Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power

The long-lasting political domination of the world by the West has been fading for some decades. For a brief moment in the 1990s, however, it looked as if the West, despite Europe’s twin attempts at collective suicide during the first half of the twentieth century, might stage a historical comeback. The peaceful end of the Cold War, culminating in the fragmentation of the Soviet Union, signaled the final step in the rapid ascendance of the United States as the first truly global superpower. That internationally dominant power, together with its politically motivated and economically dynamic partner, the European Union, appeared capable not only of reviving the West ’s global preeminence but also of defining for itself a constructive global role.

Twenty years later, few expect the European Union to emerge soon as a politically serious global player while America’s preeminent global status seems tenuous. Because the West as a whole is now less capable of acting in unison, its lasting political legacy is thus also more in doubt. Once upon a time, though briefly, it did seem that worldwide democracy, international peace, and increasingly even a comfortable social compact would be the West ’s enduring bequest to humanity. However, basic changes in the distribution of global power, the impact of the new phenomenon of global political awakening on the exercise of that power, and the negative consequences of recent US foreign policy moves and of growing doubts regarding the vitality of the American system have cumulatively put that more hopeful legacy of the West in question.

1: THE EMERGENCE OF GLOBAL POWER

The very notion of a globally dominant power is a recent historical development. For millennia, people lived in isolated communities, unaware of the existence of their more distant neighbors. Migrations and sporadic collisions with outsiders took place in a setting of total ignorance of the world at large. It has only been within the last eight hundred years or so that an initially vague awareness of the presence of distant “others” permeated the human consciousness, first through expeditions and mapping of once-unknown areas and then through colonization and large migrations. Eventually, that knowledge led to imperial rivalries, which in turn led to two destructive wars for world domination, and then to the global systemic confrontation of the Cold War. In recent times, space exploration has dramatized the new appreciation of the relative “smallness” of the earth, while photographs from outer space taken at night have conveyed the vivid contrast between the illuminated concentrations of urbanized humanity—especially in what is usually described as the West—and the darker, less technologically advanced, but increasingly crowded regions of the rest of the world.

MAP 1.1 THE EARTH AT NIGHT

The states located on the Western European shores of the North Atlantic Ocean were the first to set out, self-consciously and vigorously, on the world at large. They were driven by a potent mix of maritime technological advancement, proselytizing passion, visions of monarchical and personal glory, and out-and-out material greed. Partially as a result of this head start, they controlled territory far away from their continental home bases for nearly half a millennium. The geographic scope of the West thus expanded—first by conquest and then by settlement—from Europe’s Atlantic shores to the Western Hemisphere. Portugal and Spain conquered and colonized South America while Britain and France did the same in North America. Eventual political independence from Europe by both Americas was then followed by large-scale European migration into the Western Hemisphere. In the meantime, the Western European maritime states bordering on the Atlantic also reached into the Indian and Pacific Oceans, establishing dominion over today’s India and Indonesia, imposing a patronizing presence in parts of China, carving up almost all of Africa and the Middle East, and seizing scores of islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans as well as in the Caribbean Sea.

EMPIRES AT THEIR GREATEST EXTENT

1.British Empire (1920) 34,000,000 km²

2.Mongol Empire (1309) 24,000,000 km²

3.Russian Empire (1905) 23,000,000 km²

4.Second French Colonial Empire (1920) 15,000,000 km²

5.Manchu-Qing Dynasty, China (1800) 15,000,000 km²

6.Spanish Empire (1800) 14,000,000 km²

7.Umayyad Caliphate (720) 11,000,000 km²

8.Yuan Dynasty, China (1320) 11,000,000 km²

9.Abbasid Caliphate (750) 11,000,000 km²

10.Portuguese Empire (1815) 10,400,000 km²

11.Achaemenid Empire, Persia (480 BC) 8,000,000 km²

12.Roman Empire (117) 6,500,000 km²

From the sixteenth century until the midpoint of the twentieth, this combination of cultural and political outreach made the European states of the North Atlantic politically dominant in areas spanning the globe. (In that respect, their imperial domains differed fundamentally from the much earlier but essentially isolated and contiguous regional empires—such as the Roman, Persian, Mughal, Mongol, Chinese, or Incan—each of which conceived of itself as the center of the world but with little geographic knowledge of the world beyond.) Tsarist Russia massively expanded its land-based empire from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, but it similarly absorbed only adjoining territory with the brief exception of Alaska. The same was true of the Ottoman Empire’s expansion in the Middle East and Southeast Europe.

But while the European maritime powers on the Atlantic Coast ranged over the world, the prolonged conflicts among them weakened their geopolitical position relative to rising powers from within the European continent and from North America. The material and strategic cost of prolonged war in the Low Countries and German provinces during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries exhausted Iberian power, while Dutch prominence began to wane during the late seventeenth century in the face of ascending Britain on the seas and assertive France next door on land. By the time the smoke cleared in the mid-eighteenth century, Great Britain and France stood as the only remaining competitors in the struggle for imperial dominance.

Their transoceanic rivalry for colonial possessions expanded during the nineteenth century into a contest for supremacy over Europe itself, before turning early in the twentieth century into a joint alliance against a rising European continental power that not coincidentally also had entered the global colonial competition—Germany. From the consequent two world wars, Europe emerged devastated, divided, and demoralized. Indeed, after 1945 a vast Eurasian land power, the Soviet Union, victoriously ensconced in Europe’s geographic middle, seemed poised—like the Mongol Empire some seven hundred years earlier—to sweep even further westward.

