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经济学人美国霸权的未来系列二之尼尔·弗格森

时间: 2021-10-01 09:41:05 | 作者：天涯梅客 | 来源: 喜蛋文章网 | 编辑: admin | 阅读: 92次

经济学人美国霸权的未来系列二之尼尔·弗格森

Niall Ferguson on why the end of America’s empire won’t be peaceful

As it leaves Afghanistan in chaos, America’s decline mirrors Britain’s a century ago. It may also invite wider conflict, warns a historian

“THE MULTITUDES remained plunged in ignorance… and their leaders, seeking their votes, did not dare to undeceive them.” So wrote Winston Churchill of the victors of the first world war in “The Gathering Storm.” He bitterly recalled a “refusal to face unpleasant facts, desire for popularity and electoral success irrespective of the vital interests of the state.” American readers watching their government’s ignominious departure from Afghanistan, and listening to President Joe Biden’s strained effort to justify the unholy mess he has made, may find at least some of Churchill’s critique of interwar Britain uncomfortably familiar.

Britain’s state of mind was the product of a combination of national exhaustion and “imperial overstretch”, to borrow a phrase from Paul Kennedy, a historian at Yale. Since 1914, the nation had endured war, financial crisis and in 1918-19 a terrible pandemic, the Spanish influenza. The economic landscape was overshadowed by a mountain of debt. Though the country remained the issuer of the dominant global currency, it was no longer unrivalled in that role. A highly unequal society inspired politicians on the left to demand redistribution if not outright socialism. A significant proportion of the intelligentsia went further, embracing communism or fascism.

Meanwhile the established political class preferred to ignore a deteriorating international situation. Britain’s global dominance was menaced in Europe, in Asia and in the Middle East. The system of collective security—based on the League of Nations, which had been established in 1920 as part of the post-war peace settlement—was crumbling, leaving only the possibility of alliances to supplement thinly spread imperial resources. The result was a disastrous failure to acknowledge the scale of the totalitarian threat and to amass the means to deter the dictators.

Does Britain’s experience help us understand the future of American power? Americans prefer to draw lessons from the United States’ history, but it may be more illuminating to compare the country to its predecessor as an Anglophone global hegemon, for America today in many ways resembles Britain in the interwar period.

Like all such historical analogies, this one is not perfect. The vast amalgam of colonies and other dependencies that Britain ruled over in the 1930s has no real American counterpart today. This allows Americans to reassure themselves that they do not have an empire, even when withdrawing their soldiers and civilians from Afghanistan after a 20-year presence.

Despite its high covid-19 mortality, America is not recovering from the kind of trauma that Britain experienced in the first world war, when huge numbers of young men were slaughtered (nearly 900,000 died, some 6% of males aged 15 to 49 died, to say nothing of 1.7m wounded). Nor is America facing as clear and present a threat as Nazi Germany posed to Britain. Still, the resemblances are striking, and go beyond the failure of both countries to impose order on Afghanistan. (“It is clear,” noted The Economist in February 1930, after “premature” modernising reforms had triggered a revolt, “that Afghanistan will have none of the West”.) And the implications for the future of American power are unnerving.

So many books and articles predicting American decline have been written in recent decades that “declinism” has become a cliché. But Britain’s experience between the 1930s and the 1950s is a reminder that there are worse fates than gentle, gradual decline.

Follow the moneyStart with the mountains of debt. Britain’s public debt after the first world war rose from 109% of GDP in 1918 to just under 200% in 1934. America’s federal debt is different in important ways, but it is comparable in magnitude. It will reach nearly 110% of GDP this year, even higher than its previous peak in the immediate aftermath of the second world war. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it could exceed 200% by 2051.

An important difference between the United States today and the United Kingdom roughly a century ago is that the average maturity of American federal debt is quite short (65 months), whereas more than 40% of the British public debt took the form of perpetual bonds or annuities. This means that the American debt today is a great deal more sensitive to moves in interest rates than Britain’s was.

Another key difference is the great shift there has been in fiscal and monetary theories, thanks in large measure to John Maynard Keynes’s critique of Britain’s interwar policies.

