Read The Post-American World: Release 2.0 Online
Authors: Fareed Zakaria
For
Arshad Zakaria
Growth takes place whenever a challenge evokes a
successful response that, in turn, evokes a further and
different challenge. We have not found any intrinisic
reason why this process should not repeat itself indefinitely,
even though a majority of civilizations have failed, as a
matter of historical fact.
Arnold J. Toynbee
A Study of History
Preface
T
he first edition of
The Post-American World
was written in 2006 and 2007, when America was at the center of the world. The American economy was booming and, despite the setbacks in Iraq, people could not but be impressed by Washington’s military power, which, since 9/11, had been deployed across the world on a scale unmatched in human history. American culture reigned supreme everywhere from Latin America to China. And whatever anyone thought of George W. Bush, there was still a general feeling that America represented the world’s most advanced form of capitalism, run and regulated in a sophisticated fashion. The book was published in the middle of 2008, when the financial crisis had just begun. The Bear Stearns bailout, in March 2008, seemed to have stabilized the system, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average crept up to 13,000. That fall, the financial system collapsed and with it the American economy, which contracted by 6 percent in the last quarter and shed almost four million jobs in six months, the largest such decline since the 1930s. The contraction in global trade was actually worse than that of the 1930s.
I would be lying if I said that I had predicted any of this. While I did mention the dangers of cheap credit and wrote about a looming financial crisis, I thought it would be the garden-variety kind most countries periodically go through, not the seismic shock that actually took place. However, contrary to most predictions by most experts, the effect of the crisis was to accelerate the forces that I described in the book. The financial crisis hastened the rise of the post-American world. Goldman Sachs has twice revised its predictions of when China will overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy, and it will surely revise them again in light of the slower growth rates caused by the crisis.
The conventional wisdom was that when the West sneezed, the rest would catch pneumonia—that had been the experience in the past. But this time, the emerging nations of the world had achieved a critical mass and were now able to withstand the dramatic decline in growth in the Western world. In fact, in retrospect, it seems wrong even to describe it as “the global financial crisis.” For China, India, Brazil, and Indonesia, this has not been much of a crisis. It has resulted in an acceleration of the power shift I described in the book, giving it new force and greater scope. In this edition, I try to explain the consequences of the financial crisis, the resulting changes in power, diplomacy, and national psyche. China is today a country very different from the one it was just three years ago.
One more big change: Barack Obama became president, and he arrived in the Oval Office with an awareness of the trends described in the book. That meant that the book needed to reflect the new political realities in Washington, some of which were positive, others as depressing as ever. I remain convinced that the United States can adapt and adjust to the new world I describe, but the challenges have become greater and more complex, and I outline them with some new research and reflections on the way technology and globalization have combined to create a real crisis of employment for Americans. I also remain convinced that the geopolitical challenge of living in a world without a central, dominant power is one that will be acutely felt everywhere, and this too has been amply illustrated over the last few years.
The new edition incorporates my views on the financial crisis and its effects, the challenges and opportunities for the American economy, and the nature of the new global geopolitics. They are worked in throughout the book, not in any one place. Nowhere have I altered my basic views, so a reader who thought I was wrong three years ago is unlikely to be persuaded that I am now right. I felt that it was important to preserve the basic integrity of the work. I still believe that the challenge for all of us in the twenty-first century will be to live and prosper in this new and very different world.
1
The Rise of the Rest
T
his is a book not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else. It is about the great transformation taking place around the world, a transformation that, though often discussed, remains poorly understood. This is natural. Changes, even sea changes, take place gradually. Though we talk about a new era, the world seems to be one with which we are familiar. But in fact, it is very different.
There have been three tectonic power shifts over the last five hundred years, fundamental changes in the distribution of power that have reshaped international life—its politics, economics, and culture. The first was the rise of the Western world, a process that began in the fifteenth century and accelerated dramatically in the late eighteenth century. It produced modernity as we know it: science and technology, commerce and capitalism, the agricultural and industrial revolutions. It also produced the prolonged political dominance of the nations of the West.
The second shift, which took place in the closing years of the nineteenth century, was the rise of the United States. Soon after it industrialized, the United States became the most powerful nation since imperial Rome, and the only one that was stronger than any likely combination of other nations. For most of the last century, the United States has dominated global economics, politics, science, and culture. For the last twenty years, that dominance has been unrivaled, a phenomenon unprecedented in modern history.
