Professor Paul Kennedy’s book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, looks like having the kind of runaway success in his native Britain that it has been having in his adoptive America. This will not be a review of his book, which I haven’t yet had time to read, but an attempt to draw lessons from his thesis, which has been admirably analyzed in the London press.
What we are talking about, basically, is the overloading and overstretching of great powers, whether in defense of their empires or of their scattered interests, or (since we live in the postLeninist period) in the furtherance of an ideology or resistance to its spread. When I was trying to master the essentials of the dismal science, too many decades ago, I was struck by the observation that expenditure on armaments is a net loss to the economy of any country, in that it does not contribute to its wealth (whatever it might do in preserving that wealth from foreign encroachments). And my tutor wasn’t even a pacifist.
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