I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
In The Fourth Turning is Here, Neil Howe surveys a variety of theories of long cycles of national and international historical unfolding. He covers George Modelski’s long cycles theory which proposes that world leadership operates in roughly 100-year cycles. Like Howe’s theory of the four turnings, Modelski’s cycles as well include four segments:
Modelski divides this cycle into four quarter-century phases, each succeeding the last in a natural entropic progression. In the first world power phase, both the (social) demand for order and the (political) supply of order is high. In the delegitimizing phase, the demand for order declines. In the deconcentration phase, the supply of order declines. The cycle culminates when the demand for order rises again—leading to an order-producing era of global war. Like Schlesinger, he stresses that the cycle’s regularity is endogenous to the system—Modelski calls this property “closure”—and that its particular timing is regulated by generational change: “It is not difficult to see how a concatenation of four generations might also determine the wave-length of the war-peace cycle.”
Modelski’s theory applied to post world war II history
We can apply this to post World War II history. In Modelski’s framework, the U.S. as the new world leader (taking over from Great Britain) had to provide global services to the world to ensure security, order, and economic stability. This legimitized its position as the world leader.
The world power phase
A new monetary order was established via the Bretton Woods system. This required countries to guarantee convertibility of their currencies into U.S. dollars, while the dollar was backed by gold. The Marshall Plan handled the financial and reconstructive post-war activities. The United Nations was established in 1945 as the primary innovation to ensure political security. Through the Status of Forces Agreement, the U.S. established permanent bases overseas and became the global policeman. In 1947, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) set down rules for global commerce so as to move away from protectionist practices that contributed to the previous global war. Shortly thereafter, in 1949, NATO was created as a permanent peacetime military alliance. In Modelski’s terms, this represented the recruitment and creation of a coalition. In his theory, a world power cannot lead alone. It must organize a coalition to keep the system’s challengers at bay.
The delegitimizing phase
Then the delegitimizing phase began. In this phase the global community begins to question the leader’s authority as they fail to provide effective and trustworthy security. This began to happen in the sixties and seventies. The Vietnam War was a public relations disaster that divided the Western coalition. The war drained the U.S. Treasury and contributed directly to high U.S. inflation. In 1973, OPEC imposed an embargo on the West after its support for Israel in the Yom Kippur war, suggesting that the world hegemon–the United States–no longer had total control over the world order. Nixon ended the gold standard. The United States faced wave after wave of inflation alongside slowed growth.
The deconcentration phase
During the deconcentration phase, the global system shifted from centralized U.S. leadership toward a multipolar distribution of power. While Japan and West Germany initially challenged U.S. economic hegemony in the 1970s and 80s, the late 20th and early 21st centuries saw the rise of China as a dominant manufacturing and technological powerhouse. The U.S. began to engage in imperial overstretch, underscored by prolonged, indecisive conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan that drained resources and diminished global consensus. Simultaneously, a post-Soviet Russia re-emerged as a challenger, seeking to regain its lost sphere of influence. This phase represents the erosion of the United States’ preponderant coalition. The costs of maintaining global order began to exceed the United States’ capacity to provide it.
While Russia acts as a persistent revisionist challenger to the existing security order, China has emerged as the systemic challenger, leveraging its manufacturing dominance and institutional innovations to offer a potential alternative to U.S. leadership.
Global war
So now we have arrived at global war. With the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war and now a region-wide Middle East conflict started by the U.S. and Israel, the battle for hegemony proceeds.
Some pundits, including Ray Dalio, say we’re in a world war already. Last night’s ceasefire announced by the U.S. and Iran was reportedly driven forward by China, flexing its ability to create security around the world. Tankers moving through the Strait by paying fees to Iran are doing so using Chinese currency. The petrodollar system via which the vast majority of oil around the world is paid for in dollars is breaking down. This replaced the gold-backed U.S. dollar with a different system for ensuring that the dollar reigned supreme. But it may have reached the end of its useful life.
China is ambivalent about taking over as the world’s reserve currency. On the one hand, they’d like to accelerate the use of the yuan in global trade settlement and financial markets to reduce vulnerability to dollar sactions. But they’re not looking to take on the inflation that usually comes with serving as the world’s reserve currency and they don’t want their currency to strengthen too much, which would affect their economic power to provide export goods to the entire world.
What might emerge / who might emerge as leader?
Who will be the next world leader? Modelski’s model isn’t predictive but descriptive. It can’t tell us how the current global war will resolve.
Modelski identified past world leaders and long cycles as follows:
- Portugal led from 1492 to 1580 in the Age of Discovery
- The Netherlands took over from 1580 through 1688 beginning with the Eighty Years’ War lasting from 1579 to 1588
- Then the United Kingdom rose to power beginning with the wars of Louis the XIV of France. its first hegemonic period lasted from 1688 to 1792.
- The United Kingdom prevailed again after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars and had its second imperial period from 1792 to 1914
- Finally after World War II the United States ascended and is still in power, but facing delegitimization and deconcentration
It’s hard for those of us who grew up under American hegemony to conceive of a situation where we are no longer the world leader. And yet, world leaders are replaced regularly (but infrequently, compared to the length of a human life).
The United States might become a world leader for a second time, but if so, according to Modelski’s theory, this would happen only after a period of war and breakdown similar to Howe’s idea of the Fourth Turning as a crisis which tears down institutions so that a new order might emerge.
Let me wrap up with more from Howe on Modelski’s theory:
The final major-war phase, writes Modelski, is distinguished not by the mere scale of human destruction, though this will likely be high, but rather by a universal perception that an old global structure of politics has perished and a new one has been born. This global rite of passage is myth-generating in its scope: “The major event clusters of the cycle, the global war campaigns and the celebrated settlements, the ceremonial observances of the great nations, and the passing into obscurity of others, these make up the rituals of world politics. They are the key markers of world time.” The new winner, able to “set the rules,” may now enjoy “a golden age” and become “an object of respect, acclaim, and imitation.”
I believe we are watching this play out in real time. The movement and change is slow but real. Soon the United States will pull out of NATO (in effect, it already has). It is currently departing the Middle East, having brought attacks onto its bases there via its aggression against Iran. The current presidential administration seeks to transform the U.S. from a constitutional republic and representative democracy into what we might call an illiberal democracy, to borrow Orbán’s term. He seeks autocratic powers with sham courts and a weak congress.
So, I imagine there could be another American century, but one which looks very different from the one we have just lived.