At different times over the last 200 years, rapid economic growth due to the Industrial Revolution led to new countries emerging as power players on the global stage. In the 19th century, longtime dominant countries like China were vanquished by smaller rising powers like Britain, while in the 20th century others—namely Germany and Russia—were able to overcome devastating losses in World War I to roar back to the world stage as military powers.
Now the emergence of rising powers has stalled, says Michael Beckley, associate professor of political science. In addition, existing powers like Russia and a resurgent China are facing economic and demographic headwinds that limit their abilities to grabs for geopolitical power in the future, raising the odds that they will upset the world stage before they become too weak.
“The era of rising powers led to a couple of world wars and then the Cold War, so one hope is that without these surging powers, demanding their place in the sun and upending existing balances of power, it might be less contentious,” says Beckley, who wrote about the current moment in “The Stagnant Order and the End of Rising Powers” in Foreign Affairs last fall. But it could go either way, he notes.
What sparked your focus on the “stagnant world order”?
It derived directly from my study of the headwinds that are hitting China—economic slowdown, demographic struggles, massive debt, and the rise of global protectionism and trade barriers.
This is not unique to China, but its situation is much worse long-term than for many other major countries. If you look across the richest, most powerful countries, they all have massive debt and shrinking or relatively stagnant populations.
It’s harder for big powers to project military power while they’re facing these economic and demographic headwinds. Looking at military power in the post-Cold War era, it seems like stalemates and forever wars are much more the norm rather than the exception.
It used to be the United States had a monopoly on precision-guided munitions, for example, but now even the Houthis, this ragtag militia in Yemen, has precision-guided missiles and can threaten U.S. aircraft and ships.
How do you define rising powers?
A rising power is one that is growing economically and advancing militarily at a much faster rate than the global average. If there are countries ahead of it, it’s rapidly catching up to them.
Rising powers emerged in conjunction with the Industrial Revolution. It’s always correlated with a huge expansion of the population, because you can support bigger populations and workforces, and then raise huge armies that number in the millions.
The rise of these great powers that have global reach militarily and economically knitted the whole world together into a single arena of global conflict. I think a canonical case was the opium wars between Britain and China in the 1800s. China had been one of the most advanced major empires in the world for centuries, and it just got brought to its knees in those wars by the British.
And the British are just on a tiny island.
Exactly. Britain went from a very peripheral part of Europe, let alone the world, and then ultimately had an empire in the 19th and 20th centuries in which the sun never set.
Why are there no rising powers now?
We’re going through a demographic transition now—as countries get more economically developed, fertility rates plummet and that affects the workforce and military manpower.
During the post-war era in the 20th century, we had young, vibrant populations, but now in many advanced economies, seniors are becoming a huge share of the population. Upwards of a third of the population in the developed world is over the age of 65, and that means lower productivity and higher fiscal strain to take care of older people.
Also, if you’re hoping to be a rising power today, you have to emerge into a world that’s already crowded with developed incumbents, which is very different from when Britain got to the Industrial Revolution first and surged ahead, or Japan doing the same in East Asia.
Most importantly, the established major powers now orchestrate the system to make it harder for others to rise. Global production networks make it more difficult to develop vertically integrated industries—when companies control their supply chain, from production to distribution—that could turn a country into a major global player. It’s a more crowded, difficult environment.
Is there a benefit to not having rising powers?
The era of rising powers led to a couple of world wars and then the Cold War, so one hope is that without these surging powers, demanding their place in the sun and upending existing balances of power, it might be less contentious.
The rising powers in the past were often able to take a defeat and then come back the next generation. Germany was brought to its knees in World War I but reemerged as Nazi Germany just 20 years later. The Soviet Union was demolished in World War II and came back as a superpower. These cases of the phoenix effect happened because growth rates were so high and populations were expanding.
What happens when there’s stagnation on the global scene, with no rising powers?
The negatives are fairly obvious, as some declining powers strike while they still can, before they are too affected by the negative headwinds. We see that in the aggression from Russia, and, I fear, potentially from China. We also see the political polarization in developed democracies that are struggling with sluggish or zero growth, fiscal devastation, and aging populations, which correlates with xenophobia.
