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ROTTING FROM THE INSIDE OUT
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Barack Obama and Mitt Romney don’t generally agree on much. But
these days they appear to have one area of surprising consensus —
they both believe that stories of American decline are greatly
exaggerated. According to Foreign Policy’s own Josh Rogin, Obama
has been praising Robert Kagan’s recent article in the New Republic
on the myth of American decline — a perhaps not unsurprising
position to take for a candidate regularly accused of being
insufficiently exceptionalist. Romney — author of No Apology: The
Case for American Greatness — also counts Kagan among his top
foreign-policy advisors.

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Kagan’s article, as well as his new book, The World America Made,
is the most obvious recent example of pushback against the
declinist meme, but others have also taken up the mantle. In the
recent issue of International Security, Michael Beckley wrote a
widely cited piece that argues “America’s Edge Will Endure” against
potential rivals like China. FP’s Daniel Drezner has adopted a
similar view. These anti-declinists largely base their arguments
around the notion that U.S. economic and military power, compared
to other countries, is unsurpassed — and will remain so for the
foreseeable future.

Indeed, Kagan frames a good part of his argument around
America’s “relative power” — factors such as “the size and the
influence of its economy relative to that of other powers; the
magnitude of military power compared with that of potential
adversaries; the degree of political influence it wields in the
international system.”

By this notion, U.S. global power remains unparalleled and its
hegemony is uncontested. There is much to sustain this argument.
America today faces no great power rival, no existential threat,
and an economy that — while currently in the doldrums — remains
vibrant and adaptive. Compared to other nations, the United States
is not simply a great power, it is the greatest power. Even if its
influence declines, it is likely to continue to enjoy an outsized
role on the international stage, in part because there is a
consensus among foreign-policy elites — like Romney and Obama, for
instance — that the U.S. must do whatever it takes to remain, as
Madeline Albright once put it, “the world’s ‘indispensable
nation.'”

There is, however, one serious problem with this analysis. Any
discussion of American national security that focuses solely on the
issue of U.S. power vis-à-vis other countries — and ignores
domestic inputs — is decidedly incomplete. In Kagan’s New Republic
article, for example, he has little to say about the country’s
domestic challenges except to obliquely argue that to focus on
“nation-building” at home while ignoring the importance of
maintaining U.S. power abroad would be a mistake. In fact, in a
recent FP debate with the Financial Times’ Gideon Rachman on the
issue of American decline, Kagan diagnoses what he, and many other
political analysts, appear to believe is the country’s most serious
problem: “enormous fiscal deficits driven by entitlements.” Why is
this bad? It makes it harder, says Kagan, for the United States to
“continue playing its vital role in the world” and will lead to
significant cutbacks in defense spending.

However, a focus on U.S. global dominance or suasion that
doesn’t factor in those elements that constitute American power at
home ignores substantial and worsening signs of decline. Indeed, by
virtually any measure, a closer look at the state of the United
States today tells a sobering tale of rapid and unchecked decay and
deterioration in a host of areas. While not all of them are
generally considered elements of national security, perhaps they
should be.

Let’s start with education, which almost any observer would
agree is a key factor in national competitiveness. The data is not
good. According to the most recent OECD report on global education
standards, the United States is an average country in how it
educates its children — 12th in reading skills, 17th in science,
and 26th in math. The World Economic Forum ranks the United States
48th in the quality of its mathematics and science education, even
though we spend more money per student than almost any country in
the world.

America’s high school graduation rate is lower today that it was
in the late 1960s and “kids are now less likely to graduate from
high school than their parents,” according to an analysis released
last year by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center.
In fact, not only is the graduation rate worse than many Western
countries, the United States is now the only developed country
where a higher percentage of 55 to 64-year-olds have a high school
diploma than 25 to 34-year-olds.

While the United States still maintains the world’s finest
university system, college graduation rates are slipping. Among 25
to 34-year-olds, America trails Australia, Belgium, Canada,
Denmark, France, Ireland, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Luxembourg,
New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom in its
percentage of college graduates. This speaks, in some measure, to
the disparities that are endemic in the U.S. education system. If
you are poor in America, chances are you attend a school that
underperforms, are taught by teachers that are not as effective,
and have test scores that lag far behind your more affluent
counterparts (the same is true if you are black or Hispanic — you
lag behind your white counterparts). Can a country be a great
global power if its education system is fundamentally unequal and
is getting steadily worse?

