To the Editor:

Given our different perspectives, it would be silly of me to carp at Owen Harries’s lengthy discussion of my book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, in his article, “The Rise of American Decline” [May], even where I think he has misunderstood what I wrote. As for the larger issue, time alone will tell whose views of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China—as well as of the United States—will be shown to have been the more accurate.

But I would like to point out an intriguing historical fact. Whenever a debate about “relative decline” has occurred—be it in the Spain of Philip IV, the Britain of Edward VII, or the United States of Ronald Reagan—there has always emerged a group of arch-patriotic, emotional conservatives denying that any decline has taken place. Analogies with previous Great Powers are false, they assert, because one’s own society possesses superior virtues. The only danger, they add grimly, would come from a loss of will power. By contrast, they have paid little attention to economic trends since that would be (to use a phrase) “materialist.”

This fixation with will power is a curious one, since no one at the time doubted the determination and patriotism of the Castilian gentry, or of the British officers who charged forward onto the barbed wire and machine guns of Flanders. Similarly, by 1945 no one could doubt the will power displayed by Waffen-SS divisions, or by Japanese troops in the Pacific war. What they all lacked, at the end of the day, were the necessary material underpinnings to remain a successful Great Power.

It occurs to me that, by emphasizing will power over wisdom, and external “firmness” over internal restructuring, today’s conservatives are in danger of repeating the pattern of history which they seek to deny. Would that not be a curious (and costly) irony?

Paul Kennedy
Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut

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To the Editor:

In his insightful article, Owen Harries effectively skewers one of the most mischievous notions of our times: that American economic power is declining, and destined to continue doing so, and that the lone hope for retarding this descent is to drop our military guard against the Soviet Union. By economic “power” is meant output per capita as well as gross production. A corollary of the proposition is that the might and menace of the Soviet Union have been gravely overestimated. This is the thesis that Mr. Harries has succeeded in exposing, from under a heavy coating of erudition, in Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. In the process he refutes Kennedy’s argument at every point with documented evidence from the Defense Department, economics expert Herbert Stein, and others.

What Mr. Harries fails to point out—though an implication may be there—is that Kennedy’s opus is simply an effort to construct a pretentious foundation of historical inevitability for a refrain familiar on America’s Left for a decade or more. Especially since Ronald Reagan’s initial ascent to the presidency, our domestic radicals and ultra-liberals have amplified their cries that the U.S. has fallen from world economic leadership to the status of a second-class nation, its wealth dissipated by a misperceived need to build the fabulously expensive implements of war. Their favorite remedy for at least retarding the decline is, of course, a major cut in military outlays. To reverse the descent they further recommend a broad-based program of central economic planning, complete (in most versions) with worker-owned and community-owned industrial enterprises.

Literally hundreds of articles, books, and studies have been produced on this theme, some even winning publication by the Joint Economic Committee of Congress. Naturally they differ in details, but not otherwise. The best-known landmarks in the crusade are Greed Is Not Enough (1982) by Robert Lekachman, The Deindustrialization of America (1982) by Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Zero Sum Society (1980) and The Zero-Sum Solution (1985), both by Lester C. Thurow.

One of the most reliable characteristics of all such publications is a determined disregard of inconvenient facts, a trait shared with the book Mr. Harries reviewed. For example, while Thurow lamented in the last-named volume how pitifully the United States trailed its trading partners in productive prowess, the U.S.’s real GNP per capita, when measured by purchasing power parity indexes, exceeded West Germany’s by 33 percent, Japan’s by 41 percent, and Great Britain’s by fully 51 percent. Productivity trends since then suggest that the United States’s lead has widened.

Melville J. Ulmer
Potomac, Maryland

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Owen Harries writes:

Paul Kennedy maintains that, faced with decline, conservatives have a fixation with will power, and he finds this curious. I, in turn, find it curious that this is the only point he makes in response to an article that did not so much as mention will power.

I cannot speak for the Castilian gentry and those who fell at Flanders, but the piece I wrote was not fixated on will or anything else. On the contrary, my main criticism of Mr. Kennedy’s book was, precisely, that it failed to give an adequate account of the plurality of factors that interact in complicated ways to determine the rise and fall of Great Powers.

His attempt to represent the difference between us in terms of an obsession with will power versus a wise appreciation of material strength is so wide of the mark, therefore, as to be baffling.

That having been said, I readily plead guilty to believing that some of the things that the term “will power” brings to mind—high morale, commitment to the high values and institutions of one’s society, leadership capable of uniting and inspiring, a concern to prevail in adversity—are important ingredients in the makeup of a successful nation. They are sources of strength not only in the fighting of wars but in taking the kind of action that prevents wars from occurring. Does Mr. Kennedy really disagree?

My thanks to Melville J. Ulmer for his kind remarks. As for his one criticism, I did not describe The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers as “simply an effort to construct a pretentious foundation of historical inevitability etc.,” because I had no idea what Paul Kennedy’s motives were in writing his book. But clearly many have welcomed it as providing such a foundation

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