America will prevail

To read the newspapers, one would believe US power was in steep decline. There are prophets of error, the many critics who believe US foreign policy has gone seriously wrong, especially in Iraq. And there are prophets of weakness, such as Yale historian Paul Kennedy, who wrote even before the end of the Cold War that the US had succumbed to "imperial overstretch". How much more are we overstretched today when we face crises in three or four places across the globe?

I am sceptical about these arguments. The great fact is that the US has become a dominant nation. Even if the US fails in Iraq, there still is no other country that can replace the US in dealing with the world's problems.

Among Western countries, it's not just the US but all the Anglo nations that stand supreme. By Anglo nations I mean Britain and all the countries that were settled chiefly by Britain: the US, but also Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
Not only are these, as a group, the richest of all countries, they are also more or less running the world.

They are doing so directly through their own military and aid policies, and they are the mainstays of international institutions dedicated to peace and development such as the UN and World Bank. While the US is the dominant power, the other Anglo countries are among its closest allies.
More than most others, they have sent forces to hot spots such as Iraq and Afghanistan, and to peacekeeping operations across the globe. We will not always agree about when and where to fight, but the potential to fight is always there, and that is my main focus here. The Anglos have a capacity to project power overseas that no other countries can match.

We have in fact returned to a world order similar to the late Victorian period, at the end of the 19th century. Then, as now, the world economy was globalising and English was its lingua franca. Britain was the strongest single country and the US was just becoming a world power.
Today, the US is first and Britain is second, but remarkably little else has changed. It is as if the 20th century, with its calamitous wars and ideological conflict, has faded away. The countries that challenged the Anglos — first Germany, then Russia, then Japan — have all fallen back. The US's challengers, such as China and India, are likely to fall back as well.

Take economics. That India is taking some jobs away from Americans through the internet has sent a shiver of fear through the US middle class. But to profit from globalisation, a country must have infrastructure and an educated workforce; in short, it must be modern. Globalisation does not itself generate that modernity. The only part of India that competes with the West is a tiny hi-tech sector, not the whole country.

Of all the countries that may lead the world, only the US is modern through and through.
Globalisation is just like communism: it's a facile economic theory that fails to address the deeper problems of poor countries.

Or take a personality I call responsible individualism. Within Europe, Britain was the most individualist large country. This was why it took readily to the market and became rich. The US is even more individualist, a great hive of innovation and competition where people are constantly striving to get ahead. And that has made the US rich and powerful. It is the Anglo countries that reconcile freedom and order most fully.

Non-Western countries, however, are not individualist in this manner. Cultures are not moralistic but conformist. Moral norms exist, but they are not internalised by individuals in the same way. The moral structure is largely outside people, not inside. That means these countries generally have to choose between freedom and order. Regimes are typically authoritarian, which is contrary to economic development. But if they allow greater freedom as necessary for development, they risk political breakdown.

A country with strong collective discipline can develop, as we see in Asia. Japan showed how to do it and the other "Asian tigers" followed. China is trying to do the same. But without individualism they cannot be as innovative as the West. There is never likely to be a Silicon Valley in Japan, let alone China.

Or take good governance. Good governments take responsibility for problems, within and beyond their borders. Anglo regimes tend to accept leadership in dealing with international crises, even when their narrow self-interest is not involved. That is one reason the US so often sends forces overseas. In contrast, other rich countries tend to draw back. Germany and Japan could well do more for world peace. But due to the legacy of World War II, they sharply restrict the use of their forces abroad. They are also less trusted than the Anglos.

Meanwhile, in the non-Western world, good government has almost never arisen. This is the most tragic of all facts about the developing world. With the sole exception of Japan, no leading country outside the West has developed a government that performs at Western levels. Most regimes outside the West are corrupt, weak and ineffective, able to do little more than stay in power. That is a key reason most of these countries stay poor, even in a globalising world, and why few of them have any serious military capacity.

The communist regime in Beijing is the best government China has had, but it is still thoroughly corrupt and lacking in any deep legitimacy. While it has allowed the country to grow impressively in recent decades, there is growing unrest at the grassroots level. That upset has no legitimate outlet in the Chinese system. The people cannot march on Beijing the way they can on London, Paris or Washington. There is a good chance political turmoil will overtake the country, as it has in the past.

In India, the regime is Britain-based and elected, hence more legitimate. But it, too, is strongly corrupt and has lacked the capacity to deal with the country's serious infrastructure and social problems.

So American primacy is deeply rooted and unlikely to be challenged. The US may make mistakes in particular policies, but no other country is likely to displace it as the dominant world power. The US is strong not just in some ways but in all the ways needed to generate wealth and power. That is true of the Anglo countries as a group.

Indeed, American dominance was inevitable virtually from the founding of the country. Immigrants — most of them British — flooded the interior of the US, settling it and turning it into a powerhouse of wealth almost from the beginning. Europeans realised even then that they were facing a juggernaut. The most decisive fact in history may be that Britain defeated the other European powers for the control of the New World. This ensured the US would become not just any country but Britain writ large.

Such a country would be freed from the only important constraint on Britain's power, which was the small size of the country. A nation with British institutions but continental scale would have no equal in the world, and so it has proved.

In the late 19th century, Otto von Bismarck, the redoubtable leader who unified Germany, remarked that the most important fact about world affairs was that the North Americans spoke English. That was true then and it is still true today.

All of the US's potential rivals are weak. Either they lack a native propensity for capitalism, or they lack an individualist society, or they lack good government. Only the US and the other Anglo countries have all these assets. So today they are still running the world and I see no end to that any time soon.

Lawrence Mead is a professor of politics at New York University. This is an extract from the Centre's John Bonython Lecture he delivered in Sydney last night.