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USA And The Future Of The World - dhu - 01-17-2008
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Harold Bloom: 'What We Are Seeing Is the Fall of America'</b>
..
"I am 77 years old and I have never seen this country in such a bad state. It is madness. What we are seeing is the fall of the Roman Empire, only now it is the fall of America, the glory of our Empire. This war is what Parthia was to Rome.
.....<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
USA And The Future Of The World - dhu - 01-19-2008
<b>Confessions of an Economic Hit Man - Part I</b>
USA And The Future Of The World - ramana - 01-23-2008
The discussion in this thread has to do with the ideology, the 'idee fixee', of the US so to speak and not the mundane everyday politics of the US.
USA And The Future Of The World - dhu - 01-23-2008
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->http://www.burnsidewriterscollective.com/reviews/books/e/jacques_ellul_the_presence_of0207.php
Of Islam, Ellul writes, âIt is the only power today that challenges world structuresâ¦Islam has again set upon its conquest of the world, and it is a true revolution because it denies the modern State (based on the idea that the State and religion must be one single reality) and <b>because it globally rejects Technique, the technical system of the West, in order to return to traditional social structures - which is the most absolute revolution.</b>â
While he decries the Islamist revolution, Ellul also rejects the technical system of the West, and the biggest leap a Westerner like me must make in reading his writing is to accept that Technique has become god for the West. If youâre willing to accept that discussion, and many American Christians are not, Ellulâs words are a fascinating study and prediction of what the American Church has become over 50 years later.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
USA And The Future Of The World - dhu - 01-25-2008
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Societal_collapse
Toynbeeâs theory of decay
The British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, in his 12-volume magnum opus A Study of History, theorized that all civilizations pass through several distinct stages: genesis, growth, time of troubles, universal state, and disintegration.
Toynbee argues that the breakdown of civilizations is not caused by loss of control over the environment, over the human environment, or attacks from outside. Rather, it comes from the deterioration of the "Creative Minority," which eventually ceases to be creative and degenerates into merely a "Dominant Minority" (who forces the majority to obey without meriting obedience). He argues that creative minorities deteriorate due to a worship of their "former self," by which they become prideful, and fail to adequately address the next challenge they face.
He argues that the ultimate sign a civilization has broken down is when the dominant minority forms a "Universal State," which stifles political creativity. He states:
â First the Dominant Minority attempts to hold by forceâagainst all right and reasonâa position of inherited privilege which it has ceased to merit; and then the Proletariat repays injustice with resentment, fear with hate, and violence with violence when it executes its acts of secession. Yet the whole movement ends in positive acts of creationâand this on the part of all the actors in the tragedy of disintegration. The Dominant Minority creates a universal state, the Internal Proletariat a universal church, and the External Proletariat a bevy of barbarian war-bands. â
He argues that, as civilizations decay, they form an "Internal Proletariat" and an "External Proletariat." The Internal proletariat is held in subjugation by the dominant minority inside the civilization, and grows bitter; the external proletariat exists outside the civilization in poverty and chaos, and grows envious. He argues that as civilizations decay, there is a "schism in the body social," whereby:
  * abandon and self-control together replace creativity, and
  * truancy and martyrdom together replace discipleship by the creative minority.
He argues that in this environment, people resort to archaism (idealization of the past), futurism (idealization of the future), detachment (removal of oneself from the realities of a decaying world), and transcendence (meeting the challenges of the decaying civilization with new insight, as a Prophet). He argues that those who Transcend during a period of social decay give birth to a new Church with new and stronger spiritual insights, around which a subsequent civilization may begin to form after the old has died.
Toynbee's use of the word 'church' refers to the collective spiritual bond of a common worship, or the same unity found in some kind of social order.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
USA And The Future Of The World - dhu - 01-25-2008
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Machiavelli and the Decay of Western Civilization
by Prof Paul Eidelberg
Freeman Center For Strategic Studies
However, concomitant with the moral decline of the individual, there has been an outward improvement in the character of society. This dichotomy is not paradoxical. <b>The progress of science and technology, the hallmark of Western civilization, was actually the result of egoism or moral decline (facilitated by Machiavelliâs corrosive attack on Greco-Christian morality).</b><!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
USA And The Future Of The World - dhu - 01-26-2008
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Do you ever feel like the end is near?
Iâm not talking about the Christian Apocalypse. I<b>âm talking about a more down to earth sort of End. The End of America. The End of Prosperity. </b>The End of Normal Weather Patterns. The End of Real Jobs.
That sort of End.
I started this blog, because, after seven years of the George Bush administration and six of those years with me, personally, working in call centers because that was the only kind of work I was offered (I have a bachelorâs degree, a masterâs degree, I have 25 years of professional experience and lots of published articles)âafter all that<b>âAfter all that, I do kind of feel like, well, the End is near.