We are now living through the third great power shift of the modern era. It could be called “the rise of the rest.” Over the past few decades, countries all over the world have been experiencing rates of economic growth that were once unthinkable. While they have had booms and busts, the overall trend has been unambiguously upward. Even the economic rupture of 2008 and 2009 could not halt or reverse this trend; in fact, the recession accelerated it. While many of the world’s wealthy, industrialized economies continued to struggle with slow growth, high unemployment, and overwhelming indebtedness through 2010 and beyond, the countries that constitute “the rest” rebounded quickly. India’s annual growth rate slowed to 5.7 percent in 2009, but hummed along at a 9.7 percent rate in 2010. China’s GDP growth never fell below 9 percent.
This economic success was once most visible in Asia but is no longer confined to it. That is why to call this shift “the rise of Asia” does not describe it accurately. In 2010, 85 countries grew at a rate of 4 percent or more. In 2006 and 2007, that number was 125. That includes more than 30 countries in Africa, two-thirds of the continent. Antoine van Agtmael, the fund manager who coined the term “emerging markets,” has identified the 25 companies most likely to be the world’s next great multinationals. His list includes four companies each from Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, and Taiwan; three from India; two from China; and one each from Argentina, Chile, Malaysia, and South Africa.
Look around. The tallest building in the world is now in Dubai. The world’s richest man is Mexican, and its largest publicly traded corporation is Chinese. The world’s biggest plane is built in Russia and Ukraine, its leading refinery is in India, and its largest factories are all in China. By many measures, Hong Kong now rivals London and New York as the leading financial center, and the United Arab Emirates is home to the most richly endowed investment fund. Once quintessentially American icons have been appropriated by foreigners. The world’s largest Ferris wheel is in Singapore. Its number one casino is not in Las Vegas but in Macao, which has also overtaken Vegas in annual gambling revenues. The biggest movie industry, in terms of both movies made and tickets sold, is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Even shopping, America’s greatest sporting activity, has gone global. Of the top ten malls in the world, only one is in the United States; the world’s biggest is in Dongguan, China. Such lists are arbitrary, but it is striking that twenty years ago, America was at the top in many, if not most, of these categories.
It might seem strange to focus on growing prosperity when there are still hundreds of millions of people living in desperate poverty. But in fact, the share of people living on a dollar a day or less plummeted from 40 percent in 1981 to 18 percent in 2004, and is estimated to fall to 12 percent by 2015. China’s growth alone has lifted more than 400 million people out of poverty. Poverty is falling in countries housing 80 percent of the world’s population. The 50 countries where the earth’s poorest people live are basket cases that need urgent attention. In the other 142—which include China, India, Brazil, Russia, Indonesia, Turkey, Kenya, and South Africa—the poor are slowly being absorbed into productive and growing economies. For the first time ever, we are witnessing genuinely global growth. This is creating an international system in which countries in all parts of the world are no longer objects or observers but players in their own right. It is the birth of a truly global order.
The emerging international system is likely to be quite different from those that have preceded it. One hundred years ago, there was a multipolar order run by a collection of European governments, with constantly shifting alliances, rivalries, miscalculations, and wars. Then came the bipolar duopoly of the Cold War, more stable in many ways, but with the superpowers reacting and overreacting to each other’s every move. Since 1991, we have lived under an American imperium, a unique, unipolar world in which the open global economy has expanded and accelerated dramatically. This expansion is now driving the next change in the nature of the international order.
The rise of the rest is at heart an economic phenomenon, but it has consequences for nearly every other sphere of life. At the politico-military level, we remain in a single-superpower world. But in all other dimensions—industrial, financial, educational, social, cultural—the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from American dominance. That does not mean we are entering an anti-American world. But we are moving into a post-American world, one defined and directed from many places and by many people.
As countries become stronger and richer, we’re likely to see more challenges and greater assertiveness from rising nations. In one month in 2008, India and Brazil were willing to frontally defy the United States at the Doha trade talks, Russia attacked and occupied parts of Georgia, and China hosted the most spectacular and expensive Olympic Games in history. Ten years ago, not one of the four would have been powerful or confident enough to act as it did. Even if their growth rates decline, which they surely will, these countries will not quietly relinquish their new roles in the global system.
A related aspect of this new era is the diffusion of power from states to other actors. The “rest” that is rising includes many nonstate actors. Groups and individuals have been empowered, and hierarchy, centralization, and control are being undermined. Functions that were once controlled by governments are now shared with international bodies like the World Trade Organization and the European Union. Nongovernmental groups are mushrooming every day on every issue in every country. Corporations and capital are moving from place to place, finding the best location in which to do business, rewarding some governments while punishing others. Terrorists like Al Qaeda, drug cartels, insurgents, and militias of all kinds are finding space to operate within the nooks and crannies of the international system. Power is shifting away from nation-states, up, down, and sideways. In such an atmosphere, the traditional applications of national power, both economic and military, have become less effective.
