Word: overstretch
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...vital link between economic and military power. So what if Kennedy -- never a popularizer -- force-fed readers far more about the Habsburg Empire than most of them ever wanted to know? What mattered was that his thesis (a debt-ridden U.S. was fast running the risk of "imperial overstretch") perfectly captured the edgy mood of the late Reagan years, as opinion leaders began to brood that it was twilight in America...
With Preparing for the Twenty-First Century, Kennedy has fallen victim to the academic version of imperial overstretch. The genesis of the new book, as Kennedy explains, came during a 1988 conference when he was criticized for not addressing "those forces for global change, such as population growth, the ; impact of technology, environmental damage and migration, which were transnational in nature." Perhaps a more modest scholar than Kennedy might have responded that he was, for all his erudition, primarily a historian and not an agronomist, a climatologist or a demographer...
Harvard's Samuel Huntington confirms this Soviet intuition in the current Foreign Affairs. The real cause of the decline of nations, he argues, is not the now fashionable notion of "imperial overstretch" but the phenomenon of creeping inflexibility, what might be called industrial sclerosis -- precisely the loss of that ability to change and adapt...
...course the true basket case is the Soviet Union. (Its decline does not settle the argument between the overstretch and the sclerosis schools, since the Soviets are experts at both.) Gorbachev faces a society whose entire political and economic structure is ossified...
Kennedy proposed a theory of "imperial overstretch," that a nation gains "Great Power" status by using its economic strength to finance a military buildup and undertake a wide array of international obligations. As time goes on, however, such overseas commitments ultimately become a financial drain, eroding the Power's economic base by diverting resources badly needed for domestic investment...