Britain’s decision in 1925 to return sterling to the gold standard at the overvalued pre-war price condemned Britain to eight years of deflation. The increased power of trade unions meant that wage cuts lagged behind price cuts during the depression. This contributed to job losses. At the nadir in 1932, the unemployment rate was 15%. Yet Britain’s depression was mild, not least because abandoning the gold standard in 1931 allowed the easing of monetary policy. Falling real interest rates meant a decline in the burden of debt service, creating new fiscal room for manoeuvre.

Such a reduction in debt-servicing costs seems unlikely for America in the coming years. Economists led by the former treasury secretary, Lawrence Summers, have predicted inflationary dangers from the current fiscal and monetary policies. Where British real interest rates generally declined in the 1930s, in America they are projected to turn positive from 2027 and rise steadily to hit 2.5% by mid-century. True, forecasts of rising rates have been wrong before, and the Federal Reserve is in no hurry to tighten monetary policy. But if rates do rise, America’s debt will cost more to service, squeezing other parts of the federal budget, especially discretionary expenditures such as defence.

That brings us to the crux of the matter. Churchill’s great preoccupation in the 1930s was that the government was procrastinating—the underlying rationale of its policy of appeasement—rather than energetically rearming in response to the increasingly aggressive behaviour of Hitler, Mussolini and the militarist government of imperial Japan. A key argument of the appeasers was that fiscal and economic constraints—not least the high cost of running an empire that extended from Fiji to Gambia to Guiana to Vancouver—made more rapid rearmament impossible.

It may seem fanciful to suggest that America faces comparable threats today—not only from China, but also from Russia, Iran and North Korea. Yet the mere fact that it seems fanciful illustrates the point. The majority of Americans, like the majority of Britons between the wars, simply do not want to contemplate the possibility of a major war against one or more authoritarian regimes, coming on top of the country’s already extensive military commitments. That is why the projected decline of American defence spending as a share of GDP, from 3.4% in 2021 to 2.5% in 2031, will cause consternation only to Churchillian types. And they can expect the same hostile reception—the same accusations of war-mongering—that Churchill had to endure.

Power is relativeA relative decline compared with other countries is another point of resemblance. According to estimates by the economic historian Angus Maddison, the British economy by the 1930s had been overtaken in terms of output by not only America’s (as early as 1872), but also Germany’s (in 1898 and again, after the disastrous years of war, hyperinflation and slump, in 1935) and the Soviet Union (in 1930). True, the British Empire as a whole had a bigger economy than the United Kingdom, especially if the Dominions are included—perhaps twice as large. But the American economy was even larger and remained more than double the size of Britain’s, despite the more severe impact of the Great Depression in the United States.

America today has a similar problem of relative decline in economic output. On the basis of purchasing-power parity, which allows for the lower prices of many Chinese domestic goods, the GDP of China caught up with that of America in 2021. On a current-dollar basis, the American economy is still bigger, but the gap is projected to narrow. This year China’s current-dollar GDP will be around 75% of America’s. By 2026 it will be 89%.

It is no secret that China poses a bigger economic challenge than the Soviet Union once did, since the latter’s economy was never more than 44% the size of America’s during the cold war. Nor is it classified information that China is seeking to catch up with America in many technological domains with national-security applications, from artificial intelligence to quantum computing. And the ambitions of China’s leader, Xi Jinping, are also well known—along with his renewal of the Chinese Communist Party’s ideological hostility to individual freedom, the rule of law and democracy.

American sentiment towards the Chinese government has markedly soured in the past five years. But that does not seem to be translating into public interest in actively countering the Chinese military threat. If Beijing invades Taiwan, most Americans will probably echo the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, who notoriously described the German bid to carve up Czechoslovakia in 1938 as “a quarrel in a far away country, between people of whom we know nothing”.

A crucial source of British weakness between the wars was the revolt of the intelligentsia against the Empire and more generally against traditional British values. Churchill recalled with disgust the Oxford Union debate in 1933 that had carried the motion, “This House refuses to fight for King and country.” As he noted: “It was easy to laugh off such an episode in England, but in Germany, in Russia, in Italy, in Japan, the idea of a decadent, degenerate Britain took deep root and swayed many calculations.” This of course is precisely how China’s new breed of “wolf-warrior” diplomats and nationalist intellectuals regard America today.

