable Iran, the US’ arch-enemy, as the regional hegemon in the Persian Gulf. The massive economic crisis of 2008 cost the US close to a trillion dollars in bailing out banks. Then, US  had the disastrous handling of Covid-19 in 2020, making it  look like an unscientific, bumbling nation. To this, when you add the US is seventh in literacy, eleventh in infrastructure, and twenty-eighth in government efficiency, it seems likely that it is a declining superpower. In contrast, China seems to have controlled the Covid-19 outbreak with professionalism. Its economy has recovered well from the Covid shock. They have been posting double-digit or above six percent growth for much of the 21st century so far. They have three trillion dollars in reserve. China has deep pockets to spend a trillion dollars, building modern infrastructure in almost seventy countries through the Belt and Road Initiative and the Maritime Silk Road. They are investing more than the US as a percentage of GDP in R&D for Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computing. They are getting close to the US in military might and are flexing muscles in Asia. 

But the author of this interesting book “Unrivaled “, Michael Beckley does not buy the arguments. His argument is vey  simple,  he says not only that U.S. preeminence is safer than most contemporary thinkers and analysts would have believed, but also that it is more resilient: “Unipolarity is not guaranteed to endure,” he concludes, “but present trends strongly suggest that it will last for many decades.”

And there is a vast action on the card at US Government level to combat the situation. The past Trump administration as well as now Biden Government has been increasingly aggressive in countering America's import substitution , imposing penalties ranging from 10 to 25 percent on $250 billion worth of Chinese exports; inking trade agreements with Mexico and Canada that aim to prevent either one from pursuing a separate trade accord with China; and,also, banning Chinese chipmaker Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Company from buying U.S. components without a special license from the Commerce Department. A growing cadre of U.S. observers holds that Washington has entered into a new Cold War with Beijing, with China representing a significantly more potent challenge than the Soviet Union ever did.

I was initially skeptical about  Beckley's premise . But once I started reading Beckley's book , it is doubly surprising: a concise but detailed provocation, it breaks methodological ground to offer a novel assessment of America's position in world affairs. 

One hopes that the book  finds a high-level audience in both Washington and Beijing but also in countries like India which aspire to become global power: the United States would be less likely to succumb to fatalism were it to understand more thoroughly its bases of power and China's corresponding points of weakness; China, in turn, would be less likely to succumb to hubris.

Expounding an essay that he published in International Security near the end of 2011, Beckley had argued that a country's aggregate power is better measured by its “net resources” than its “gross resources.” The later, he explains, do not account for production costs, “the price a nation pays to generate wealth and military capabilities”; welfare costs, “the expenses a nation pays to keep its people alive”; and security costs, “the price a government pays to police and protect its citizens.” Because population size is the chief source of these costs, he derives a country's net resources by multiplying GDP by GDP per capita. While his fellow political scientists will surely debate the utility of this metric—Beckley himself calls it a “primitive proxy”—his core insight—that net resources are a more accurate gauge of power than gross resources—is sound.

Beckley adduces an impressive amount and diversity of evidence in support of his argument. U.S. workers, for example, “generate roughly seven times the output of Chinese workers on average.” China's total factor productivity growth rate, meanwhile, “has actually turned negative in recent years, meaning that China is producing less output per unit of input each year,” and “roughly one-third of China's industrial production goes to waste.” In addition, “China would need to outspend the United States by substantial margins in the decades ahead just to start closing the gap in recently accumulated military capital,” and “at least 35 percent of China's military budget goes to homeland security operations alone. Beckley does not believe great powers have predictable life spans or they rise and fall as though it is their destiny. In the foreseeable future, he does not see any country gaining the means to challenge the US for global supremacy. Unipolarity will continue to reign for decades, well into this century. These are audacious pronouncements. I have read several books on the subject, arguing both ways. Most of them followed familiar lines of reasoning. Some books brought new concepts, such as Graham Allison’s invocation of the ‘Thucydides trap’. However, few of them broke new ground. I found this book refreshing and innovative as it gives us a couple of new frameworks and methods to grasp and analyze the parameters of this question. Using his approach, the author makes persuasive arguments for why the US will remain the sole superpower for decades. 

Beckley says most studies size up countries using gross indicators of economic and military resources, such as GDP and military spending. These indicators tally countries’ resources without deducting the costs countries pay to police, protect, and provide services for their people. As a result, these indicators exaggerate the wealth and military power of populous countries like China and India. Such countries produce vast output and field large armies. They also bear massive welfare and security burdens that drain their resources. Instead, power must be measured in net resources rather than gross and create a balance sheet for each country. Assets and liabilities go on either side of the ledger. We calculate net resources, subtracting the latter from the former. When we do this, we find America’s economic and military lead over other countries is much larger than assumed. The future trends are also in its favor. Population size is the chief element of these costs. So, Beckley captures the net assets as the product of GDP and GDP per capita. He calls it the ‘primitive proxy’ and it is an insightful contribution of the author.