Meanwhile, across the North Atlantic, the United States spent the nineteenth century developing its industrial and military capabilities in felicitous geographic isolation from the devastating continental and imperial rivalries of Europe. Its interventions in the two world wars of the first half of the twentieth century were decisive in preventing the preponderance of German power in Europe, and it did so while shielded from the unprecedented destruction and carnage of those conflicts. Moreover, America’s enviable economic and geopolitical position at the end of World War II hoisted upon it a novel status—one of global preeminence. As a result, the subsequent American-Soviet Cold War precipitated the emergence of a redefined cross-Atlantic West, one dependent on and therefore dominated by the United States of America.

America and the independent western remnants of Europe—bonded by the common goal of containing Soviet Russia as well as by similar political and economic systems and therefore ideological orientations—became the geopolitical core of the newly delineated Atlantic world, defensively preoccupied with its own survival in the face of the trans-Eurasian Sino-Soviet bloc. That bond was institutionalized in the realm of security with the creation of the transoceanic NATO, while Western Europe, seeking to accelerate its postwar recovery, integrated economically through the adoption of the European Economic Community, which later evolved into the European Union. But, still vulnerable to Soviet power, Western Europe became almost formally America’s protectorate and informally its economic-financial dependency.

Within four or so decades, however, that same cross-Atlantic and defensive West emerged suddenly as the globally dominant West. The implosion in 1991 of the Soviet Union—in the wake of the fragmentation two years earlier of the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe—was caused by a combination of social fatigue, political ineptitude, the ideological and economic failings of Marxism, and the successful Western foreign policies of military containment and peaceful ideological penetration. Its immediate consequence was the end of Europe’s half-century-long division. Globally, it also highlighted the emergence of the European Union as a major financial and economic (and potentially perhaps even military/political) powerhouse in its own right. Thus, with the unifying Europe still geopolitically wedded to the United States—by then the world’s only military superpower as well as the world’s most innovative and richest economy—the Atlantic West on the eve of the twenty-first century seemed poised for a new era of Western global supremacy.

The financial and economic framework for that global supremacy already existed. Even during the Cold War, the Atlantic West, due to its capitalist system and the extraordinary dynamism of the American economy, had a clear financial and economic advantage over its geopolitical and ideological antagonist, the Soviet Union. Consequently, despite facing serious military threats, the Atlantic powers were able to institutionalize their dominant position in global affairs through an emerging network of cooperative international organizations, ranging from the World Bank and the IMF to the UN itself, thus seemingly consolidating a global framework for their enduring preeminence.

MAP 1.2 NATO MEMBERS, 2010

The West’s ideological appeal rose similarly during this period. In Central and Eastern Europe, the West was able to project its appealing vision of human rights and political freedom, thus putting the Soviet Union on the ideological defensive. By the end of the Cold War, America and the Western world found themselves generally associated with the globally attractive principles of human dignity, freedom, and prosperity.

Nonetheless, while the resulting appeal of the West was greater than ever, its geographic scope of control had actually shrunk in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The Western imperial powers had emerged from the two world wars profoundly weakened, while the newly dominant America repudiated the imperial legacy of its European allies. President Roosevelt made no secret of his conviction that the US commitment to the liberation of Europe during World War II did not include the restoration of the colonial empires of Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, or Portugal.

However, Roosevelt’s highly principled opposition to colonialism did not prevent him from pursuing an acquisitive US policy determined to gain a lucrative position for America in the key oil-producing Middle Eastern countries. In 1943, President Roosevelt not so subtly told Britain’s ambassador to the United States, Lord Halifax, while pointing at a map of the Middle East, that “Persian oil is yours. We share the oil of Iraq and Kuwait. As for Saudi Arabian oil, it’s ours.”[1] So began America’s subsequently painful political involvement in that region.

The end of the European empires was even more so the product of the growing restlessness of their colonial subjects. National emancipation became their battle cry, while Soviet ideological and even military support made repression too costly. The new political reality was that the dissolution of the old colonial empires of the European-centric West was unavoidable. The British wisely withdrew—before being forcefully challenged to do so—from India and later from the Middle East (though they left behind religious and ethnic violence that produced a colossal human tragedy in India and an intractable Israeli-Palestinian political conflict that still haunts the West in the Middle East). With US encouragement, they then made a semivoluntary withdrawal from their colonies in Africa. The Dutch in the East Indies (Indonesia) chose to stay and fight—and lost. So did the French in two bloody colonial wars fought first in Vietnam and then in Algeria. The Portuguese withdrew under pressure from Mozambique and Angola. The West’s geographic scope thus shrank even as its geopolitical and economic preeminence rose, largely due to the expanding global reach of America’s cultural, economic, and political power.

At the same time—obscured from public awareness by the fog of the Cold War—a more basic shift in the global distribution of political and economic power was also taking place. Eventually, it gave birth to a new pecking order in the international system, seen more clearly for the first time as a consequence of the financial crisis of late 2007. This crisis made clear that coping with global economic challenges now required the strength not just of the world’s only superpower, or of the West as a whole, but also of the states that hitherto had been considered not yet qualified to take part in global financial-economic decision making.