Nazis, fascists and communists alike had good reason to think the British were succumbing to self-hatred. “I did not even know that the British Empire is dying,” George Orwell wrote of his time as a colonial policeman in his essay “Shooting an Elephant.” Not many intellectuals attained Orwell’s insight that Britain’s was nevertheless “a great deal better than the younger empires that [were] going to supplant it.” Many—unlike Orwell—embraced Soviet communism, with disastrous results for Western intelligence. Meanwhile, a shocking number of members of the aristocratic social elite were attracted to Hitler. Even readers of the Daily Express were more inclined to make fun of the Empire than to celebrate it. “Big White Carstairs” in the Beachcomber column was an even more absurd caricature of the colonial type than David Low’s Colonel Blimp.

The end of empiresAmerica’s empire may not manifest itself as dominions, colonies and protectorates, but the perception of international dominance, and the costs associated with overstretch, are similar. Both left and right in America now routinely ridicule or revile the idea of an imperial project. “The American Empire is falling apart,” gloats Tom Engelhardt, a journalist in The Nation. On the right, the economist Tyler Cowen sardonically imagines “what the fall of the American empire could look like.” At the same time as Cornel West, the progressive African-American philosopher, sees “Black Lives Matter and the fight against US empire [as] one and the same”, two pro-Trump Republicans, Ryan James Girdusky and Harlan Hill, call the pandemic “the latest example of how the American empire has no clothes.”

The right still defends the traditional account of the republic’s founding—as a rejection of British colonial rule—against the "woke” left’s attempts to recast American history as primarily a tale of slavery and then segregation. But few on either side of the political spectrum pine for the era of global hegemony that began in the 1940s.

In short, like Britons in the 1930s, Americans in the 2021s have fallen out of love with empire—a fact that Chinese observers have noticed and relish. Yet the empire remains. Granted, America has few true colonies: Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands in the Caribbean, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands in the north Pacific, and American Samoa in the south Pacific. By British standards, it is a paltry list of possessions. Nevertheless, the American military presence is almost as ubiquitous as Britain’s once was. American armed-forces personnel are to be found in more than 150 countries. The total number deployed beyond the borders of the 50 states is around 200,000.

The acquisition of such extensive global responsibilities was not easy. But it is a delusion to believe that shedding them will be easier. This is the lesson of British history to which Americans need to pay more heed. President Joe Biden’s ill-advised decision for a “final withdrawal” from Afghanistan was just the latest signal by an American president that the country wants to reduce its overseas commitments. Barack Obama began the process by exiting Iraq too hastily and announcing in 2021 that “America is not the world's policeman.” Donald Trump’s “America First” doctrine was just a populist version of the same impulse: he too itched to get out of Afghanistan and to substitute tariffs for counterinsurgency.

The problem, as this month’s debacle in Afghanistan perfectly illustrates, is that the retreat from global dominance is rarely a peaceful process. However you phrase it, announcing you are giving up on your longest war is an admission of defeat, and not only in the eyes of the Taliban. China, which shares a short stretch of its vast land border with Afghanistan, is also closely watching. So is Russia, with zloradstvo—Russian for Schadenfreude. It was no mere coincidence that Russia intervened militarily in both Ukraine and Syria just months after Obama’s renunciation of global policing.

Mr Biden’s belief (expressed to Richard Holbrooke in 2021) that one could exit Afghanistan as Richard Nixon exited Vietnam and “get away with it” is bad history: America’s humiliation in Indochina did have consequences. It emboldened the Soviet Union and its allies to make trouble elsewhere—in southern and eastern Africa, in Central America and in Afghanistan, which it invaded in 1979. Reenacting the fall of Saigon in Kabul will have comparable adverse effects.

The end of American empire was not difficult to foresee, even at the height of neoconservative hubris following the invasion of Iraq in 2003. There were at least four fundamental weaknesses of America’s global position at that time, as I first argued in “Colossus: The Rise and Fall of America’s Empire” (Penguin, 2004). They are a manpower deficit (few Americans have any desire to spend long periods of time in places like Afghanistan and Iraq); a fiscal deficit (see above); an attention deficit (the electorate’s tendency to lose interest in any large-scale intervention after roughly four years); and a history deficit (the reluctance of policymakers to learn lessons from their predecessors, much less from other countries).

