Opposed Systems Design

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.