The practical acceptance of this new reality came with the 2008 admission of new entrants from Asia, Africa, and Latin America into the G-8, a hitherto exclusive and largely Western club of financial decision makers, transforming its previously narrow circle into the more globally representative G-20. Symbolic of this change was the fact that the most significant leadership roles in the first G-20 meeting held in the United States in 2009 were played by the presidents of two states: the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China, respectively.

The cumulative effect of these events was to make self-evident a new geopolitical reality: the consequential shift in the center of gravity of global power and of economic dynamism from the Atlantic toward the Pacific, from the West toward the East. To be sure, economic historians remind us that in fact Asia had been the predominant producer of the world’s total GNP for some eighteen centuries. As late as the year 1800, Asia accounted for about 60% of the world’s total GNP, in contrast to Europe’s 30%. India’s share alone of the global product in 1750 amounted to 25% (according to Jaswant Singh, former Indian finance minister), much like that of the United States today. But during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the intrusion of European imperialism backed by Europe’s surging industrial innovation and financial sophistication, Asia’s global share declined precipitously. By 1900, for example, under prolonged British imperial rule, India’s share shrank to a mere 1.6%.

In China, just as in India, British imperialism followed in the wake of British traders. The latter had run up huge monetary deficits by purchasing Chinese tea, porcelain, silk, and so on, for which they sought remedy by selling opium to Chinese importers. Beijing’s belated efforts to ban the import of opium and restrict the access of foreign merchants then precipitated two armed interventions, first by the British and then by both the British and the French, which further contributed to a precipitous decline in China’s role in the global economy.

The historic fact of China’s and India’s past economic preeminence has led some to argue that the current economic rise of Asia is basically a return to a distant but prolonged normality. But it is important to note that Asia’s earlier superiority in GNP was attained in a world of basically isolated regions and thus of very limited economic interactions. The economic links between Europe and Asia involved trade based largely on barter, transacted primarily in just a few ports (notably Calcutta) or transported by periodic caravans slowly traversing the Silk Route. A global economy, continuously interactive and increasingly interdependent, did not then exist.

Thus, in times past, Asia’s statistically impressive but isolated economic prowess was not projected outward. In the early part of the fifteenth century, China chose a policy of vigorously enforced self-isolation, having even earlier refrained from exploiting the technological superiority of its commercial fleet and oceanic navy to assert a political outreach. India under the Mughal Empire possessed great wealth, but it lacked political cohesion or external ambitions. Indeed, the only significant case of assertive westward projection of Asian political power occurred under the leadership of Mongolia’s Genghis Khan, whose horseback-riding warriors carved out a vast Eurasian empire. However, they galloped from a country with a miniscule GNP of its own—thus demonstrating that at the time military prowess was not handicapped by economic weakness.

2: THE RISE OF ASIA AND THE DISPERSAL OF GLOBAL POWER

The rise to global preeminence of three Asian powers—Japan, China, and India—has not only altered dramatically the global ranking of power but also highlighted the dispersal of geopolitical power. The emergence of these Asian states as significant political-economic players is a specifically post–World War II phenomenon because none of them could exploit their population advantage until the second half of the twentieth century. Admittedly, inklings of Asia’s emergence on the international scene first came into view with the brief rise of Japan as a major military power following its victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. That unexpected triumph, however, was followed not long after by Japan’s embrace of militaristic imperialism that ended in total defeat at the hands of the United States in 1945 in a war that the Japanese had proclaimed was aimed to free Asia from Western domination. The subsequent national recovery of Japan from its massive destruction in World War II provided the first major preview of an Asia whose economic growth signaled growing international stature.

The combination of a stable pacifist democracy, a national acceptance of American military protection, and a popular determination to rebuild the country’s devastated economy created a fertile climate for Japan’s rapid economic growth. Based on high rates of savings, moderate wages, deliberate concentration on high technology, and the inflow of foreign capital through energetically promoted exports, Japan’s GDP grew from $500 billion in 1975 to $5.2 trillion in 1995.[2]Before long, Japan’s economic success was emulated—though in politically more authoritarian settings—by China, South Korea, Taiwan, the Association of Southeastern Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries, and Indonesia, as well as by the more democratic India.

The relatively complacent American public of the mid-twentieth century at first paid little attention to Japan’s new role in the world economy. But during the 1980s and early 1990s, American public anxiety suddenly focused on Japan. Public opinion was stimulated not by Japan’s geopolitical assertiveness—for it possessed a pacifist constitution and was a steadfast American ally—but rather by Japanese electronic and then automobile products’ highly visible domination of the American domestic market. US paranoia was fanned further by alarmist mass media reports of Japanese buyouts of key American industrial assets (and some symbolic ones: e.g., Rockefeller Center in New York City). Japan came to be seen as an economic powerhouse, a trading giant, and even a growing threat to America’s industrial and financial global preeminence. Japan as the new “superstate” became the fearsome and widely cited slogan of overblown media coverage and demagogic congressional rhetoric. Academic theories of America’s inevitable decline in the face of the “rising sun” gave intellectual credence to widespread populist anxiety that only receded after Japan’s “lost decade” of anemic economic growth during the 1990s.

Though fears of global economic domination by the Japanese were unrealistic, Japan’s post–World War II recovery awakened the West to Asia’s potential to assume a major economic and political role. And subsequent economic successes in the region, notably South Korea’s similar drive, beginning in the 1960s, to establish an export-driven economy, further emphasized this point. By 2010, the president of the once-impoverished South Korea could assert confidently that his country was ready to play a significant role in global economic decision making; symbolically, Seoul even hosted a G-20 summit in 2010. Concurrently, both Taiwan and Singapore also emerged as dynamic examples of economic success and social development, with considerably higher rates of growth during the second half of the twentieth century than those attained by the Western European economies during their post–World War II recovery.