These were never deficits of British imperialism. One other difference—in many ways more profound than the fiscal deficit—is the negative net international investment position (NIIP) of the United States, which is just under -70% of GDP. A negative NIIP essentially means that foreign ownership of American assets exceeds American ownership of foreign assets. By contrast, Britain still had a hugely positive NIIP between the wars, despite the amounts of overseas assets that had been liquidated to finance the first world war. From 1922 until 1936 it was consistently above 100% of GDP. By 1947 it was down to 3%.

Selling off the remaining imperial silver (to be precise, obliging British investors to sell overseas assets and hand over the dollars) was one of the ways Britain paid for the second world war. America, the great debtor empire, does not have an equivalent nest-egg. It can afford to pay the cost of maintaining its dominant position in the world only by selling yet more of its public debt to foreigners. That is a precarious basis for superpower status.

Facing new stormsChurchill’s argument in “The Gathering Storm” was not that the rise of Germany, Italy and Japan was an unstoppable process, condemning Britain to decline. On the contrary, he insisted that war could have been avoided if the Western democracies had taken more decisive action earlier in the 1930s. When President Franklin Roosevelt asked him what the war should be called, Churchill “at once” replied: “The Unnecessary War.”

In the same way, there is nothing inexorable about China’s rise, much less Russia’s, while all the lesser countries aligned with them are economic basket cases, from North Korea to Venezuela. China’s population is ageing even faster than anticipated; its workforce is shrinking. Sky-high private-sector debt is weighing on growth. Its mishandling of the initial outbreak of covid-19 has greatly harmed its international standing. It also risks becoming the villain of the climate crisis, as it cannot easily kick the habit of burning coal to power its industry.

And yet it is all too easy to see a sequence of events unfolding that could lead to another unnecessary war, most probably over Taiwan, which Mr Xi covets and which America is (ambiguously) committed to defend against invasion—a commitment that increasingly lacks credibility as the balance of military power shifts in East Asia. (The growing vulnerability of American aircraft carriers to Chinese anti-ship ballistic missiles such as the DF-21D is just one problem to which the Pentagon lacks a good solution.)

If American deterrence fails and China gambles on a coup de main, the United States will face the grim choice between fighting a long, hard war—as Britain did in 1914 and 1939—or folding, as happened over Suez in 1956.

Churchill said that he wrote “The Gathering Storm” to show:how the malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous; how the structure and habits of democratic States, unless they are welded into larger organisms, lack those elements of persistence and conviction which can alone give security to humble masses; how, even in matters of self-preservation … the counsels of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger … [how] the middle course adopted from desires for safety and a quiet life may be found to lead direct to the bull’s-eye of disaster.He concluded the volume with one of his many pithy maxims: “Facts are better than dreams.” American leaders in recent years have become over-fond of dreams, from the “full spectrum dominance” fantasy of the neoconservatives under George W. Bush to the dark nightmare of American “carnage” conjured up by Donald Trump. As another global storm gathers, it may be time to face the fact that Churchill understood only too well: the end of empire is seldom, if ever, a painless process._____________Niall Ferguson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and managing director of Greenmantle, a political-economic advisory firm. His latest book is “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe” (Allen Lane, 2021).

source：https://www.economist.com/by-invitation

尼尔·弗格森：如果让丘吉尔来领导，今天的美国能避免衰落吗？

当美国在一片混乱中从阿富汗撤离时，它的衰落令人回想起一个世纪前英国的衰落。一位历史学家警告说，这也可能导致更大范围的冲突。

“许多人仍然沉浸在无知之中……而他们的领导人为了获取选票，不敢点醒他们。”在《集结风暴》（即丘吉尔的《第二次世界大战回忆录》的第一卷）一书中，丘吉尔就是这样描述第一次世界大战的胜利者的。他痛苦地回忆到：“拒绝面对令人不愉快的问题，渴求人民的拥护和选举的胜利，而不顾国家的重大利益。”美国读者看着他们的政府可耻地离开阿富汗，听着拜登总统紧张而努力地为他所造成的不光彩的混乱而辩护，可能会发现丘吉尔对战时英国的批评中，至少有一些是令他们心里不舒服却感到熟悉的。