The problem in the developing world is the raft of state failure. I worry it’s going to get much worse, because manufacturing is no longer the kind of elevator that countries could take to rise up. The global population is going to start to shrink, and that means consumer markets are going to start to contract. The idea that you can replicate the East Asian model— becoming an export platform and selling into open global markets—no longer looks very viable.
On the other hand, there are studies that suggest older, more fiscally strapped populations are just not as willing to support crazy military adventures abroad—look at Japan and Germany today. So there’s some hope that maybe in the future you won’t have the same kind of vicious, great power politics.
I think there’s perception in America that China is a big threat—but is that in fact the case?
I look at different factors—the scale of a country, its economy, its military, and its power. A country has to convert its resources into usable forms of power and sustain it under stress. There’s no doubt that China has scale—nobody does mass manufacturing better than the Chinese. It obviously has a huge population and a massive military. But to what extent can China translate that into power?
Its big economy is still very brittle in the sense that it is highly dependent on imported oil and on the need to sell into international markets, since its domestic markets are relatively poor per capita. It imports a lot of food and is highly reliant on some imported advanced technologies. Chinese debt is more than 300% of GDP and rising quickly, and the country has very little in the way of a social safety net.
That’s why I think there are reasons to question whether China’s vast economic size really equates to power.
Does that make China less of a military threat?
No. I worry that China is a massive threat, because what we’ve seen time and again is when rising powers start to slow down, they don’t mellow out. They tend to pump more money into strategic industries and the military and then start using the iron fist of state power and military threats to try to batter their way through the increasingly tough economic times.
I think China fits that pattern extremely well. Look at the aggression in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, on the border with India, and its mercantilist economic strategy, which is to basically subsidize its industries, shove those exports down the throats of its trade partners to try to capitalize, and take over market share in global industries.
I think it’s a massive economic and military threat, even though I’m more skeptical of its power if we really come to a major crisis with China.
How does Russia fit in with this model of stagnant powers?
It is way weaker and smaller than the Soviet Union, but right now it’s a massive threat, just because it could escalate to the use of, say, tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine. That can make Russia a very big threat, even if it’s a relatively weak “great power.”
Russia basically went down this peaking-power path about a decade before China. Putin came to power in early 2000, during the global commodities boom, which bankrolled the resurgence of Russia, selling oil, gas, minerals. But the 2008 financial crisis led to a big drop in demand for those commodities, and that dragged down the Russian economy.
Putin came up with the idea for the Eurasian Economic Union, hoping to raise trade barriers around former Soviet states—to wall them off from the rest of the world—while making them lower their trade barriers with Russia.
Ukraine resisted, and that’s how we got to the 2013, 2014 crisis, which led to the initial invasion of Ukraine. Once that conflict started, it fed on itself. Now it seems that Putin has gone all in on the military solution to his problems.
Where do you see the U.S. in the stagnation scenario?
The United States is suffering from a lot of the same headwinds. It has massive debt and sluggish productivity growth. Once the global growth rate slows down, you get this zero-sum game kind of politics, which partially explains the surge of polarization that we see—because you can’t grow your way out of your problems anymore. I think the nastiness of U.S. politics is in part a reflection of many of these economic headwinds.
The United States has incredible structural endowments: geography, resource base, its ability—at least up until now—to attract immigrants and grow its population so it doesn’t have a shrinking population overall. It has political institutions that have generally favored a vibrant private sector, which can lead to growth and avoid catastrophic dictatorial misallocations of resources.
But the U.S. has a major weakness in its difficulty in translating its latent power advantages into mobilized hard assets on the ground—many of the factors that make the U.S. strong also impede its ability to have a coherent foreign policy or mobilize resources for big national goals.
Those weaknesses include a deepening divide between prosperous urban hubs and struggling rural communities, which intensify economic disparities and fuel political polarization.
Its geographic insulation and wealth lead to detachment from global affairs, and at the same time it pursues ambitious interests abroad. That tension results in a hollow internationalism, as the U.S. tries to lead on the world stage, but often lacks the resources to fully achieve its goals, inadvertently fueling costly conflicts.
I think the United States still has tremendous advantages, despite facing these headwinds. But it’s certainly not a foregone conclusion that the political system can handle the fiscal problems, the slack productivity and sluggish growth, and political polarization that results from them.