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
I
magine 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—boomed over the last decade. Turkey, which shares a border with Iraq, averaged 7 percent annual growth between the start of the war and 2008. During the worst years of the conflict, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, one hour from Baghdad by plane, erected eye-catching, iconic skyscrapers as if they were on another planet. The countries that did involve themselves in Iraq—Syria and Iran—operate largely outside the global economy and thus have less to lose by making trouble.
What explains this mismatch between a politics that spirals downward and an economy that steams along? First, it’s worth looking more carefully at the cascade of bad news. It seems that we are living in crazily violent times. But don’t believe everything you see on television. Our anecdotal impression turns out to be wrong. War and organized violence have declined dramatically over the last two decades. Ted Robert Gurr and a team of scholars at the University of Maryland’s Center for International Development and Conflict Management tracked the data carefully and came to the following conclusion: “the general magnitude of global warfare has decreased by over sixty percent [since the mid-1980s], falling by the end of 2004 to its lowest level since the late 1950s.”
1
Violence increased steadily throughout the Cold War—increasing sixfold between the 1950s and early 1990s—but the trend peaked just before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and “the extent of warfare among and within states lessened by nearly half in the first decade after the Cold War.” Harvard’s polymath professor Steven Pinker argues “that today we are probably living in the most peaceful time in our species’ existence.”
2
One reason for the mismatch between reality and our sense of it might be that, over these same decades, we have experienced a revolution in information technology that now brings us news from around the world instantly, vividly, and continuously. The immediacy of the images and the intensity of the twenty-four-hour news cycle combine to produce constant hyperbole. Every weather disturbance is “the storm of the century.” Every bomb that explodes is BREAKING NEWS. It is difficult to put this all in context because the information revolution is so new. We didn’t get daily footage on the roughly two million who died in the killing fields of Cambodia in the 1970s or the million who perished in the sands of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. We have not even seen much footage from the war in Congo in the 1990s, where millions died. But now, almost daily, we see live broadcasts of the effects of IEDs or car bombs or rockets—tragic events, to be sure, but often with death tolls under ten. The randomness of terrorist violence, the targeting of civilians, and the ease with which modern societies can be penetrated add to our disquiet. “That could have been me,” people say after a terrorist attack.
It feels like a very dangerous world. But it isn’t. Your chances of dying as a consequence of organized violence of any kind are low and getting lower. The data reveal a broad trend away from wars among major countries, the kind of conflict that produces massive casualties.
I don’t believe that war has become obsolete or any such foolishness. Human nature remains what it is and international politics what it is. History has witnessed periods of calm that have been followed by extraordinary bloodshed. And numbers are not the only measure of evil. The nature of the killings in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s—premeditated, religiously motivated, systematic—makes that war, which had 200,000 casualties, a moral obscenity that should register very high on any scale. Al Qaeda’s barbarism—cold-blooded beheadings, the deliberate targeting of innocents—is gruesome despite its relatively low number of casualties.
Still, if we are to understand the times we are living in, we must first accurately describe them. And they are, for now, in historical context, unusually calm.
The Islamic Threat
Islamic terror, which makes the headlines daily, is a large and persistent problem, but one involving small numbers of fanatics. It feeds on the dysfunctions of the Muslim world, the sense (real and imagined) of humiliation at the hands of the West, and easy access to technologies of violence. And yet, does it rank as a threat on the order of Germany’s drive for world domination in the first half of the twentieth century? Or Soviet expansionism in the second half? Or Mao’s efforts to foment war and revolution across the Third World in the 1950s and 1960s? These were all challenges backed by the power and purpose of major countries, often with serious allies, and by an ideology that was seen as a plausible alternative to liberal democracy. By comparison, consider the jihadist threat. Before 9/11, when groups like Al Qaeda operated under the radar, governments treated them as minor annoyances, and they roamed freely, built some strength, and hit symbolic, often military targets, killing Americans and other foreigners. Even so, the damage was fairly limited. Since 2001, governments everywhere have been aggressive in busting terrorists’ networks, following their money, and tracking their recruits—with almost immediate results. In Indonesia, the largest Muslim nation in the world, the government captured both the chief and the military leader of Jemaah Islamiah, the country’s deadliest jihadist group and the one that carried out the Bali bombings in 2002. With American help, the Filipino army battered the Qaeda-style terrorist outfit Abu Sayyaf. The group’s leader was killed by Filipino troops in January 2007, and its membership has declined from as many as two thousand guerrillas six years ago to a few hundred today. In Egypt and Saudi Arabia—Al Qaeda’s original bases and targets of attack—terrorist cells have been rounded up, and those still at large have been unable to launch any new attacks in six years. Finance ministries—especially the U.S. Department of the Treasury—have made life far more difficult for terrorists. Global organizations cannot thrive without being able to move money around, and so the more terrorists’ funds are tracked and targeted, the more they have to resort to small-scale and hastily improvised operations. This struggle, between governments and terrorists, will persist, but it is the former who have the upper hand.
