Just off London’s Jermyn Street, in the shaded comfort of an 18th-century restaurant, several men of a certain age are happily grazing. Some are perched at the bar, peering into their starters; others are relaxing in wood-panelled booths. My interviewee just about blends in.
This is Wiltons, which advertises itself as “noted since 1742 for the finest oysters, fish and game”. My guest is 61-year-old Paul Kennedy, a bestselling historian who is distinguishable from his besuited confreres by his blue cravat, green jacket and a hint of grey stubble.
I am late, out of breath, out of place and consumed by a single issue: is Professor Kennedy’s most famous book, which sold more than two million copies and put the US administration on the backfoot, plain wrong? Since the book in question - The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers - predicted the decline of the US, the rise of China and a glorious future for Japan, it seems an obvious question for these troubled times.
But first I have to apologise, order (Kennedy has had sufficient time to study the lavish menu) and find out a little more about the journey that took him from the industrial world of north-east England to this preserve of the privileged.
Kennedy, whose father worked in the shipyards, was the first in his family to go to university, although he almost gave up his studies to become a racing tipster. Now a professor at Yale, he returns to Newcastle whenever he can.
“I have a deep affection for my native Tyneside, the teachers who taught me and the rather close Catholic Irish immigrant community in which I grew up and was somehow protected from the world for many, many years,” he says. “When I was born, there were 23 shipyards on the river Tyne. Now I think there is one left.”
His voice trails off as he contemplates his birthplace’s industrial decline. It is a theme that resonates deeply with his life’s work - Kennedy argues that a country’s economic and industrial strength largely determines its military power and its place in the world. But it seems odd to discuss such subjects in so wilfully outdated a place as Wiltons.
When we were exchanging e-mails about where to eat, Kennedy said he had walked past the restaurant for years without ever daring to enter. Wiltons, which takes pride in its exclusivity and insists that gentlemen diners wear jackets, made him think of James Bond. Now that we are inside, talking above the raucous laughter from an adjoining table, our feet bumping against each other in our little booth, the restaurant seems more swaggering than suave.
The sommelier arrives, keen to coax us into ordering a particularly grand bottle of white wine.
“Mr Kennedy, I’m so sorry to disturb you, Meursault by the half is finished, but we do have a Montrachet which is a step in the right direction, slightly more buttery, very, very delicious,” he says. “Since it’s a special lunch, I’m sure it will complement it very well.”
I panic. “Are we talking three figures?” I gasp.
“No, we’re not talking three, we’re just under, so we’re OK,” the sommelier replies.
Kennedy seeks to establish some control. He speaks slowly, insistently, with a Tyneside lilt. “I don’t want to skin the FT alive,” he says, and the sommelier retreats, leaving a wine list behind him.
This, I will learn, is the pattern of the lunch. Kennedy gently imposes himself on the conversation, not letting my questions divert him from what he wants to say.
He is best known for his argument that the US’s economic power and military potential have been in relative decline since about 1945. When he outlined the theory in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers in 1988 - a US election year - it made many waves.
Kennedy remembers one day during his summer holidays that year when he picked up a newspaper, hungry for news. Then, “sitting on the back deck of this little place in the Black Forest, I opened it up and there was a report saying: ‘US Secretary of State George Shultz makes six-nation Asian tour to confront Kennedy thesis that America is in decline.’ I fell off my chair,” he recalls.
But, I ask, hasn’t the book been invalidated by all the predictions that he got wrong? In the years after publication, the US grew stronger, not weaker. Japan, which he said would continue its rise to the top, stagnated. The Soviet Union, which he said would not collapse, collapsed. Overall, it seems to me, he exaggerated the importance of manufacturing, magnifying some of his theory’s flaws.
“I wonder if I could answer that in terms of a university professor grading essays,” he replies. “It does seem to me that what I say about China might be as high as an A minus. Possibly Europe is in that area too.”
This one can allow. The book hails China as the best-placed of the great powers, with the most coherent grand strategy, and argues that its economic reforms will translate into more political power. As for Europe, it says that the bloc needs to sort out a common defence strategy and modernise its economy - arguments still made today.
“Japan has to be a C, a C minus or something like that,” he says. “It was very much a synthesis of the existing debate.”
He pauses. “If you think about it, there were three really interesting things that happened on the world scene around 1990 which would take somebody from the year 1985 by surprise.