</b>
<b>At the very least, the end of America as I knew it has already arrived. </b>Whoever acquires the presidency in 2008, whether that person be Democrat, Republican, Independent, or Dictator, that person will have a real job on his or her hands. Our moral reputation has been destroyed in the eyes of the rest of the world. <b>Our economy is tanking and tanking fast. </b><b>We produce less and less while being urged to consume more and more. </b>We are in so much debt as a nation that it is to the point where, if the US were a person, the US would be paying one credit card with the tiny bit of credit left on another credit card. In other words, we are running out of fast, easy solutions and staring into the abyss.
<b>Iâm afraid to look back for fear of turning into a pillar of salt.</b>
Being a self-destructive type, Iâm going to do it anyway. Iâm going to look back, and then if Iâm still here, Iâm going to say stuff I shouldnât.
Thatâs why I created this blog.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
USA And The Future Of The World - dhu - 01-26-2008
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Strange rise of Eastern neo-colonialism</b>
20 Jan 2008,
Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar
(TOI)
For 60 years, the International Monetary Fund has bailed out distressed economies, imposing onerous conditions aimed at ensuring that the loans are repaid. The borrowers have often complained that loan conditions violate their sovereignty. The IMF is dominated by rich countries, and always has a European chief. So, leftists have long accused the IMF of being a tool of western imperialism, controlling the Third World through financial muscle.
Today, a remarkable transformation has taken place. Very few developing countries are borrowing from the IMF, which therefore cannot meet its running costs and is retrenching 400 of its staff. Meanwhile, developing countries have amassed trillions of dollars of foreign exchange. They are using these funds to bail out Western financial institutions hit by the housing collapse in the US. In the process, they could acquire more influence over those they rescue than the IMF could ever dream of. This can with only modest exaggeration be called Eastern neo-colonialism, in financial, though not military, terms. It is already giving the shivers to Western governments.
Last week, Citibank â the world's biggest commercial bank â received $ 14.5 billion from investment funds in China and Kuwait, over and above the $ 7.5 billion it got last November from the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. Merrill Lynch got $ 5.6 billion from Temasek of Singapore last November, and is now negotiating another $ 6.6 bn. The top Swiss bank, UBS, suffered mortgage losses of $ 10 bn and was rescued by investors from Singapore and the Middle East. The list of distressed Western financial institutions keeps growing, and many will need repeated injections of billions. In the process, they are increasingly becoming owned by Asian government funds.
These flows from Asia to the West now dwarf anything the IMF ever gave. Most IMF loans were well below $ 1 bn, and virtually none exceeded $ 4 bn. Never has the world witnessed such a remarkable reversal of financial roles and muscle. Western countries are now the ones worrying about loss of sovereignty, and of neo-colonial subjugation by the new financial overlords of Asia.
Historically, Third World countries have depended on dollars from the West. But after the Asian financial crisis, many Asian countries decided to run big current account surpluses, and so accumulated billions in forex reserves. Meanwhile, the sharp rise in oil prices gave oil exporters unprecedented surpluses, estimated at $ 300 bn per year. So, the balance of financial advantage shifted from the West to the East.
Countries with long-term financial surpluses have placed part of their forex reserves in what are called Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs), to make long-term investment for future generations. These funds today control a mighty $ 2,876 bn, almost thrice the GDP of India. The lion's share belongs to oil and gas exporters. India too should enter the fray, with a modest kitty of say $ 30 bn.
What are the main differences between the old and new rescue outfits, the IMF and Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs)? The IMF provides loans to distressed governments, while SWFs invest in equities, including those of distressed MNCs. The IMF imposes onerous conditions on borrowers. SWFs don't impose conditions, but become part-owners of the distressed corporations, with obvious implications for influence and control. The IMF takes many months to draw up detailed loan agreements with conditions, whereas SWFs make money available almost instantly.
This makes SWFs more attractive to those in distress, but also more dangerous in a long-term sense. Successive injections of equity by SWFs may enable them to not just influence but take over western MNCs. This is the new fear stalking western governments.
Already France and Germany have said that they will not allow backdoor takeover in this manner. No backdoor takeovers have been attempted so far. But given the sheer size of SWFs, it will happen in some cases. In Thailand, Singapore acquired control of a Thai telecom firm owned by former Prime Minister Shinwatra, and caused a full-blown political crisis. J Sainsbury, one of the biggest British retail chains, has been acquired by Qatar's SWF.
