The graying of great-power politics

The graying of great-power politics

Washington Post

By 

Daniel W. Drezner

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.

May 19, 2021 at 8:00 p.m. GMT+9

Will Russia and China try to exploit domestic divisions under Biden as the U.S. birthrate declines?

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If the 2020s are to be defined by competition among the great powers — I have my doubts, but let’s grant the premise for now — what, exactly, is the basis of that competition? Is it who can age into senility the quickest? A glance at the major powers reveals that none of them is having a lot of babies and all of them are getting old fast.

Russia likes to think of itself as a great power, but its demographic future has been ominous for quite some time. Despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s best, partially successful efforts to incentivize larger families, the birthrate has stagnated yet again. Last year, Russia’s population contracted by half a million people. Even if worst-case scenarios are overstated, Russia faces severe demographic challenges.

China is also aging fast. China’s population just recorded its slowest growth rate in decades, and its migrant worker population fell last year for the first time since data collection began. Chinese efforts to stimulate the birthrate by relaxing its one-child policy in 2016 led to a two-year increase in the birthrate, followed by a precipitous drop-off over the past three years. The New York Times’ Sui-Wee Lee explains that “anxiety over the rising cost of education, housing and health care is now deeply ingrained in society. Many Chinese simply prefer smaller families, and the government’s efforts to boost the birthrate … have largely fizzled.”

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She also wrote the extraordinary sentence, “Beijing’s reluctance to abandon birth restrictions stems in part from the view that not all Chinese people can be trusted to know how many children they should have.” This suggests that the Chinese Communist Party is unlikely to loosen its policy anytime soon.

Comparatively to these two countries, the United States remains in good shape. But “comparatively” is the key word. The United States just experienced its sixth consecutive decline in annual birthrates. The natural experiment of the pandemic revealed that simply cooping up partners together does not yield a baby boom. As the New York Times’ Sabrina Tavernise notes, “Births were down most sharply at the end of the year, when babies conceived at the start of the pandemic would have been born. Births declined by about 8 percent in December compared with the same month the year before, a monthly breakdown of government data showed. December had the largest decline of any month.”

It cannot be stressed enough just how novel a phenomenon this is in world history. Back in 2008, Richard Jackson and Neil Howe noted in “The Graying of the Great Powers” that “throughout history, populations have usually behaved in one of two ways. They have grown steadily, or they have declined fitfully due to disease, starvation, or violence. In the coming decades, we will see something entirely new: large, low-birthrate populations that steadily contract.”

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They predict that “the 2020s promise to be a decade in which breaking population trends come to play an important role in world affairs.” They further suggest that demographic decline will be linked to authoritarianism.

How should this inform U.S. grand strategy? Let me suggest two ways. First, the United States needs to think about adding partners with more demographic sustainability. The demographic pressures hitting the United States are hitting long-standing U.S. allies even harder. Both NATO and Northeast Asian allies have even lower birthrates. European countries are … let’s say “divided” on the question of migrants. Northeast Asian countries are not divided, because they do not want any immigrants.

Nicholas Eberstadt argued back in 2019 that the United States needs to partner with countries that have more robust demographic profiles. This suggests that the Biden administration should continue to befriend India, as well as Indonesia, the Philippines and much of sub-Saharan Africa.

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The second thing the United States needs to do is to keep its immigrants coming and guard against external attempts at dividing U.S. society.

The saving grace for the United States remains immigration. Despite the restrictionist policies of recent years, 1 million immigrants enter the United States every year. According to Pew, “immigrants and their descendants are projected to account for 88% of U.S. population growth through 2065, assuming current immigration trends continue.” Unique among the great powers, the United States excels at accepting migrants from every part of the globe and turning them into Americans.

If I were a strategist in either Moscow or Beijing, I would be super enthusiastic about sowing divisions within U.S. society about influxes of migrants. As Eberstadt noted, “immigration is an intrinsically political phenomenon.” Souring the U.S. public on immigration would be the best way to eliminate America’s demographic advantage.

Five years of Donald Trump hammering this issue again and again and again only pushed the American public to embrace immigration even more. The big question is whether, with Joe Biden now at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Russia and China will try to exploit domestic divisions and whip up anti-immigrant hysteria to new heights.