But these were merely a prelude to the most dramatic change in the world’s geopolitical and economic pecking order: China’s meteoric rise, by the first decade of the twenty-first century, into the front ranks of the leading world powers. The roots of that emergence go back many decades, beginning with the quest for national renewal launched more than a century ago by nationalistic young Chinese intellectuals and culminating some decades later in the victory of Chinese Communists. Although Mao’s economically and socially devastating Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution set back China’s rise for some years, the unprecedented takeoff in China’s social and economic modernization started in 1978 with Deng Xiaoping’s bold adoption of market liberalization, which “opened” China to the outside world and set it on a trajectory of unprecedented national growth. Its rise signals both the end of the West ’s singular preeminence and the concomitant shift eastward of the global center of gravity.

China’s domestic reorientation coincided with a dramatic geopolitical realignment, its separation from the Soviet Union. Their gradual estrangement and growing mutual hostility broke into the open during the 1960s. That provided the United States with a unique opportunity, first explored by President Richard Nixon in 1972 and then consummated by President Jimmy Carter in 1978, to engage China in a common front against Moscow. In the course of the subsequent mere three decades, China, no longer faced by a potential Soviet threat and thus free to focus its resources on domestic development, achieved a degree of infrastructural modernization comparable to what had transpired in the West over the course of the previous century. Though faced with lingering internal ethnic challenges posed by Tibet and Xinjiang, a significant domestic political disruption in 1989, and socially painful inequality in rural and urban development, China’s results were spectacular. However, they also eventually fueled American populist and geopolitical anxiety. Slogans about China “owning” the United States echoed the earlier uproar over Japanese purchases of American industrial and real estate assets during the late 1980s. By 2010, in an overreaction reminiscent of the earlier case of Japan, many feared that China would soon supplant America as the world’s leading superpower.

The ongoing shift eastward in the distribution of global power has also been prompted by the recent emergence on the world scene of postcolonial India, one of the world’s two most populous countries and a state also entertaining global ambitions. Contemporary India is a complicated mixture of democratic self-governance, massive social injustice, economic dynamism, and widespread political corruption. As a result, its political emergence as a force in world affairs has lagged behind China’s. India was prominent in sharing leadership of the so-called nonaligned nations, a collection of neutral but politically wavering states, including Cuba and Yugoslavia, all allegedly opposed to the Cold War. Its brief military collision with China in 1962, which ended in India’s defeat, was only partially redeemed by its military successes in the two wars with Pakistan of 1965 and 1971. By and large, the prevailing view of India until relatively recently has been one of a country with strong moralistic opinions about world affairs but without commensurate influence.

This perception began to change as a consequence of two significant developments: India’s defiant testing of its own nuclear device in 1974 and of nuclear weapons in 1998, and its period of impressive economic growth beginning in the 1990s. India’s liberalizing reforms—including the deregulation of international trade and investment and the support of privatization—are transforming what was an anemic and cumbersome quasi-socialist economy into a more dynamic economy based on services and high technology, thus putting India on an export-driven growth trajectory similar to that of Japan and China. By 2010, India, with a population beginning to exceed China’s, was even viewed by some as a potential rival to China’s emerging political preeminence in Asia, despite India’s persisting internal liabilities (ranging from religious, linguistic, and ethnic diversity to low literacy, acute social disparities, rural unrest, and antiquated infrastructure).

India’s political elite is motivated by an ambitious strategic vision focused on securing greater global influence and a conviction of its regional primacy. And the gradual improvement in US-Indian relations during the first decade of the twenty-first century has further enhanced India’s global stature and gratified its ambitions. However, its simmering conflict with Pakistan, which includes a proxy contest with it for greater influence in Afghanistan, remains a serious diversion from its larger geopolitical aspirations. Therefore, the view—held by its foreign policy elite—that India is not only a rival to China but also already one of the world’s superpowers lacks sober realism.

Nonetheless, the appearance on the world scene of China as the economic challenger to America, of India as a regional power, and of a wealthy Japan as America’s Pacific Ocean ally have not only altered dramatically the global ranking of power but also highlighted its dispersal. That poses some serious risks. The Asian powers are not (and have not been) regionally allied as in the case of the Atlantic alliance during the Cold War. They are rivals, and thus in some respects potentially similar to the European Atlantic powers during their colonial and then continental European contests for geopolitical supremacy, which eventually culminated in the devastation of World War I and World War II. The new Asian rivalry could at some point threaten regional stability, a challenge heightened in its destructive potential by the massive populations of the Asian powers and the possession by several of them of nuclear weapons.

There is, admittedly, a basic difference between the old transoceanic imperial rivalry of the European powers and that of the current Asian powers. The key participants in the Asian rivalry do not compete for overseas empires, which for Europe escalated distant collisions into great power conflicts. Regional flare-ups among them are more likely to occur within the Asia-Pacific region itself. Nonetheless, even a regionally confined collision between any of the Asian states (for example, over islands, or maritime routes, or watershed issues) could send shock-waves throughout the global economy.