借用耶鲁大学的历史学家保罗·肯尼迪的一句话，英国的精神状态是整个国家的疲惫和“帝国过度扩张”的产物。自1914年以来，英国经历了战争和金融危机，并在1918到1919年经历了可怕的大流行病——西班牙流感。经济被堆积如山的债务压得喘不过气来。尽管英国仍然是全球主要货币的发行国，但在货币方面，它已经不再是无可匹敌的角色。这样一个高度不平等的社会促使左派政治家要求即使不实行彻底的社会主义，也要进行社会财富和权力的重新分配。相当一部分知识分子在这方面走得更远，他们选择拥护共产主义或法西斯主义。

与此同时，业已形成的统治阶层倾向于忽略不断恶化的国际形势。英国的全球主导地位在欧洲、亚洲和中东都受到了威胁。集体安全体系——建立在国际联盟的基础上，它是在1920年作为战后和平解决方案的一部分而成立的——正在崩溃，只留下了一个松散的联盟来勉强补充分散的帝国资源。但结果却是灾难性的失败，既没有认识到极权主义威胁的规模之大，也没有积累起威慑独裁者的手段。

英国的教训是否有助于我们理解美国权力的未来？美国人更喜欢从美国自己的历史中吸取教训，但将美国与上一任英语国家的全球霸主进行对比，或许可以带来更多启发，因为今天的美国与战时的英国在很多方面都很相似。

同任何历史类比一样，这个类比也有缺陷。英国在20世纪30年代统治了广阔的殖民地和其他附属国，今天的美国却没有对等的统治区域。这一点使得美国人在自我认知上认为美国并非一个帝国，即使他们的士兵和公民在阿富汗驻扎了20年才撤退的时候，他们依旧如此认为。

尽管美国的新冠病毒死亡率很高，但也并没有严重到英国在第一次世界大战中所经历的那种创伤的程度，当时英国有大量的年轻人被屠杀（近90万人死亡，在15至49岁的男性中占了大约6%，更不用说还有170万伤员）。美国面临的威胁也不像纳粹德国对英国造成的威胁那样明显而紧迫。不过，这些相似之处还是很惊人的，而且这两个国家在阿富汗强行建立秩序的尝试都失败了。早在1930年2月，在“过早的”现代化改革引发了一场叛乱之后，《经济学人》杂志指出：“很明显，阿富汗不会采用西方的东西。”而这对美国未来的影响令人感到不安。

近几十年来，预测美国衰落的书和文章太多了，以至于“衰落主义”已经成为一种陈词滥调。但英国在20世纪30年代和50年代之间的经历提醒我们，还有比温和的、渐进式的衰退更糟糕的命运。

以金钱为导向

从堆积如山的债务开始。第一次世界大战后，英国的公共债务从1918年占GDP的109%上升到1934年略低于200%。而美国的联邦债务同英国有所不同，但在规模上是可以比较的。今年它将达到国内生产总值的近110%，甚至高于第二次世界大战后不久的前一个高峰。国会预算办公室估计，到2051年它可能超过200%。

当今的美国与大约一个世纪前的英国有一个重要区别，美国联邦债务的平均期限相当短（65个月），而英国超过40%的公共债务采取的是永久债券或年金的形式。这意味着，今天的美国债务对利率的变化要比当初的英国敏感得多。

另一个关键区别是财政和货币理论的巨大转变，这在很大程度上是因为凯恩斯对英国战时政策的批评。

1925年，英国决定以战前过高的价格将英镑回归金本位，这使英国陷入了长达八年的通货紧缩。工会权力的增加意味着在大萧条期间，工资的削减落后于物价的削减，这导致了就业机会的减少。在1932年的低谷期，失业率为15%。然而，英国的萧条并不严重，这主要是因为英国在1931年放弃了金本位制，使得货币政策得以放宽。实际利率的下降意味着偿债负担的减轻，为英国财政创造了新的回旋余地。

