Some pax Americana. The United States even hesitated before sending a tiny force to the one basket-case country in Africa for which it can be said to have any historical responsibility, Liberia. In August three ships, carrying about 4,500 sailors and Marines, were sent to Liberia after repeated requests for American intervention. In all, 225 Americans went ashore, of whom 50 contracted malaria. Two months later the Americans pulled out. This halfhearted African adventure exemplifies the limits of American power.

But how are we to explain these limits?

The election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor of California offers an important clue to the nature of American power. In his most recent film, “Terminator 3,” Schwarzenegger plays an almost indestructible robot programmed to protect a young man who is destined to save the world. In the climactic scene, the Terminator’s operating system becomes corrupted: instead of saving the future savior, he comes close to killing him. As his original program battles this contradictory command, the word abort flashes in big red lights in his head, finally preventing him from doing anything.

In three distinct ways, “T3” is a perfect metaphor for the deficits that constrain American might. Though he has the body of a man half his age, Schwarzenegger himself is, in fact, just four years short of his 60th birthday. His determination to remain forever Mr. Universe typifies the determination of an entire generation never to grow old, though grow old they must—with important economic consequences. As he contemplates the finances of the state of California, the real Arnold Schwarzenegger now confronts just a fraction of the huge economic deficit that is the first real constraint on American power.

The Terminator is also a very American hero for the simple reason that there is only one of him. In this he personifies the chronic manpower shortage that constrains American nation-building. Above all, the Terminator exemplifies the American attention deficit. Less than a year after the invasion of Iraq, a growing number of Americans have already got that five-letter word flashing in their heads: abort.

Let’s first take a closer look at the fabled $10 trillion U.S. economy. The lion’s share of the annual output of the American economy is, in fact, accounted for by private consumption. That share has risen from about 61 percent in 1967 to 70 percent in 2002. As they have consumed more, so Americans have saved ever less: the savings rate averaged about 10 percent between 1973 and 1983; at its low point, in 1999, it touched 1.6 percent, and it has risen only slightly to 3.6 percent in 2003. The only way that the United States has been able to achieve such rapid economic growth in the past decade has been by financing investment with the savings of foreigners. As a result it has gone from being the world’s banker to being the world’s debtor: the country’s net international-investment position was about 12 percent of GDP in 1980; in 2002 it was close to minus 25 percent.


Foreign lending also underwrites the American government. Some 46 percent of the total federal debt in public hands is now held by foreigners, and the bulk of the most recent purchases have been made by Asian central banks, particularly the Japanese and the Chinese. The fact that the financial stability of the United States today depends on the central bank of the People’s Republic of China is not widely known. Yet the significance is great. A debtor power can’t possibly exert the same leverage as a creditor power, and U.S. deficits look likely to grow as the baby-boom generation approaches retirement, because only a minority will have made adequate provision for the idleness and illness of old age. One recent estimate of the implicit “fiscal imbalance” between future spending and tax revenue arrived at the mind-boggling figure of $45 trillion.

That’s not the only troubling U.S. deficit. As has become obvious in Iraq, the United States does not have an especially large pool of combat-effective troops on which it can draw. With about 130,000 personnel required for active service in postwar Iraq, the Pentagon admits that it is at full stretch. Since the end of the cold war, service-personnel cuts have lowered the number of Americans troops abroad to little more than 200,000 at any one time. The rest are, or expect to be, at home. Foreign postings are expected to last six months, or at most a year.

This manpower deficit is compounded by the attention deficit: to be precise, a reluctance on the part of voters to tolerate prolonged commitments of American forces in hostile territory. It took about three years—from 1965 to 1968—and more than 30,000 men killed in action to reduce popular support for the Vietnam War by 25 percent. Between April and September 2003, by contrast, there was a comparably large drop in the popularity of the war in Iraq. Yet in that five-month period, little more than 300 U.S. service personnel lost their lives, a third of whom were the victims of accidents or sickness. Small wonder the Bush administration has felt compelled to promise the swiftest possible transfer of power to the Iraqi people.

Of the three deficits that eat away at American power, this last is the most serious. The economic deficit need not be fatal. Why shouldn’t the Japanese and Chinese fund American consumption indefinitely if Americans are happy to consume their products rather than those produced by American manufacturers? The manpower deficit may also be solvable. Why shouldn’t the United Nations help the United States create a peacekeeping force big enough to provide an effective constabulary for Iraq?

But the attention deficit is the real source of American weakness. For the creation of stable economic, legal and political institutions in a country like Iraq simply cannot be achieved in a 12-month time frame. The shorter the life of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the more difficult it will be to elicit the collaboration of local elites on which all imperial power must ultimately rely. Why would anyone want to collaborate with foreign occupiers who will soon, by their own admission, be gone?

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