The more immediate risk of the ongoing dispersal of power is a potentially unstable global hierarchy. The United States is still preeminent but the legitimacy, effectiveness, and durability of its leadership is increasingly questioned worldwide because of the complexity of its internal and external challenges. Nevertheless, in every significant and tangible dimension of traditional power—military, technological, economic, and financial—America is still peerless. It has by far the largest single national economy, the greatest financial influence, the most advanced technology, a military budget larger than that of all other states combined, and armed forces both capable of rapid deployment abroad and actually deployed around the world. This reality may not endure for very long but it is still the current fact of international life.

The European Union could compete to be the world’s number two power, but this would require a more robust political union, with a common foreign policy and a shared defense capability. But unfortunately for the West, the post–Cold War expansion of the European Economic Community into a larger European “Union” did not produce a real union but a misnomer; in fact, the designations should have been reversed. The earlier smaller “community” of Western Europe was politically more united than the subsequently larger “union” of almost all of Europe, with the latter defining its unity through a partially common currency but without a genuinely decisive central political authority or a common fiscal policy. Economically, the European Union is a leading global player; it has a population and external trade considerably larger than that of the United States. However, through its cultural, ideological, and economic connections to America and more concretely through NATO, Europe remains a junior geopolitical partner to the United States in the semiunified West. The EU could have combined global power with global systemic relevance but, since the final collapse of their empires, the European powers chose to leave the more costly task of maintaining global security to America in order to use their resources to create a life-style of socially assured security (from the cradle throughout early retirement) funded by escalating public debts unrelated to economic growth.

As a consequence, the EU as such is not a major independent power on the global scene, even though Great Britain, France, and Germany enjoy a residual global status. Both Great Britain and France have been entitled since 1945, together with America, Russia, and China, to the right of veto in the UN Security Council and—like them—they also possess nuclear weapons. However, Great Britain remains wary of European unity while France is unsure of its larger global purpose. Germany is the economic engine of Europe and matches China in its exporting prowess but remains reluctant to assume military responsibilities outside of Europe. Therefore, these European states can only truly exercise global influence as part of the larger Union, despite all of the EU’s current collective weaknesses.

In contrast, China’s remarkable economic momentum, its capacity for decisive political decisions motivated by clearheaded and self-centered national interest, its relative freedom from debilitating external commitments, and its steadily increasing military potential coupled with the worldwide expectation that soon it will challenge America’s premier global status justify ranking China just below the United States in the current international hierarchy. Symptomatic of China’s growing self-confidence is its state-controlled media’s frequent allusions to the increasing worldwide perception of China as America’s emerging rival in global preeminence—despite China’s residual and still-unresolved internal difficulties: rural vs. urban inequality and the potential of popular resentment of absolute political authority.

A sequential ranking of other major powers beyond the top two would be imprecise at best. Any list, however, has to include Russia, Japan, and India, as well as the EU’s informal leaders: Great Britain, Germany, and France. Russia ranks high geopolitically largely because of its rich stores of oil and gas and its continued status as a nuclear power second only to the United States, though that military asset is diluted by its domestic economic, political, and demographic handicaps, not to mention the fact that from both the east and west it faces economically much more powerful neighbors. Without nuclear weapons or the dependence of some European states on Russian oil and gas, Russia would otherwise not rank very high on the pyramid of global geopolitical power. Economically, it lags significantly behind Japan, and a strategic choice by Japan to pursue a more active international role could elevate it above Russia as a major global player. India, regionally assertive and globally ambitious, is the new entrant into the presumptive top list, but it remains hindered by the strategic antagonism with its two immediate neighbors, China and Pakistan, as well as by its various social and demographic weaknesses. Brazil and Indonesia have already laid claims to participation in global economic decision making within the G-20 and aspire to take regional leadership roles in Latin America and in Southeast Asia, respectively.

The foregoing composition of the current global elite thus represents, as already noted, a historic shift in the global distribution of power away from the West as well as the dispersal of that power among four different regions of the world. In a positive sense, with the self-serving domination of major portions of the world by European powers now a thing of the past, these new realities of power are more representative of the world’s diversity. The days when an exclusive Western club—dominated by Great Britain, France, or the United States—could convene to share global power at the Congress of Vienna, at the Versailles Conference, or at the Bretton Woods meeting, are irrevocably gone. But—given the persistence of historically rooted antagonisms and regional rivalries among the currently more diversified and geographically widespread ten leading powers—this new state of affairs also highlights the increased difficulty of consensual global decision making at a time when humanity as a whole is increasingly confronting critical challenges, some potentially even to its very survival.

It is far from certain how enduring that new convent of leading states will prove to be. One should be mindful of the fact that in the course of only one century—from approximately 1910 to 2010—the ranking hierarchy of global power changed significantly no less than five times, with all but the fourth signaling a divisive deterioration in the global preeminence of the West. First, on the eve of World War I the British and French empires were globally dominant and were allied to a weakened Tsarist Russia recently defeated by a rising Japan. They were being challenged from within Europe by the ambitious imperial Germany supported by a weak Austro-Hungarian and declining Ottoman empires. An industrially dynamic America, though initially neutral, made in the end a decisive contribution to the Anglo-French victory. Second, during the interlude between World War I and World War II, Great Britain seemed internationally preeminent, though with America clearly on the rise. However, by the early 1930s the rapidly rearming and increasingly revisionist Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were already plotting against the status quo. Third, Europe was shattered by World War II, which produced in its wake the forty-year-long Cold War between the American and Soviet superpowers, the might of each overshadowing everyone else. Fourth, the ultimate “defeat” of the Soviet Union in the Cold War led to a brief unipolar phase in world affairs dominated by America as the sole global superpower. And, fifth, by 2010, with America still preeminent, a new and more complex constellation of power containing a growing Asian component was visibly emerging.