在未来几年里，美国似乎不太可能出现这种偿债成本的下降。以美国前任财政部长劳伦斯·萨默斯为首的经济学家预测，当前的财政和货币政策会有导致通货膨胀的危险。英国的实际利率在20世纪30年代普遍下降，而美国的实际利率预计将从2027年开始转为正数，并稳步上升，到本世纪中期达到2.5%。诚然，对利率上升的预测以前是错误的，而且美联储不急于收紧货币政策。但是，如果利率真的上升，美国的债务将需要更多的成本来偿还，挤压联邦预算的其他部分，特别是国防等可自由支配的支出。

这就把问题的关键摆在了我们面前。丘吉尔在20世纪30年代最关心的问题是，政府在拖延时间——这是他的绥靖政策的基本原理——而不是积极地重新武装军队，以应对希特勒、墨索里尼和日本帝国主义政府越来越多的侵略行为。绥靖主义者的一个关键论点是，财政和经济方面的限制——特别是管理一个覆盖斐济、冈比亚、圭亚那、温哥华的帝国的高额成本——使得快速的重新武装变得不再可能。

说美国今天面临着类似的威胁——不仅是来自zg，还有来自俄罗斯、伊朗和朝鲜的威胁——这可能显得有些异想天开。然而，仅仅是这一事实，就说明了问题所在。大多数美国人，就像两战期间的大多数英国人一样，根本不想考虑在国家已有的大规模军事投入之外，还要对一个或多个政权发动一场重大战争。这就是为什么预计美国国防开支占国内生产总值的比例将从2021年的3.4%下降到2031年的2.5%，而这只会引起丘吉尔主义者的惊愕。他们也将会经历相同的敌意和指责——同当年谴责丘吉尔在煽动战争一样。

力量是相对的

美国与其他国家相比的相对衰退，是和当初的英国的又一个相似点。经济史学家安格斯·麦迪逊估计，到20世纪30年代，英国经济产值不仅被美国（早在1872年）超越，而且还被德国（第一次在1898年，在经历了灾难性的战争、恶性通货膨胀和不景气的年代后，于1935年再次被超越）和苏联（1930年）超越。诚然，大英帝国作为一个整体，其经济规模比英国大，特别是如果把各殖民地包括在内的话，也许是其两倍大。但美国的经济规模更大，尽管大萧条对美国的影响更严重，美国的经济体量仍然是英国的两倍多。

今天的美国也面临着类似的经济产值相对下降的问题。按照购买力平价法，考虑到许多中国国内商品的价格更低，中国GDP在2021年赶上了美国。按当前美元计算，美国经济体量仍然更大，但预计两国的差距将会缩小。今年，中国的美元时值GDP会是美国的75%左右，而到2026年，则将达到89%。

zg给美国带来的经济挑战比苏联曾经带来的更大，这不是什么秘密，因为苏联的经济规模在冷战期间从未超过美国的44%。在许多运用于国家安全应用的技术领域，从人工智能到量子计算，zg正在努力追赶美国，这也不是什么机密消息了。zg领导人的雄心壮志也是众所周知的。

这五年来，美国对中国政府的好感明显变淡。即便如此，公众对于应对来自中国的军事威胁也并没有多大的热情。如果dalu收呆湾，大多数美国人可能会与英国首相内维尔·张伯伦的观点一致，他曾臭名昭著地将德国在1938年分割捷克斯洛伐克的行动描述为“遥远国家的争吵，而我们对争吵的双方都一无所知”。

在两次大战之间，英国态度软弱的一个关键原因是知识分子对帝国的反抗，以及更普遍的对英国传统价值观的反抗。丘吉尔厌恶地回忆起1933年牛津大学辩论社在辩论中提出的动议：“我们拒绝为国王和国家而战”。他指出：“在英国，人们一般会对这样一个插曲一笑置之，但在德国、俄罗斯、意大利和日本，他们会有英国已经变得腐朽堕落了的根深蒂固的想法，这种想法也动摇了许多人的盘算。”当然，这也正是如今zg新一代“战狼”外交官和民族主义知识分子对美国的看法。

