In this week’s Newsweek Fareed Zakaria takes a look at the implications of the decline of the United States as the world’s sole superpower:
We are certainly in a trough for America?with Bush in his last years, with the United States mired in Iraq, with hostility toward Washington still high almost everywhere. But if so, we might also be getting a glimpse of what a world without America would look like. It will be free of American domination, but perhaps also free of leadership?a world in which problems fester and the buck is endlessly passed, until problems explode.
(…)
The problem is that this free ride probably can’t last forever. The global system?economic, political, social?is not self-managing. Global economic growth has been a fantastic boon, but it produces stresses and strains that have to be handled. Without some coordination, or first mover?or, dare one say it, leader?such management is more difficult.
The world today bears some resemblance to the 1920s, when a newly globalized economy was booming, and science and technological change were utterly transforming life. (Think of the high-tech of the time?electricity, radio, movies and cars, among other recent inventions.) But with Britain declining and America isolationist, that was truly a world without political direction. Eventually protectionism, nationalism, xenophobia and war engulfed it.
There are, you see, worse things than a world dominated by the United States.
January 29th, 2007 at 3:11 pm
Fareed Zakaria may be a smart political scientist, but he does not seem to know much about economics. The whole point of free enterprise is that for the most part it is self-managing. Some regulation is required, but the less the better.
The rest of the world is not the domain of the USA. We don’t even want it! What are we going to if people do not want to follow our lead?
The best way (perhaps the only way) we can address most of the environmental concerns in other nations is to set a good example. And for most part, our example is not too shabby. Part of the reason for that is the fact we tend over-manage our economic system less than some other nations.