Beckley defines power in terms of resources. A country’s assets are its economic and military resources. Its liabilities are production, welfare, and security costs. Net resources are the remains after subtracting these costs from the assets. Production costs are the price a nation pays to generate wealth and military capabilities. They include the raw materials consumed, and the pollution spewed out, during the production process. Welfare costs are subsistence costs. They are the expenses a nation pays to keep its people alive and include outlays on basic items like food, healthcare, education, and social security. Security costs are the price a government pays to police, protect its citizens, and defend its borders. These costs tie down large chunks of every country’s assets. To assess the balance of power, analysts must deduct them. Power derives from the net stocks of resources. 

Using this approach and an impressive amount of data, Beckley exposes the fallacy of arguments that see the US in decline and China rising to the pre-eminent position. We may marvel at the rapid pace at which China has built its high-speed rail network or the speed with which they pull of big infrastructural projects. But Beckley says that China is generating lesser and lesser output per unit of input each year. Most of China’s growth has come from greater investment and not productivity growth. Its productivity growth reduced last decade and became negative of late. Excess capacity and purposeless investment have made some 30% of China’s production go to waste, like ghost cities and ghost highways. China also has substantial security costs as it shares a border with fourteen countries, not all of them friendly, such as India and Vietnam. Nations like Pakistan and Afghanistan, though friendly, harbor Islamists who could trouble China in Xinjiang. North Korea, though friendly, is unpredictable and China has to watch its borders for refugees trying to flee to South Korea. Russia is not hostile but would not like China to encroach on its Central Asian backyard. Beckley says that China has much internal strife because of dictatorship. It imposes unnecessary security costs besides pacifying restive regions like Xinjiang and Tibet. Thirty-five percent of China’s military budget goes for homeland security operations. Welfare costs are also high because China has to feed, clothe, provide employment, healthcare, and educate one-fifth of humanity. Communism imposes wasteful costs like having to prop up loss-making public sector enterprises. In contrast, the US enjoys seven times the productivity of an average Chinese worker. It borders two friendly nations and two vast oceans, making its external security benign in comparison. Beckley shows US’s internal security environment demands a lot fewer costs compared to China. When you put it all together, the US comes far ahead in net resources and is increasing the gap between itself and other challenging powers.

In the military sphere, Beckley shows with impressive statistics, the US is about five to ten times more capable than China now. This includes the vast combat experience the US gained by waging war somewhere or the other in the world over the past half-century. The Chinese army has very limited actual combat experience in comparison. The last time they fought a limited war was in 1979 with Vietnam with mixed results. Corruption and professional decay riddle the People’s Liberation Army, according to Beckley. Research shows hundreds of senior officers to have purchased their positions by paying bribes to superiors. 

Beckley concludes the book by proposing another framework to understand the rise and fall of nations. It bolsters his earlier arguments further and ends the book on an impressive note. Geography, institutions, and demography are the three primary drivers of long-run economic growth. He advances this view in opposition to the Balance-of-power and Convergence theories, which he critiques. With logical arguments and data, he shows the US has the best prospects for sustained future economic growth. Hence, it will widen the already substantial lead it holds in economic and military domains. In demography, unless the US puts a total stop to immigration, it will continue as a nation with young workers well into this century. China’s insularity and xenophobia would need enormous changes to combat the aging trend of its population through immigration. As for institutions, the US beats both its major adversaries, China and Russia, hands down. Excellent geography and benign borders are other blessings for the US. 

The author is also well aware of the pitfalls in these projections. He is also not in love with a Unipolar era. However, this space is too small to discuss them. 

Beckley has provided two seminal frameworks in this book to probe the questions raised by China’s rise. I found it educational and innovative and applicable to assessing other nations which have pretensions to become a superpower. I also read with interest in the book about the prospects of India challenging US in coming time, the author  has its own assessment which says that it is a favorite pastime of the so called  Nationalists in India to fantasize about India becoming a superpower in two decades. India has to defend its borders from its two unfriendly neighbors viz Pakistan and China, thus  its spendings to defending the borders on a very high side. More and more of the national budget gets absorbed by keeping thousands of troops at high altitudes on the border just to maintain the status quo. It weakens the economy, reducing the quality of education, healthcare, and development. It harms the dream of becoming a richer nation and kicks the dream that much farther into the future. 

The book is short, comprising only 150-odd pages. There are a hundred pages of Notes and References. Prof. Beckley argues his case with conviction, writes in an accessible style, creating a ground-breaking work.

*Michael Beckley is a fellow in International Security Program at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs, he also teaches at Tuffs University