Opposed Systems Design

A good reminder that Russia's navy, despite recent chest-thumping, remains in decline.

With the twentieth anniversary of the 1992 Dream Team, we've been seeing a flood of press reports about that assemblage of mind-bending talent.  Gigabytes of text have been written on whether the 2012 incarnation of Team USA could beat the 1992 squad.  But that misses the point.  Arguing over the relative skills of the two American teams overlooks the more important relative balance of power: the shrinking gap between the basketball talent of the US and the rest of the world.

In 1992, the US stood at the start of its unipolar moment, both in terms of its power in the international system and on the court.  The gulf between it and the rest of the world was so great that the 1992 team won by an average of 43.75 points during its eight games during the Olympics.  In 1996, the team won with an average margin of 31.8 points.  The 2000 Olympics saw numerous close games and by 2004 Team USA had lost its hold on the gold, losing to Argentina in the semifinals.  The 2008 team got back to form by winning the gold.  While the American talent varied, the level of international play clearly improved.  By the 2000s, other countries began to have major NBA stars on their teams, like Manu Ginóbili, Peja Stojaković, Vlade Divac, and Pau Gasol.  The net result has been increasingly competitive games.  Given the talent disparity between the 1992 team and the rest of the field, arguably any of the subsequent US teams loaded with NBA talent could have won gold that year. 

All of which has similarities to the larger relative position of the U.S. in the world.  It remains the most powerful military, largest economy and most dynamic large market.  It's relative edge in these areas, however, has shrunk due to the rise of developing economies like China.  This does not mean that China is the new superpower, any more than it means that Argentina became the dominant basketball power by winning the 2004 gold medal.  What it does mean, in both cases, is that the U.S. must be on its game in order to win.  The 1992 team had such a large marginal advantage that even on an off night it could stroll to victory (the team only trailed once, briefly, by two points).  Similarly, the U.S. military had such an advantage that it could defeat Iraq in 1991 in an unprecedentedly brief and (for the coalition) low casualty campaign. The 2012 team, on the other hand, has a smaller margin of error (witness Monday's game against Brazil, which was still a six point game with six minutes to go), just as the U.S. military's margin for error has decreased in a Taiwan scenario, relative to a decade earlier.

In both cases, we should not panic because we are no longer as dominant as we were in 1992.  1992 was an aberration, one of a vanishingly rare moments in history where a country possesses such overwhelming power in so many dimensions that its relative advantage is overwhelming.  Power is always finite, but during these uncommon periods, the dominant power's relative advantage is so great that those limits recede from the front of our minds.  The normal state of affairs in both competitive sports and international relations is a painful awareness of the limits of one's power.  The fact that we're worrying about them again by itself merely indicates that the unipolar moment has ended.  The US survived before that moment and it will afterwards, just as Team USA basketball will probably win the gold again this year.  The games will be closer, however, which is the normal state of the world.  We must not fall into the trap of measuring the US relative to its unipolar moment because that provides a false standard (we can be secure without having such an unprecedented advantage) and an erroneous sense of decline.

Reuel Marc Gerecht's op-ed in the WSJ advocates muscular covert aid to the Syrian rebels to overthrow Assad: "...there is an alternative that could crack the Assad regime: a muscular CIA operation launched from Turkey, Jordan and even Iraqi Kurdistan. The trick for Washington is to go in big, deploying enough case officers and delivering paralyzing weaponry to the rebels as rapidly as possible."

Gerecht rhetorically asks whether the president really wants Assad to fall, positing that the administration is hamstrung by fear of an interventionist slippery slope, re-election concerns, and anxiety over appearing too meddling.  Gerecht argues that this dithering hampers U.S. efforts to topple Assad.

What Gerecht overlooks is the key policy question, which is: what would follow the fall of Assad?  Based upon Obama's handling of Libya, I'd expect this question is prominent in his mind as he looks at Syria.

There are any number of tools that Obama has at his disposal.  Syria has a better air defense system than Libya and the nature of the regime's control is different, but the U.S. military still possesses significant capability advantages.  But these are all tools.  Presumably there are multiple U.S. goals, with the most proximate goal being for the violence to stop and the ultimate goal being for Syria to be a stable democratic state that was no longer aligned with Iran.  The key policy question is what comes after Assad?  It is a hard question and pouring weapons into Syria doesn't magically answer it anymore than dropping thousands of tons of bombs does.

Many national security commentators seem to uncritically use GDP as the metric for economic size.  A recent Economist article, however, surveys a new approach that measures a nation's stock of wealth (as opposed to GDP, which measures a flow - namely the annual rate at which a nation's wealth increases).   Sir Partha Dasgupta of Cambridge University's methodology considers three stocks of assets:

1. “manufactured”, or physical, capital (machinery, buildings, infrastructure and so on)
2. human capital (the population’s education and skills)
3. natural capital (including land, forests, fossil fuels and minerals).

A useful reminder that whatever the challenges that the U.S. economy faces (and it faces many), it continues to remain in an enviable position.

DefenseTech has a post up discussing the prospect for China to catch the U.S. in high-tech weaponry. 

I don't have time to dig into this right now, so I'll just observe that:

• China has selected to preferentially modernize a few key areas of its military over the past twenty years, so a relevant follow-up question is always "can China catch the U.S. in what area of high-tech weaponry?"
• Technology is one facet of military capability (albeit a particularly easy one to focus on since one can observe it and the tech fanboys can fawn over it).  It is much harder to get a good handle on the PLA's skill.  Recent stories such as John Garnaut's piece on PLA corruption raise the possibility that the PLA could be less than the sum of its unevenly shiny parts.

Okay, due to blogsome flaking out I'm moving to a new platform.  I'm still trying to get the old site up and running if only to get seven years worth of posts (!) but right now blogsome isn't answering any emails.