The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [10]
Of course, things would be different if a major terrorist organization were to acquire significant weapons of mass destruction. A nuclear attack could result in mass panic and a broader breakdown. But such weapons are harder to get than many think, and a more sustained effort from Washington could make it nearly impossible to acquire them in any quantity. Biological terror may seem most worrying because of the ease of acquiring biological agents, but dispersing them effectively is difficult and may lack the dramatic results terrorists crave. And none of this is to suggest that anti-terror activities are unnecessary, but rather that careful, calibrated, intelligent policies are likely to be quite successful.
In some unspoken way, people have recognized that the best counterterrorism policy is resilience. Terrorism is unusual in that it is a military tactic defined by the response of the onlooker. If we are not terrorized, then it doesn’t work. And, from New York and London to Mumbai and Jakarta, people are learning this fact through experience and getting on with life even amid the uncertainty. The most likely scenario—a series of backpack or truck bombings in the United States—would be a shock, but in a couple of weeks its effects would fade and the long-term consequences would likely be minimal. In vast, vigorous, and complex societies—the American economy is now $14 trillion—problems in a few places do not easily spill over. Modern civilization may be stronger than we suspect.
The challenges from rogue states are also real, but we should consider them in context. The GDP of Iran is 1/43 that of the United States, its military spending 1/72 that of the Pentagon.* If this is 1938, as many conservatives argue, then Iran is Romania, not Germany. North Korea is even more bankrupt and dysfunctional. Its chief threat—the one that keeps the Chinese government awake at night—is that it will implode, flooding the region with refugees. That’s power? These countries can cause trouble in their neighborhood and must be checked and contained, but we need to keep in mind the larger world of which they are a relatively small part. Look at Latin America. Venezuela is a troublemaker, but what has that meant on the ground? The broad trend in the region—exemplified by the policies of the major countries like Brazil, Mexico, and Chile—has been toward open markets, trade, democratic governance, and an outward orientation. And that trend, not Hugo Chávez’s insane rants, represents the direction of history.
The Great Expansion
Today’s relative calm has a deep structural basis. Across the world, economics is trumping politics. What Wall Street analysts call “political risk” is almost nonexistent. Wars, coups, and terrorism have lost much of their ability to derail markets more than temporarily. Again, this may not last (it has not historically), but it has been the world we have lived in for at least a decade.
This is not the first time that political tumult became disconnected from economics. Two earlier periods seem much like our long, post–Cold War expansion: the turn-of-the-century boom of the 1890s and 1900s, and the postwar boom of the 1950s and early 1960s. In both, politics was turbulent and yet growth was robust. These two periods had one feature in common: