The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [5]
What do these changes portend for the United States and its dominant position in the world? What will the “rise of the rest” mean in terms of war and peace, economics and business, ideas and culture?
In short, what will it mean to live in a post-American world?
2
The Cup Runneth Over
Imagine that it is January 2000, and you ask a fortune-teller to predict the course of the global economy over the next several years. Let’s say that you give him some clues, to help him gaze into his crystal ball. The United States will be hit by the worst terrorist attack in history, you explain, and will respond by launching two wars, one of which will go badly awry and keep Iraq—the country with the world’s third-largest oil reserves—in chaos for years. Iran will gain strength in the Middle East and move to acquire a nuclear capability. North Korea will go further, becoming the world’s eighth declared nuclear power. Russia will turn hostile and imperious in its dealings with its neighbors and the West. In Latin America, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela will launch the most spirited anti-Western campaign in a generation, winning many allies and fans. Israel and Hezbollah will fight a war in southern Lebanon, destabilizing Beirut’s fragile government, drawing in Iran and Syria, and rattling the Israelis. Gaza will become a failed state ruled by Hamas, and peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians will go nowhere. “Given these events,” you say to the sage, “how will the global economy fare over the next decade?”
This is not really a hypothetical. We have the forecasts of experts from those years. They were all wrong. The correct prediction would have been that, between 2000 and 2007, the world economy would grow at its fastest pace in nearly four decades. Income per person across the globe would rise at a faster rate (3.2 percent) than in any other period in history. In 2008, that growth collapsed in the Western world, but the cause was an economic shock, not a political shock.
In the two decades since the end of the Cold War, we have lived through a paradox, one we experience every morning when reading the newspapers. The world’s politics seems deeply troubled, with daily reports of bombings, terror plots, rogue states, and civil strife. And yet the global economy forges ahead. As the events beginning with the collapse of Lehman Brothers reminded us, markets do panic—but over economic, not political news. The front page of the newspaper often seems unconnected to the business section.
I remember speaking to a senior member of the Israeli government a few days after the war with Hezbollah in July 2006. He was genuinely worried about his country’s physical security. Hezbollah’s rockets had reached farther into Israel than people had believed possible, and the Israeli military response had not inspired confidence. Then I asked him about the economy—his area of competence. “That’s puzzled all of us,” he said. “The stock market was higher on the last day of the war than on its first! The same with the shekel [Israel’s currency].” The government might have been spooked, but the market wasn’t.
Or consider the Iraq War, which caused deep, lasting chaos in the country and sent over two million refugees crowding into its neighbors. That kind of political crisis seems certain to spill over. But to travel in the Middle East these past years is to be struck by how little Iraq’s troubles destabilized the region. Everywhere you go, people angrily denounce the invasion. But where is the actual evidence of regional instability? Most Middle Eastern countries—Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, for example