“One is the mysterious slowing down of Japan. Just comes to a halt. How could you ever think of that? Second is the disintegration of the Soviet Union. And the third is a truly impressive year-on-year annual growth of the US economy.”
So, I ask again, does that mean that he was wrong when he accused the US of imperial overstretch? “Look, I actually believe the country has enormous innate strength,” he says. “You can’t look at the figures for research investment or the flexibility of their capital markets and say it is like the Ottoman Empire, circa 1878. It just isn’t.”
He cuts off the tips of his asparagus starter and dips them in the accompanying sauce, which he declares to be halfway between Bearnaise and custard. Then he goes on.
“But I couldn’t see what was so offensive about the concept of managing decline. That is essentially what Lord Salisbury was doing [as British prime minister at the end of the 19th century] for years. It was strengthening your weak positions, pulling out from your exposed positions, making sure your core interests were protected.”
This is what he believes the US should be doing today - in part by withdrawing from Iraq, a move he predicts will relieve Washington of the same sort of unsustainable commitments that France freed itself from in Algeria and that Britain rid itself of in India and Palestine. He considers the Bush administration has bitten off more than it can chew, and that US supremacy cannot last.
“What if you went theoretically to some analytical political scientist or economist and said, given all that you know about the laws of economics and history and politics, do you think a country with 4.5 per cent of the world’s population can continue generation after generation to have this extraordinary position, especially when the global productive balances are shifting?” he asks.
“It seems a fairly simple question and it is hard to avoid the overall conclusion. So if you ask would I be more benign or nuanced about the US’s prospects if I wrote about it today, my answer would be that I actually envisaged people who could cleverly manage relative decline as opposed to those who blow it.”
The diatribe is over. Some poached halibut has arrived, which we agree is the high point of the meal, in culinary terms at least. But I look around and feel slightly ill at ease.
“By the way, is this the most male restaurant you’ve ever eaten in?” I ask. “Not a single female.”
“I can see a waitress,” Kennedy says, laughing gently into his halibut. “You chose it, I think.”
“No, you did,” I retort, bringing the conversation down a few hundred notches from our earlier discussion of grand strategy. “I gave you a shortlist.”
“Well, remember I’d never been in it.”
At this point, I think it’s best to move on to his new book. Called The Parliament of Man, it is a history of the United Nations and in some ways it is more idealistic than his earlier work.
While Kennedy makes clear his belief that a world system can only work if the big powers work together - as in 1815 or 1945 - he also maintains that the UN should become more democratic. He endorses proposals for a UN tax, for dedicated UN troops in national armies and for giving the world body more access to intelligence.
“It’s the only world organisation we’ve got,” he says as a formidable dessert of summer pudding arrives. “If we tried to create it now, either we couldn’t create anything or we would create something different, but it is our legacy, so what are we going to do? Either scrap it or improve the bloody thing.”
He says that he stopped his work on the book because of the death from cancer of his first wife, his childhood sweetheart. For a while he just absorbed himself in short-term projects. But he married again in 2001 and is now working on a study of Rudyard Kipling.
Although Kipling is often dismissed as an imperialist, Kennedy’s strategic mind is clearly impressed by a man who warned against the rise of the Kaiser’s Germany and wrote enduring poems, stories and novels.
“In 1917 the British government realised that it was going to have a major problem in handling in a tactful way the British war dead across the world,” he says. “So it set up the Imperial War Graves Commission. Kipling was a member, along with the architect Edwin Lutyens, who built the Cenotaph just along the way from here. The two of them went off to design the war memorials, with Kipling taking an enormous amount of interest in it. It was partly because of his son, who died in the war.”
The bill comes. I pay. Kennedy squeezes past me, darts to the gents and is gone.
Some days later, I finally make it down the road and walk by the Cenotaph in Whitehall. A few ragged bunches of flowers droop at its base. The inscription reads: “The Glorious Dead.”
After all the talk and controversy about great powers’ rise and fall, this is what remains: battered flowers and memorials for men who died in wars.
Wiltons, London SW1
1 x crab and avocado salad
1 x asparagus with Bearnaise sauce
2 x poached halibut
2 x summer pudding
1 x espresso
1 x double espresso
1 x bottle of mineral water
1 x half bottle of Pouilly Fume
Total ₤169.88