What about national infrastructure — another key element of
national economic power and global competitiveness? First, the
nation’s broadband penetration rates remain in the middle of the
global pack and there is growing divide in the United States
between digital haves and have nots. Overall, its transportation
networks are mediocre compared to similarly wealthy countries and
according to the World Economic Forum, the United States ranks 23rd
in the OECD for infrastructure quality — a ranking that has
steadily declined over the past decade. American commuters spend
more time in traffic than Western Europeans, the country’s train
system and high-speed rail lines in general pale next to that of
other developed nations, and even the number of people killed on
American highways is 60 percent higher than the OECD average. Part
of the problem is that the amount of money the U.S. government
spends on infrastructure has steadily declined for decades and now
trails far behind other Western nations. In time, such
infrastructure disadvantages have the potential to undermine the
U.S. economy, hamstring productivity and competitiveness, and put
the lives of more Americans at risk — and this appears to be
happening already.

Finally, a closer look at the U.S. health care system is enough
to make one ill. Even after the passage of Obama’s 2010 health care
reform bill (which every Republican presidential candidate wants to
repeal) the United States is far from having a health care system
that meets the needs of its citizens. According to a July 2011
report by the Commonwealth Fund, “the U.S. has fewer hospital beds
and physicians, and sees fewer hospital and physician visits, than
in most other countries” even though it spends far more on health
care per capita than any other country in the world. In addition,
“prescription drug utilization, prices, and spending all appear to
be highest in the U.S., as does the supply, utilization, and price
of diagnostic imaging.” Long story short, the United States spends
more for less on health care than pretty much any other developed
nation in the world. That might also explain why life expectancy in
America trails far behind most OECD countries.

The United States also has the unique distinction of having one
of the highest rates of income inequality in the world, on par with
such global powerhouses as Cameroon, Madagascar, Rwanda, Uganda,
and Ecuador. It has the fourth worst child poverty rate and trails
only Mexico and Turkey in overall poverty rate among OECD
countries. And when it comes to infant mortality, the U.S. rate is
one of the worst in the developing world.

But not to fear, the United States still maintains some
advantages. For example, it is one of the fattest countries in the
world, with approximately one-third of the country considered obese
(including one out of every six children). In addition, the United
States has, by far, the largest prison population — more than
China, Iran, and Cuba — one of the highest homicide rates in the
world, and one of the highest rates of death from child abuse and
neglect.

This steady stream of woe is certainly dispiriting, but the more
optimistic might be inclined to respond that America had has
problems before and has always found a way to right the ship.
Certainly, this is a legitimate counter-point. The problem is that
anyone looking to Washington today would have a hard time imagining
that Congress and the White House will lock arms anytime soon and
fix these various national crises. And this political gridlock is
the biggest reason to be concerned about decline.

Perhaps at no point in recent American history has the country’s
politics been less capable of dealing with serious challenges.
Certainly, when one party basically rejects any role for the
federal government in providing health care, improving educational
opportunity, or strengthening the social safety net, the chances
for compromise appear even slimmer.

As Harold Pollack, a professor at the University of Chicago,
said to me, “What future president, witnessing Barack Obama’s
difficulties over health reform, will make an equivalent political
investment regarding climate change or another great national
concern? I fear that we are headed for a kind of legislative
Vietnam syndrome in which our leaders will shy away from the large
things that must be done.”

Obama argued in his recent State of the Union speech that
“innovation is what America has always been about.” Indeed, the
recent report of the Information Technology and Innovation
Foundation found that the United States is currently sixth in
global innovation and competitiveness. Good news, right? Not so
fast. The report also found that the country is dead last in
“improvement in international competitiveness and innovation
capacity over the last decade.” Bottom line: dysfunction reaps an
ill reward.

Kagan’s retort to this argument is that “on many big issues
throughout their history, Americans have found a way of achieving
and implementing a national consensus.” True, but the philosophical
divide between the two parties over the role of government offers
little reason for optimism that such a new national consensus is in
the offing.

The fact is, discussions of U.S. power that only take into
account America’s global standing in relation to other countries
are not only misleading — they’re largely irrelevant. Sure,
America has a bigger and better military than practically every
other nation combined. Sure, it has a better global image than
Russia or China or any other potential global rival. Sure,
America’s economy is bigger than any other nation’s (though this is
a debatable point). But if its students aren’t being well educated,
if huge disparities exist in technological adoption, if social
mobility remains stagnant if the country’s health care system is
poorly functioning, and if its government is hopelessly gridlocked,
what good is all the global power that transfixes Kagan and others?
The even more urgent question is how the United States can hope to
maintain that power if it’s built on a shaky foundation at
home.

Rather than talking about how great America is on the campaign
trail — which surely both candidates will do throughout the 2012
election — the country would likely be better off having an honest
discussion on the immense challenges that it faces at home. Even
more helpful would be a recognition that education, health care,
infrastructure, and overall national economic competitiveness is as
essential to U.S. national security as, for example, the number of
ships in the U.S. Navy. All this talk about the myth of American
decline might make Americans feel better about themselves for a
while, but it is a distraction from the real and declining elements
of U.S. power.