Paying Attention to Paul Kennedy

 I was very late to read Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers; about 14 years. It was very much in the air in the late Eighties. He missed the fall of the Soviet Union only because the data he had to work with was wrong.

Engelsberg ideas published Paul Kennedy in conversation on the rise of a new era of great power competition, and it is short, and should be read by everyone shooting off their mouths (like I do) about politics.

I was intrigued by a future chart projection of the share of world total economic output by the year 2050, which would see three very large economies at the top of the pile, namely, the United States, the People’s Republic of China, and, because of a vastly higher rate of growth between the 2000s and 2050, India.

Now those three countries, the US, China and India, would have GDPs approximately six to eight times bigger than any of the ones directly beneath them – the middle-ranking powers such as Japan, Britain, Russia, and France. That would be the rough and ready order of the world in the year 2050. So the world of the nation states and national economies has not altered, just the nation states. And those three, if they wanted to, in total defence spending, would be way above anyone else.

A note of caution, however. In the meantime, epic things have happened in Washington, DC. We have an authoritarian powerbroker and deal maker in the Oval Office, an impulsive, I would say unscrupulous, president who makes things a little bit more complicated. I think we have a calculating leadership in Beijing, just watching to see how far Washington on the one hand and Moscow on the other, might stumble. I think that those leaders in Beijing do believe that they are in or entering this new tripolar world, along with India. It is a world in which they have to move very carefully and slowly, but from which they might be the beneficiaries.

Which makes me think there is a future for this country - unless Trump screws the pooch. Or Putin goes completely wrong with his nukes.

Read the whole interview, it does have interesting things to say about America's future.

And for something far more amusing:

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