FIGURE 1.1 DECLINING IMPERIAL LONGEVITY

The high frequency of these power shifts signals a historical acceleration in the changing distribution of global power. Prior to the twentieth century, global preeminence by a leading state generally lasted for a century or so. But as conscious political activism became an increasingly widespread social phenomenon, politics became more volatile and global preeminence less enduring. The fact that the West remained globally dominant during the entire twentieth century should not obscure the fact that conflicts within the West undermined its once-dominant position.

Indeed, even today the uncertainty regarding the durability of America’s current international leadership, the end of Europe’s central role in world affairs as well as the EU’s political impotence, Russia’s nostalgia for a leading global role that it is incapable of exerting, the speculation that China before long might be ascending to global primacy, India’s impatient ambition to be seen as a world power and its external as well as internal vulnerabilities, and Japan’s lingering reluctance to translate its global economic weight into political assertiveness collectively reflect the reality of a more broadly based but less cohesive global leadership.

3: THE IMPACT OF GLOBAL POLITICAL AWAKENING

The ongoing dispersal of global power is furthered by the emergence of a volatile phenomenon: the worldwide political awakening of populations until recently politically passive or repressed. Occurring recently in Central and Eastern Europe and lately in the Arab world, this awakening is the cumulative product of an interactive and interdependent world connected by instant visual communications and of the demographic youth bulge in the less advanced societies composed of the easy-to-mobilize and politically restless university students and the socially deprived unemployed. Both groups resent the richer portions of humanity and the privileged corruption of their rulers. That resentment of authority and privilege is unleashing populist passions with unprecedented potential for generating large-scale turmoil.

The universal scope and the dynamic impact of this new social phenomenon is historically novel. For most of history, humanity has lived not only in compartmentalized isolation but also in a state of political stupor. Most people in most places were neither politically conscious nor politically active. Their daily lives were focused on personal survival in conditions of physical and material deprivation. Religion offered some solace while social traditions provided some degree of cultural stability and occasional collective relief from the hardships of fate. Political authority was remote, often seen as an extension of divine will, and frequently legitimated by hereditary entitlement. Struggles for power at the top tended to be confined to a narrow circle of participants, while group conflicts with adjoining communities focused largely on territorial or material possessions and were fueled by instinctive ethnic hatreds and/or divergent religious beliefs. Political conversations, political convictions, and political aspirations were a preoccupation of a privileged social stratum in the immediate vicinity of the ruler itself.

As societies became more complex, a distinctive class of people engaging in political discourse and in struggles for political power emerged at the apex of organized society. Whether in the court of the Roman or of the Chinese emperor, the courtiers or mandarins were active crypto-politicians, though focused more on palace intrigues than on wider policy issues. And as societies evolved even further and literacy increased, more participants entered the political dialogue: the landed aristocracy in the rural areas, wealthy merchants and artisans in the expanding towns and cities, and a limited elite class of intellectuals. Still, the populace at large remained politically disengaged and dormant, except for periodic outbreaks of violent but largely anarchistic outrage, as in the case of peasant uprisings.

The first socially inclusive but geographically limited manifestation of political awakening was the French Revolution. Its eruption was driven by a combination of atavistic rebellion from below and novel mass propagation from above. It occurred in a society in which a traditional monarchy was sustained by a politically literate but internally divided aristocracy and by a materially privileged Catholic Church. That power structure was then challenged by a politically literate but restless bourgeoisie engaged in public agitation in key urban centers and even by a peasantry increasingly aware of its relative deprivation. Historically unprecedented political pamphleteering, facilitated by the printing press, rapidly translated social resentments into revolutionary political aspirations crystallized in emotionally captivating slogans: “liberté, égalité, fraternité.”

The resulting violent political upheaval produced a sudden unifying surge in collective and self-conscious national identity. Napoleon’s military triumphs in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1789 owed at least as much to the collective fervor of a politically awakened French national identity as to his military genius. And that fervor spread rapidly throughout Europe, with its contagion first favoring Napoleonic victories and then contributing, in a rebound (having aroused Prussian, Austrian, and Russian nationalistic passions), to Napoleon’s defeat. But by the “Spring of Nations” in 1848, much of Europe—notably Germany but also Italy, Poland, and soon Hungary—plunged into an age of fervent nationalism and socially self-conscious political awakening. By then, the more politically conscious Europeans had also become captivated by the democratic ideals of the socially less revolutionary but politically more inspirational humanism of the distant, open, and postaristocratic American republic.

However, less than a century later, Europe fell victim to wars inspired by its own conflicting populist passions. The two world wars coupled with the explicit anti-imperialism of the Bolshevik Revolution, helped make mass political awakening a global phenomenon. The conscripted soldiers of the British and French colonial empires returned home imbued with a new awareness of their own political, racial, and religious identity and of their economic privation. Concurrently, the increasing access to Western higher education and the resulting spread of Western ideas drew the minds of those in the upper strata of the indigenous populations of European colonies to captivating notions of nationalism and socialism.

