The greatest source of instability has come from the attempts of the US to permanently cement its position at the front of the global pecking order. This seemed unassailable at the end of the Second World War. But in the decades that followed the US feared successive challenges from other states which were growing much more rapidly than it was. Russia was seen as an economic (as well as military) threat in the 1 950s, however absurd that might seem today, Japan in the 1980s, and more recently China. The determination of the US state not to risk losing its position explains its massive levels of arms expenditure and the wars it has waged in the Global South.
The scale of the problems it faced first began to hit home in the late 1960s when the US ruling class found it could not afford the escalating cost of trying to achieve all-out victory in Vietnam. The history of US capitalism since has been very much a history of its attempts to restore its old position, amid a world marked by repeated economic crises and generally declining rates of accumulation. Its attempts have involved alternating phases of reducing arms spending as a proportion of total output in an effort to ease economic difficulties (from the late 1 960s to the late 1970s, and from the late 1980s to 2000), and of increasing it in the belief that this could boost US global power and the performance of particular US corporations (in the early and mid-1980s and 2000-8). In all the phases the US state made some gains for the capitals based in it. In none of them were the gains sufficient fully to offset its long-term relative decline.
The collapse of the military challenge from the USSR and the economic challenge from Japan might have been expected to restore the confidence of the US ruling class in its global power in the 1990s. But its strategists had worries about the future. They reasoned that without the fear of the USSR to keep them in line, the European powers were more likely to resist US demands than in the past-as was shown by very hard bargaining at World Trade
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