纳粹、法西斯和共产主义者都认为英国人对自己充满了憎恶。“我甚至不知道大英帝国正在消亡，”乔治·奥威尔在他的文章《猎象记》中记录了他作为殖民地警察的时光。没有多少知识分子能有奥威尔这样的洞见，认为英国仍然是“瘦死的骆驼比马大”。许多人——不像奥威尔——选择了信仰苏联共产主义，给西方国家的情报部门带来了灾难性的后果。与此同时，令人震惊的是，大量上流社会的贵族精英则被希特勒吸引。甚至《每日快报》的读者也乐于取笑而非赞颂大英帝国。

帝国的终结

美利坚帝国不像曾经的大英帝国一样有英联邦自治领、殖民地和受保护国，但它现在所处的国际主导地位，以及过度扩张带来的代价，同大英帝国是相似的。现在美国的左翼和右翼都习惯性地嘲笑或谩骂美帝国主义的计划。《国家》杂志的记者汤姆·恩格尔哈特（Tom Engelhardt）幸灾乐祸地说：“美利坚帝国正在崩溃。”对于右翼来说，经济学家泰勒·考恩（Tyler Cowen）讥讽地想象着“美利坚帝国的衰落会是什么样子”。与此同时，进步的非裔美国哲学家康奈尔·韦斯特（Cornel West）认为“‘黑人的命也是命’同反对美利坚帝国的抗争殊途同归”，还有两位支持特朗普的共和党人瑞安·詹姆斯·吉尔·杜斯基（Ryan James Gir dusky）和哈伦·希尔（Harlan Hill）认为最近的新冠疫情揭露了“美利坚帝国其实穿着皇帝的新装”。

右翼仍然捍卫着共和国建国的传统说法——拒绝英国的殖民统治——与此相反，“觉醒”的左翼则试图将美国历史改写为充斥着奴隶制和种族隔离的血泪史。但政治光谱中的任何一方都没有多少人渴望回到上世纪40年代开始的全球霸权时代。

简而言之，就像20世纪30年代的英国人一样，21世纪20年代的美国人已经不再热衷于帝国主义——zg的观察人士注意到了这一现象，并对此津津乐道。然而，帝国仍然存在。诚然，美国几乎没有多少真正意义上的的殖民地：只有加勒比海的波多黎各和美属维尔京群岛、北太平洋的关岛和北马里亚纳群岛，以及南太平洋的美属萨摩亚。按照英国人的标准，这点殖民地不值一提。然而，美国同曾经的大英帝国一样，军队遍布全球，无处不在。美国的武装部队人员在150多个国家都有部署，驻外军队总人数约为20万人。

承担如此广泛的全球责任并非易事。但是，要想摆脱他们同样不容易。英国人为此吃过苦头，美国人则要吸取他们的教训。拜登决定从阿富汗进行“最后的撤军”是不明智的，说明美国想要减少其在海外所承担的责任。奥巴马曾经也做出了类似的从伊拉克撤退的决定，并于2021年宣布“美国不是世界警察”。特朗普的“美国优先”（American First）原则只是同一种冲动的民粹主义的版本：他太渴望离开阿富汗，并以关税取代“反叛乱”。

本月在阿富汗发生的灾难完美地说明，想要放弃对全球的主导权，这个过程是不太可能和平度过的。不管用何种措辞，宣布放弃这场历时最长的战争就是承认失败，而且不仅仅对塔利班来说是这样的。zg也在密切关注，毕竟zg与阿富汗也有一段狭小的接壤土地。俄罗斯也在幸灾乐祸的作壁上观。就在奥巴马宣布放弃做世界警察的几个月后，俄罗斯立刻就对乌克兰和叙利亚进行了军事干预，这并非巧合。

拜登相信美国可以像之前从越南撤军、摆脱越南这个泥淖一样从阿富汗撤军。越战是段不光彩的历史，美国在印度支那受到的屈辱确实产生了后果。它给苏联及其盟国以可趁之机，在其他地方制造了麻烦——包括非洲南部和东部、中美洲以及于1979年入侵了阿富汗。在喀布尔重演西贡当年的沦陷将产生类似的不良影响。