Nehru of India, Jinnah of Pakistan, Sukarno of Indonesia, Nkrumah of Ghana, and Senghor of Senegal traveled such paths from their own personal political awakening to charismatic leadership in mass political proselytization, culminating in their leadership of respective national emancipations. Japan’s sudden burst into world politics at the turn of the twentieth century also stimulated a parallel political awakening in China, then smarting under the humiliating subordination imposed on it by the European powers. Sun Yat-sen launched his quest for China’s renewal in the early twentieth century having benefited from personal observation of Japan’s self-initiated Western-style modernization; while another young Chinese, Deng Xiaoping, absorbed Marxism as a young student in distant Paris.

Over the course of two centuries, the revolution in mass communication and the gradual spread of literacy, especially among the growing concentration of urban residents, transformed individual political awakening into a mass phenomenon. Pamphleteering and the emergence of regularly published newspapers during the nineteenth century began to stoke popular desires for political change. As people in the middle and upper classes took on the habit of regularly reading newspapers, their political awareness grew and political dialogue about the state of national affairs became a normal social occurrence. The appearance of radio in the early twentieth century then gave political oratory a nationwide reach (think of Hitler) while giving even distant events a sense of dramatic immediacy, exposing hitherto politically passive and semi-isolated peoples to a cacophony of political clamor.

The recent emergence of global television, and then of the Internet, has in turn connected previously isolated populations with the world at large, and also augmented the ability of political activists to reach out to and mobilize the political loyalty and emotions of millions. The universal connectivity of the late twentieth century transformed political unrest into a worldwide learning process of street tactics in which otherwise disparate and distant political factions can borrow tactics from one another. Slogans quickly spread from Nepal to Bolivia, as have colored scarves from Iran to Thailand, videos of suffering from Sarajevo to Gaza, and tactics of urban demonstrations from Tunis to Cairo—all promptly ending up on TV and computer screens throughout the world. Thanks to these new means of communication, mass political agitation now involves a rapid geographical leapfrogging of shared experience.

In some countries, demographic “youth bulges”—disproportionately large populations of young adults who confront difficulties in their cultural and economic assimilation—are especially explosive when combined with the revolution in communication technology. Often educated but unemployed, their resulting frustration and alienation make them ideal recruits for militant groups. According to a 2007 report by Population Action International, youth bulges were present in a full 80% of civil conflicts between 1970 and 1999. It is also noteworthy that the Middle East and the broader Muslim world have a higher than average proportion of youth. Iraq, Afghanistan, the Palestinian territories, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan all have massive youth populations whom their economies are unable to absorb and who are susceptible to disaffection and militancy. It is in this region, from east of Egypt to west of China, that accelerating political awakening has the greatest potential for violent upheaval. It is in effect a demographic powder keg. Similarly dangerous demographic realities prevail in African countries such as the Congo and Nigeria as well as in some Latin American countries.

The younger generation of today is particularly responsive to political awakening because the Internet and cellular phones liberate these young adults from their often-confining local political reality. They are also the political mass most inclined to militancy. In much of today’s world, the millions of university students are thus the equivalent of Marx’s concept of the “proletariat”: the restless, resentful postpeasant workers of the early industrial age, susceptible to ideological agitation and revolutionary mobilization. Political sloganeering through the mass media can translate their often-inchoate sentiments into simple and focused formulations and action prescriptions. The more the latter can be related to specific resentments and deeply felt emotions, the more politically mobilizing they become. Not surprisingly, discourses about democracy, rule of law, or religious tolerance resonate less. In some cases, Manichean visions—rooted in reactions to subjectively felt racial, ethnic, or religious humiliations—have a more powerful appeal, such as in Iran in 1979. They explain better what the young feel while legitimating their thirst for retribution and even revenge.

The popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East during the first few months of 2011 provide a particularly vivid example of the potential consequences of the accelerating political awakening, characterized by the convergence of disaffected youth bulges with increasingly accessible mass communication technology. They were driven by resentment against corrupt and unresponsive national leaderships. Local frustrations with unemployment, political disfranchisement, and prolonged periods of “emergency” laws provided the immediate motivating impulse. Leaders who had been secure in their rule for decades found themselves suddenly confronted by the political awakening that had been gestating in the Middle East since the end of the imperial era. The interaction between the disenfranchised but politically aroused youth populations of the Middle East and the revolution in communication technology is now an important reality of geopolitics in this century.

In its very early phases, political awakening tends to be most impatient and prone to violence. Its passion is fueled by a deep sense of historically aggrieved self-righteousness. In addition, early political awakening is characterized by a focus on national, ethnic, and religious identity—especially identity defined by opposition to a detested external force rather than by abstract political concepts. Thus, populist nationalisms in Europe were initially ignited by opposition to Napoleon’s conquests. Japanese political stirrings in the late Tokugawa period of the nineteenth century first took the form of antiforeign agitation and then turned by the first half of the twentieth century into an expansionist and militaristic nationalism. Chinese opposition to imperial domination surfaced violently in the Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the twentieth century and gradually led to a nationalistic revolution and civil wars.

