May 30, 2021 | View in Browser
Welcome to The Backstory. Every Sunday, we’ll guide you through the debates driving U.S. foreign policy and international affairs using pieces from the Foreign Affairs archives—some recent, some decades old. The United States’ 2020 census confirmed a historic shift: the population is growing at its slowest-ever rate, apart from the years of the Great Depression. But when it comes to influence in world affairs, demographic trends “have been running to the United States’ advantage for some time,” Nicholas Eberstadt writes. Even now, “the United States will likely retain a demographic edge over other great powers.”
For decades, demographers have combed through the population data of U.S. allies (such as European countries after World War II) and adversaries (such as the Soviet Union during the Cold War) for insights into long-term shifts in the international balance of power. Global disparities in population growth in the late-twentieth century could lead to a “systematically diminished role and status for today’s industrial democracies,” Eberstadt noted in 1991. There would be consequences to aging, Peter Peterson wrote in 1999, including questions about whether the developed world would “be able to maintain its security commitments.” In 2010, Jack Goldstone predicted a more fundamental change to the international order. The reality of population growth would undermine expectations of either continued U.S. hegemony or a shift toward a multipolar system led by China, the United States, and Europe. “Because they ignore current global demographic trends,” Goldstone wrote, “these views will be obsolete within a few decades.”
Demographic change happens slowly and with warning, which makes it possible for a country to mitigate any harmful effects on its economic and political power. As Eberstadt and Hans Groth conceded in 2007, western Europe’s “demographic pressures are undoubtedly heavy,” but its “economic decline is by no means inevitable” if governments respond creatively. Russia ignored its population crisis at its own peril, Ilan Berman wrote in 2015. “Preoccupied with regaining its place on the world stage, Moscow has only peripherally addressed the long-term sources of national decline.” After a decades-long one-child policy, China “will not be caught off-guard” as its population ages, Baozhen Luo contended. “If China continues to meet its demographic challenge head-on, it might yet be able to grow old and rich at the same time.”
Will the United States heed those lessons? To maintain the country’s edge, “American leaders must take steps to slow or reverse the negative demographic trends now eating away at the foundations of U.S. power,” Eberstadt wrote in 2019. And they must look abroad, too, as aging allies lose ground to rising powers. Washington must recognize that “the future of the U.S.-led international order lies with the young and growing democracies of the developing world.”
But demographic pressures may be pushing the American electorate in a different direction, according to Michael Beckley. The global aging trend will preserve the United States as “the world’s dominant economic and military power,” he writes. But it may also make traditional methods of wielding that power less appealing—in the end, demographics are “unlikely to shore up the sagging U.S.-led liberal order.”
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