Will America compete?

• Position: Excerpts of speech given to the 1991 World Affairs Council of Philadelphia - Chairman's Agenda: Being a Global Leader

Will America Compete?

Paul M. Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers has been called a standard by which future studies of great powers will be measured. The book spent eight months on the best-seller lists when it was published in 1988, clearly captivating a wide-ranging audience hungry for insights into the future of the United States and its place in the world order. Kennedy is the J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History at Yale University and is internationally known for his writings and commentaries on global political, economic, and strategic issues. In the following excerpts from a speech given earlier this year to the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia, he dissects what he terms a three-level set of challenges from abroad that threaten the U.S.'s standing as a great competitive power.

Can America compete? Suppose one answered that question with a simple word, "no." The implications for this society, for its future, for its place in world affairs would be dire.

To put my own position crudely before I come to my subtopic, "The Challenge From Abroad," I would say that the answer cannot be either a straight yes or a straight no. The issue is far more complicated.

Yes, I think we can compete in the traditional areas of military and security issues. This country has, after all, specialized and prepared itself in being No. 1 in the military sphere.

Perhaps we can continue to compete in the more complex economic and technological sphere.

With difficulty, we may be able to compete in the sphere of educational attainment and technical skills that our children will need to have for the future.

The question really is, "What is the future of the U.S. in the world?" The U.S. faces a three-level set of challenges from abroad.

Political Instabilities

The first is one that we are well familiar with. It is a challenge of political instabilities, of foreign dangers and threats to American interests. It is something that has been there since 1776, 1812, or 1917. It is one that after 1945 was seen chiefly in the form of the Soviet Union. We do not know what will come out of the debate and the controversy about the future of the Soviet Union. But whatever emerges, that external threat is less acute than it was, and, by consequence, I think we are looking elsewhere when we talk about the challenges from abroad in terms of security and military issues.

We're looking these days much more toward regional instabilities. Local wars and clashes were always there in Latin America, in the Middle East, in Southeast Asia, but they had been for so long subsumed into the Cold War. When we looked at Egypt 30 or 40 years ago, the issue was whether it was our Egypt or the Soviet's Egypt. Or, whether we were losing China or gaining China. Now the conditions, the regional circumstances for conflicts and antagonisms, are removed from our Cold War interpretation. They are reemerging without Cold War implications. But they are there, and they are not likely to go away. Indeed, some would argue that we may be in for not a world of increasing harmony and goodwill as we go to the end of this century but a world of worsening regional instabilities because of certain broad factors for change that lie behind them.

The greatest of those, it could be argued, is demographic change - i.e., population pressures, particularly prevalent in parts of Central America, in the Muslim Middle East, the...