In today’s postcolonial world, the newly politically awakened partake of a common historical narrative that interprets their relative deprivation, prolonged external domination, denial of self-dignity, and continued personal disadvantage as the collective legacy of Western domination. Its anticolonial sharp edge is aimed at the West, fed by still vivid memories of British, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Belgian, Dutch, Italian, and German colonialism. In Muslim countries of the Middle East, even despite the fascination of many young Muslims with American mass culture, the intense resentment against American military intrusion in the Middle East as well as its support of Israel is now seen also as an extension of Western imperialism and thus as a major source of their felt deprivation.^{1}

A prescient analysis of this phenomenon concluded, shortly after the end of the Cold War, that “one common and fundamental ingredient in cultural non-Westernisms today is a profound resentment against the West,”[3] citing as an evocative example the poem “Vultures” by the Senegalese poet, David Diop:

The poem encapsulated the anti-imperialist sentiment of a significant part of the new intelligentsia in the postcolonial regions. If such hostile views of the West were to become the universal mindset of the politically activated populations of the emerging countries, the more benign democratic values that the West was so hopefully propagating at the outset of the twenty-first century could become historically irrelevant.

Two further and indirect consequences of the phenomenon of global political awakening are also noteworthy. The first is that it marks the end of relatively inexpensive and one-sided military campaigns by technologically superior expeditionary forces of the West against politically passive, poorly armed, and rarely united native populations. During the nineteenth century native fighters in head-on battles against the British in Central Africa, against the Russians in the Caucasus, or against the Americans by Indians typically suffered casualties at a ratio of 100:1 in comparison to their well-organized and much better armed opponents. In contrast, the dawn of political awakening has stimulated a wider sense of shared commitment, greatly increasing the costs of external domination, as demonstrated in recent years by the highly motivated, much more persistent, and tactically unconventional popular resistance (“the people’s war”) of the Vietnamese, Algerians, Chechens, and Afghans against foreign domination. In the resulting battles of will and of endurance, the technologically more advanced were not necessarily the winners.

Second, the pervasive spread of political awakening has given special importance to a previously absent dimension of competitive world politics: global systemic rivalry. Prior to the onset of the industrial age, military prowess (weaponry, organization, motivation, training, and strategic leadership), backed by an adequate treasury, was the central and determining asset in the quest for a dominant status, with the issue often resolved by just one decisive land or sea battle.

In our time, comparative societal performance, as popularly judged, has become a significant component of national influence. Before 1800, no attention was paid to comparative social statistics—nor were they readily available—in the rivalries of France vs. Great Britain, or Austria-Hungary vs. the Ottoman Empire, not to mention China vs. Japan. But in the course of less than a century, societal comparisons have become increasingly important in shaping competitive international standings in public approval, especially for the top protagonists such as the United States and the USSR during the Cold War, or currently the United States and China. Discriminating awareness of varying social conditions is now commonplace. Rapid and extensive access to international news and information, availability of numerous social and economic indexes, growing interactions between geographically distant economies and stock exchanges, and widespread reliance on television and the Internet all produce a continuous flow of comparative assessments of the actual performance and future promise of all major social systems. The systemic rivalry among major contenders is now scrutinized continuously, and its future outcome is currently seen by the world at large as especially dependent on the relative performance—carefully measured and projected even decades ahead—of the economies and social systems of America and China respectively.

The broad effect is a world that is now shaped to an unprecedented degree by the interaction of popular emotions, collective perceptions, and conflicting narratives of a humanity no longer subjectively submissive to the objective power of one politically and culturally specific region. As a result, the West as such is not finished, but its global supremacy is over. That, in turn, underlines the central dependence of the West’s future role on America, on its domestic vitality, and on the historical relevance of its foreign policy. How the American system performs at home, and how America conducts itself abroad will determine the place and role of the West in the new objective and subjective global context. Both issues are wide open today, and ultimately their constructive resolution is America’s current and unique historical responsibility.

The continued attraction of the American system—the vital relevance of its founding principles, the dynamism of its economic model, the good will of its people and government—is therefore essential if America is to continue playing a constructive global role. Only by demonstrating the capacity for a superior performance of its societal system can America restore its historical momentum, especially in the face of a China that is increasingly attractive to the third world. For example, when the United States presented itself as the undisputed champion of anticolonialism at the end of World War II, America became the preferred alternative—primarily in contrast to Great Britain—for those states seeking to bring themselves into modernity via free enterprise. A state perceived by others to be riding the crest of history finds it less difficult to secure its interests. And, while there is yet no explicitly ideological alternative to the United States in this new century, China’s continued success could become a systemic alternative if the American system became widely viewed as an irrelevant model.

In such a case, the West as a whole could be in jeopardy. America’s historic decline would undermine the political self-confidence and international influence of Europe, which then would be standing alone in a potentially more turbulent world. The European Union—with its aging population, lower rates of growth, even larger public debts than America’s, and, at this stage of its history, the lack of a shared “European” ambition to act as a major power—is unlikely to be able to replace America’s once-compelling attraction or fill its global role.

The EU thus faces potential irrelevance as a model for other regions. Too rich to be relevant to the world’s poor, it attracts immigration but cannot encourage imitation. Too passive regarding international security, it lacks the influence needed to discourage America from pursuing policies that have intensified global cleavages, especially with the world of Islam. Too self-satisfied, it acts as if its central political goal is to become the world’s most comfortable retirement home. Too set in its ways, it fears multicultural diversity. With one half of the geopolitical West thus disengaged from active participation in ensuring global geopolitical stability at a time when the world’s new pecking order of power lacks coherence and a shared vision of the future, global turmoil and a rise in political extremism could become the West’s unintended legacy.

Paradoxically, that makes the self-revitalization of America more crucial than ever.