When the Imperial Japanese Navy awakened the sleeping giant and filled it with a terrible resolve, they ignored some grim economic realities:
The United States built more merchant shipping in the first four and a half months of 1943 than Japan put in the water in seven years. The other really interesting thing is that there was really no noticeable increase in Japanese merchant vessel building until 1943, by which time it was already way too late to stop the bleeding. Just as with their escort building programs, the Japanese were operating under a tragically flawed national strategy that dictated that the war with the United States would be a short one. Again, the United States had to devote a lot of the merchant shipping it built to replace the losses inflicted by the German U-Boats. But it is no joke to say that we were literally building ships faster than anybody could sink them, and still have enough left over to carry mountains of material to the most God-forsaken, desolate stretches of the Pacific. Those Polynesian cargo cults didn’t start for no reason, and it was American merchant vessels in their thousands which delivered the majority of this seemingly divinely profligate largesse to backwaters which had probably never seen so much as a can opener before.
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In other words, even if it had lost catastrophically at the Battle of Midway, the United States Navy still would have broken even with Japan in carriers and naval air power by about September 1943. Nine months later, by the middle of 1944, the U.S. Navy would have enjoyed a nearly two-to-one superiority in carrier aircraft capacity! Not only that, but with her newer, better aircraft designs, the U.S. Navy would have enjoyed not only a substantial numeric, but also a critical qualitative advantage as well, starting in late 1943. All this is not to say that losing the Battle of Midway would not have been a serious blow to American fortunes! For instance, the war would almost certainly have been protracted if the U.S. had been unable to mount some sort of a credible counter-stroke in the Solomons during the latter half of 1942. Without carrier-based air power of some sort there would not have been much hope of doing so, meaning that we would most likely have lost the Solomons. However, the long-term implications are clear: the United States could afford to make good losses that the Japanese simply could not. Furthermore, this comparison does not reflect the fact that the United States actually slowed down its carrier building program in late 1944, as it became increasingly evident that there was less need for them. Had the U.S. lost at Midway, it seems likely that those additional carriers (3 Midway-class and 6 more Essex-Class CVs, plus the Saipan-class CVLs) would have been brought on line more quickly. In a macro-economic sense, then, the Battle of Midway was really a non-event. There was no need for the U.S. to seek a single, decisive battle which would ‘Doom Japan’ — Japan was doomed by its very decision to make war.
The final evidence of this economic mismatch lies in the development of the Atomic bomb. The Manhattan Project required an enormous commitment on the part of the United States. And as Paul Kennedy states, “…it was the United States alone which at this time had the productive and technological resources not only to wage two large-scale conventional wars but also to invest the scientists, raw materials, and money (about $2 billion) in the development of a new weapon which might or might not work.” In other words, our economy was so dominant that we knew we could afford to fund one of the greatest scientific endeavors in history largely from the ‘leftovers’ of our war effort! Whatever one may think morally or strategically about the usage of nuclear weapons against Japan, it is clear that their very development was a demonstration of unprecedented economic strength.
(Hat tip to Borepatch.)
Perhaps not surprisingly, this dominance continues to this day. Moreover, demographic trends indicate that it will continue for the rest of this century. Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea (both) and China are all either losing population right now or, as in the case of China, will soon be.
In the particular case of China, our putative 21st Century competitor, its power vis à vis the US is right now at its peak. In the next decade or so, its population will begin declining. The US population will not. China will end up with fewer people, and they will be increasing elderly and dependent and decreasingly young and productive. China’s economic growth will slow, and eventually it will begin to decline.
Elderly, unproductive, declining populations cannot compete in any arena with young, productive and increasing populations. That is the situation facing all of our competitors.
Europe’s situation is particularly grim. They are importing very large numbers of unskilled, barely literate people, mostly Muslim, who are intensely anti-European. Most of these immigrants are unproductive and dependent on the native populations. The actual stability of every European state is at risk, and a return of 1930s fascism is a real possibility.
America’s native population is reproducing at somewhat less than replacement, but not as severely as Europe’s, and we are growing because of immigration, mostly Mexican and Central American, but generally from everywhere. One advantage we have is that the Mexicans are already Christian and half-Americanized. They do not have the kind of anti-native culture bias that so many Muslims in Europe have. Unfortunately, as in Europe, they are mostly dependent. They are also self-segregating, and California are conducting wars of ethnic cleansing against blacks, whom they generally despise as competitors.
If current demographic trends continue, there will actually be more Americans than Europeans. This depends in part on a continuing robust reproductive rate in Mexico and Central America. Their reproductive rates are also rapidly falling, so the Latino population surplus of the past is likely to disappear, reducing immigration substantially.
Most news media like to quote the UN’s median population predictions, which suggest a world population rising continuously for the foreseeable future and exceeding 9 billion in a couple of decades. However, this projection assumes that each country’s population reproduces at the replacement rate. The world population increase is due to the predominance of young people in the world.
However, in every country in the world, the reproductive rate is falling rapidly. The low population projection uses these rates, and it predicts a maximum world population of around 8 to 8.5 billion around 2030 and a decline thereafter. Then we (or you, I’ll be dead) enter the great unknown: a dominant USA in a declining world.
“The actual stability of every European state is at risk and a return of 1930s fascism is a real possibility.”
We’d better start bombing them now before it’s too late!
“The actual stability of every European state is at risk and a return of 1930s fascism is a real possibility.”
Fascism, National Socialism, and the like were mainly reactions to the revolutionary left of the time — primarily Communism, but also anarchism to some extent. It could be that the Cultural Marxism today emanating from America is the contemporary equivalent of the revolutionary left of that earlier period. The millions marching in France against homosexual marriage and adoption may be a clue.