In Iraq, where terrorist attacks have declined, a complication that is revealing has weakened Al Qaeda. In its original fatwas and other statements, Al Qaeda made no mention of Shiites, condemning only the “Crusaders” and “Jews.” But Iraq changed things. Searching for ways to attract Sunni support, Al Qaeda morphed into an anti-Shiite group, espousing a purist Sunni worldview. The late Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, the head of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, bore a fierce hatred for Shiites derived from his Wahhabi-style puritanism. In a February 2004 letter to Osama bin Laden, he claimed, “The danger from the Shia . . . is greater . . . than the Americans. . . . [T]he only solution is for us to strike the religious, military, and other cadres among the Shia with blow after blow until they bend to the Sunnis.” If there ever was a debate between him and bin Laden, Zarqawi won. As a result, a movement that had hoped to rally the entire Muslim world to jihad against the West was dragged into a dirty internal war within Islam.
The split between Sunnis and Shiites is only one of the divisions within the Islamic world. Within that universe are Shiites and Sunnis, Persians and Arabs, Southeast Asians and Middle Easterners, and, importantly, moderates and radicals. Just as the diversity within the communist world ultimately made it less threatening, so do the many varieties of Islam undermine its ability to coalesce into a single, monolithic foe. Some Western leaders speak of a single worldwide Islamist movement—absurdly lumping together Chechen separatists in Russia, Pakistani-backed militants in India, Shiite warlords in Lebanon, and Sunni jihadists in Egypt. In fact, a shrewd strategist would emphasize that all these groups are distinct, with differing agendas, enemies, and friends. That would rob them of their claim to represent Islam. It would also describe them as they often really are: small local gangs of misfits hoping to attract attention through nihilism and barbarism.
Conflicts involving radical Islamic groups persist, but these typically have more to do with specific local conditions than with global aspirations. Although North Africa has seen continued terror, particularly in Algeria, the main group there, the Salafist Group for Call and Combat (known by its French abbreviation, GSPC), is part of a long war between the Algerian government and Islamic opposition forces and cannot be seen solely through the prism of Al Qaeda or anti-American jihad. The same is true of the main area where there has been a large and extremely dangerous increase in the strength of Al Qaeda, the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands. It is here that Al Qaeda Central, if there is such an entity, is housed. But the group has been able to sustain itself despite the best efforts of NATO troops because it had dug deep roots in the area during the years of the anti-Soviet campaign. Its allies, the Taliban, are a local movement that has long been supported by a section of the Pashtuns, an influential ethnic group in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Here is the bottom line. In the nine years since 9/11, Al Qaeda Central—the group led by Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri—has been unable to launch a major attack anywhere. It was a terrorist organization; it has become a communications company, producing the occasional videotape rather than actual terrorism.
*
Jihad continues, but the jihadists have had to scatter, make do with smaller targets, and operate on a local level—usually through groups with almost no connection to Al Qaeda Central.
This improvised strategy has a crippling weakness: it kills locals, thus alienating ordinary Muslims—a process that is well underway in countries as diverse as Indonesia, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. The data on public opinion in the Muslim world are now overwhelming. The London School of Economics professor Fawaz Gerges has analyzed polls from dozens of Muslim countries over the past few years. He notes that in a range of places—Jordan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Lebanon, and Bangladesh—there have occurred substantial declines in the number of people who say suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilian targets can be justified to defend Islam. Wide majorities say such attacks are, at most, rarely acceptable. The shift has been especially dramatic in Jordan, where only 12 percent of Jordanians view suicide attacks as “often or sometimes justified” (down from 57 percent in 2005). In Indonesia, 85 percent of respondents agree that terrorist attacks are “rarely/never justified” (in 2002, by contrast, only 70 percent opposed such attacks). In Pakistan, that figure is 90 percent, up from 43 percent in 2002. Gerges points out that, by comparison, only 46 percent of Americans say that “bombing and other attacks intentionally aimed at civilians” are “never justified,” while 24 percent believe these attacks are “often or sometimes justified.” This shift does not reflect a turn away from religiosity or even from a backward conception of Islam. That ideological struggle persists and will take decades, not years, to resolve itself. But the battle against jihadism has fared much better, much sooner, than anyone could have imagined.