即便新保守主义在2003年入侵伊拉克后抬头，狂妄自大到了顶峰的时候，美利坚帝国的终结也不难预见。我在《巨人：美利坚帝国的兴衰》一书中首次提出，当时美国的全球地位至少存在四个根本性的弱点：一是人力赤字（很少有美国人愿意在像阿富汗和伊拉克这样的地方长时间工作）；二是财政赤字（见上文）；三是关注度不够（选民在大约四年后就对任何大规模干预失去了兴趣）；四是历史视角的缺失（决策者不愿从前任那里汲取经验教训，更不愿意从其他国家吸取经验教训）。

但是曾经的大英帝国从来没有这些短板。另一个不同之处在于——这比财政赤字要深刻得多——是美国的负国际投资头寸（NIIP），它占GDP的比例是-70 %。负的国际投资头寸本质上意味着外国人对美国资产的所有权超过了美国人对外国资产的所有权。相比之下，在两次世界大战期间，英国尽管有大量的海外资产被清算以资助一战，但它仍然有着庞大的正国际投资头寸。从1922年到1936年，它一直保持在GDP的100%以上。到1947年才下降到3%。

抛售剩余的帝国白银（准确的说，是迫使英国投资者抛售海外资产，交出美元）是英国为二战买单的其中一种方式。但是美国作为一个债务大国，并没有与之对等的储备金。只有通过将更多的公共债务出售给外国人，美国才能负担得起维持其世界霸主地位的成本。这对于维持其超级大国的地位而言实在是太不稳定了。

面临着新的风暴

丘吉尔在《集结风暴》中的论点并不是在借德国、意大利和日本的崛起这一不可阻挡的进程来谴责英国的衰落。相反，他坚持认为，如果西方民主国家在1930年代早些时候采取更果断的行动，战争本来是可以避免的。当富兰克林·罗斯福总统问丘吉尔这场战争应该叫什么时，丘吉尔立刻回答说：“不必要的战争。”

同样的道理，zg的崛起也并非不可阻挡，更不用说俄罗斯了。从朝鲜到委内瑞拉，所有与他们结盟的小国都是经济上的弱国。zg人口老龄化的速度比预期的还要快，劳动力正在萎缩。居高不下的私营部门债务正在拖累经济增长。它也可能在气候危机中首当其冲，因为它没法轻易改掉依赖煤炭来为工业提供动力。

然而，一系列事件的发展又很容易导致另一场不必要的战争，最有可能是在台湾问题上爆发。大陆要统一台湾，而美国模糊地承诺要防御zg大陆——随着东亚地区军事力量平衡的转变，这种承诺越来越缺乏可信度。美国航母越来越难招架zg大陆的东风-21D等反舰弹道导弹，而这还只是美国国防部无法解决的问题之一。

如果美国的威慑失败，大陆发动突然袭击，美国将面临更严峻的选择，要么打一场漫长而艰苦的战争——就像英国在1914年和1939年所做的那样——要么就像1956年苏伊士运河事件那样直接认输。

丘吉尔说他写《集结风暴》是为了表明：

邪恶者的恶意如何因善良者的软弱而愈发猖狂；民主国家的结构和习惯为何——除非与更大的有机体结合在一起——会缺乏为卑微大众提供安全感的毅力和信念；甚至在自我保护的问题上……谨慎和克制的忠告反而会带来致命的危险……以及因为渴望安全和平静的生活而采取的中庸之道可能会直接导向灾难的中心。

他用一句精辟的格言作为这卷书的结束语：“事实胜于幻想。”近年来，美国领导人过度热衷于幻想了，譬如小布什领导下新保守主义者“全面统治”的幻想，还有唐纳德·特朗普想像出的美国“大屠杀”的黑暗噩梦。随着另一场集结风暴的到来，也许是时候面对现实了，丘吉尔看透了这一点：帝国的终结很难不伴随着阵痛。

【尼尔·弗格森是英国历史学家，哈佛大学历史系教授、牛津大学耶稣学院高级研究员、斯坦福大学胡佛研究所高级研究员。】

（本文发表于2021年8月21日英国《经济学人》网站，译者刘思雨）

来源：https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1709928609339776149&wfr=spider&for=pc

文章标题: 经济学人美国霸权的未来系列二之尼尔·弗格森
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文章标签：经济学人（The Economist）  美国历史  美国霸权
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