Harold Evans, one-time editor of The Times in London, is now Reuter's editor-at-large. Reflecting on a new book written by a former advisor to Bill Clinton, in a piece on The Daily Beast Evans considers the position of the USA in the world in 2012 - and where things are headed.
In the vicinity of July 4, it’s probably imprudent to mention that America has lost its dominant position of world leadership, according to a renowned scholar of geopolitics, Zbigniew Brzezinski. He is as sturdily patriotic as anyone, but as a Cold Warrior, presidential adviser, and foreign-policy professor at Johns Hopkins, he has seen too much to follow the drum.
He went against the grain of elite opinion in the 50s by predicting that the Soviet Union was doomed to break up, and break up along nationalist lines; he foresaw the danger of allowing Ayatollah Khomeini to control the Iranian revolution and urged military action to forestall him; in the late 70s, he forecast the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He’s been so right on Soviet matters that it is downright disconcerting to read in his new book Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power that America now exhibits the same symptoms of decay as the Soviet Union did just before its fall: a gridlocked governmental system incapable of enacting serious policy revisions, bankrupting itself with a gross military budget; failing in a decades-long attempt to control Afghanistan; a ruling class cynically insensitive to widening social disparities while hypocritically masking its own privileged lifestyle; and finally, in foreign affairs, becoming increasingly self-isolated while precipitating a geopolitically damaging hostility with China.
Brzezinski concedes this parallel may over drawn—there is the little matter of American freedom, for instance—but he is surely right that there is a dangerous new volatility. It doesn’t arise as it so often has in the past from the aggressive ambitions of a single big power (Germany, Italy, Japan, the Soviets in the 30s intimidating an ill-informed and irresolute West). What matters now, he argues, is the dispersal of power, rather than its concentration, the risks in regional collisions, the incapacity of any single power to deal with nuclear proliferation, financial contagion, climate change, global depression, vast demographic movements, and the dynamic political awakening of people worldwide.
The center of gravity has shifted from the West to the East. America is in decline. Europe is busy digging a bigger hole for itself. But China is on a trajectory to equal the U.S. in economic power by 2020 and lead the whole world by 2050. Its gross GDP was in 2010 way behind the U.S. and Europe, and lagged behind Japan, yet such is the speed of is growth from investment that by the time a Chinese boy today reaches pensionable age he will be a citizen of the world’s largest economic power (a gross GDP in trillions of $46, against $38 for the U.S., $26 for the European Union, with India ($15), Japan ($6), and Russia $4) trailing. The poverty of the vast peasant population means the average Chinese family will still be poorer than the American or the European but China’s voice, and military might, will be of enormous potential.
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