The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [24]
What’s puzzling, however, is that these trends have been around for a while—and they have actually helped America’s bottom line. Even as globalization and outsourcing accelerated dramatically over the last twenty years, America’s growth rate averaged just over 2.5 percent, significantly higher than Europe’s. (Japan averaged 1.2 percent over the same period.) Productivity growth, the elixir of modern economics, has been over 2.3 percent for over two decades now, a full percentage point higher than the European average. Even American exports held up, despite a decade-long spike in the value of the dollar. In 1980, U.S. exports represented 10 percent of the world total; in 2007, that figure was still almost 9 percent.
The United States’ share of the global economy has been remarkably steady through wars, depressions, and a slew of other powers rising. With 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States has generated between 20 and 30 percent of world output for 125 years. There will surely be some slippage of America’s position over the next few decades. This is not a political statement but a mathematical one. As other countries grow faster, America’s relative economic weight will fall. But the decline need not be large-scale, rapid, or consequential, as long as the United States can adapt to new challenges as well as it adapted to those it confronted over the last century. In the next few decades, the rise of the emerging nations is likely to come mostly at the economic expense of Western Europe and Japan, which are locked in a slow, demographically determined decline.
America will face the most intense economic environment it has ever experienced. Some of its challenges are internal, legacies of the 2008 rupture and the pressures that caused it. The American economic and social systems know how to respond and adjust to such pressures. The reforms needed are obvious. Households, for instance, should save more. The U.S. government offers enormous incentives to consume (the deduction of mortgage interest being the best example), and it works. If we were to tax consumption and encourage savings, that would also work. The government must, moreover, ensure that Wall Street becomes more stable and secure, even if that means it is also less profitable. But because such reforms mean some pain now for long-term gain, the political system cannot make them.
The more difficult challenge that the United States faces is international. It will confront a global order quite different from the one it is used to operating in. For now, the United States remains the most powerful player. But every year the balance shifts.
For the roughly two decades since 1989, the power of the United States has defined the international order. All roads have led to Washington, and American ideas about politics, economics, and foreign policy have been the starting points for global action. Washington has been the most powerful outside actor on every continent in the world, dominating the Western Hemisphere, remaining the crucial outside balancer in Europe and East Asia, expanding its role in the Middle East and Central and South Asia, and everywhere remaining the only country that can provide the muscle for any serious global military operation. For every country—from Russia and China to South Africa and India—its most important relationship in the world has been the relationship with the United States.
That influence reached its apogee with Iraq. Despite the reluctance, opposition, or active hostility of much of the world, the United States was able to launch an unprovoked attack on a sovereign country and to enlist dozens