9/15 trumps 9/11

Great piece by Gideon Rachman, a regular FT columnist who sometimes stretches too hard to make his overarching points but drives this one home deftly.

The symmetry of imagery here is haunting:  ten years ago the WTC towers collapse (9/11) and two years ago Lehman Brothers collapses (9/15).

The first event reveals, in sequence, the limits of US military power, but the second quickly exposes the relative economic decline of the US vis-a-vis rising China.

On many levels, I find the need to designate forever-marking tipping points to be a bit much.  America discovered the limits of its Leviathan force in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now builds something very different. Is any other great power out there moving further down that curve than we are? Hardly. China chases our Leviathan's tale in a fabulous waste of force structure that does nothing to actually address its strategic shortfall globally (which is growing at a magnificent rate).

Does 9/15 signal the permanent eclipsing of the US by China? Depends on how you view the long-term prospects of each. China's debts are massive, if hidden, and their demographics bottom out this year, as old people stack up from here on out and the economy loses 100m workers by 2050 (we add 35m and remain remarkably young by comparison).  A lot of experts are sticking with their linear projections of China's advance, but I see a large number of very painful and destabilizing (for single-party rule, that is) transformations laying in wait.  America's necessary transformations, by comparison, will be both faster and easier to swallow.

But I do buy, in a general sense, Rachman's notion that the economic restructuring of the world dramatically trumps the downshifting of violence represented by 9/11 (from nation-states to mere non-state actors), so I admire the piece.