The US in 2005 refused to allow the Chinese to take over Unocal, a big oil corporation. When Dubai Ports acquired P&O, the Britishâbased ports MNC, it acquired several port operations in the US. This led to an outcry about security in the US, and Dubai Ports had to sell all its US operations.
Western countries want SWFs to provide money but not exercise any influence. Exactly as Third World borrowers from the IMF wanted money, but without conditions. Alas, there is no such thing as a free lunch in finance. Up to a point, SWFs may be passive investors. But as their stakes rise, they will demand additional seats on the boards of MNCs, as befits part-owners. This could provide them with long-term influence, exceeding anything the IMF acquired through loans. Ultimately, it could lead to complete takeovers, something the IMF could never do.
So, the balance of world financial power has changed, probably forever. Eastern neo-colonialism is combating the western variety, and India needs to become a small part of it. This will transform global relationships <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
USA And The Future Of The World - acharya - 01-26-2008
http://www.newsweek.com/id/42407
USA And The Future Of The World - dhu - 01-26-2008
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->01/16/08
Larry Summers: "Recession Could be Deep and Severe"
Reported on [Bloom]berg.
Yes, Mr. Summers, but you have no idea as to how deep and how severe. T<b>he US economy will not recover from it in your lifetime (there will be some cyclical upturns but none that will bring back to the peak in 2007). Is that clear? Crystal clear??!</b>
Jas [Jain]<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
USA And The Future Of The World - dhu - 01-27-2008
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->....
<b>The fact is that the Vatican was the world's first multinational, centuries ago. </b><b>The Knights Templar was one of its offshoots in the middle ages, specifically to run many kinds of business across Christendom. </b>Thats where structures of corporate governance were perfected, through centuries of experience based on agressive expansion and long distance management. <b>This became the role model on which various enterprises including the East India Trading Company and many others were based. Today's MNCs are based on such structures.</b>
<b>
So church did not learn corporate governance from businesses, but the other way around. </b>Hindu religious groups were never organized in a similar manner as they lacked similar ambitions. Even today most gurus and sampradayas shy away from professionalizing and corporatizing because they see this as un-spiritual in some sense. But many like Amritayananda, Swaminarayan, Brahmakumaris, etc. are running massive organized social service activities. Prof Ramdas Lamb of Hawaii has
activities with shudra hindus who are intense Ram bhaktas and dislike being called dalits or oppressed. They are poor but remain staunch Hindus. He needs funds which you could provide, along with helping hands.
regards,
rajiv
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
USA And The Future Of The World - dhu - 01-29-2008
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><i>In spite (or more likely because) being a desi, this Macauleyite ignores the world's 5th largest economic power today, India, and worse, equates it with the Pukistani failed-state when he deigns to note it. What he has to say about China's rise is nothing new, and he assumes that there will be no internal discord from the unequal society that is kept bottled-up by the Communist kleptocracy there. No planned society has ever managed to dominate the world. The great powers have always had free and open societies that allowed them to thrive over long periods. The Persians, the Ottomans, the Soviets couldn't maintain their empire because of internal repression that stifled innovation.
As for Europe, the demographics there are scarcely better than that of Russia; and they have a growing Mosie fifth-column to hold them down even further; something that afflicts India as well. OTOH, India has the native-intelligence and the technical abilities of its Hindus, unhampered by totalitarian medieval ideologies, that gives it a leg-up over aging Eurabia. </i>
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Waving Goodbye to Hegemony - Parag Khanna
</b><img src='http://sajablogs.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/01/27/parag_khanna150x220.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />
Turn on the TV today, and you could be forgiven for thinking itâs 1999. Democrats and Republicans are bickering about where and how to intervene, whether to do it alone or with allies and what kind of world America should lead. Democrats believe they can hit a reset button, and Republicans believe muscular moralism is the way to go. Itâs as if the first decade of the 21st century didnât happen â and almost as if history itself doesnât happen. But the distribution of power in the world has fundamentally altered over the two presidential terms of George W. Bush, both because of his policies and, more significant, despite them. Maybe the best way to understand how quickly history happens is to look just a bit ahead.
It is 2016, and the Hillary Clinton or John McCain or Barack Obama administration is nearing the end of its second term. America has pulled out of Iraq but has about 20,000 troops in the independent state of Kurdistan, as well as warships anchored at Bahrain and an Air Force presence in Qatar. Afghanistan is stable; Iran is nuclear. China has absorbed Taiwan and is steadily increasing its naval presence around the Pacific Rim and, from the Pakistani port of Gwadar, on the Arabian Sea. The European Union has expanded to well over 30 members and has secure oil and gas flows from North Africa, Russia and the Caspian Sea, as well as substantial nuclear energy. Americaâs standing in the world remains in steady decline.
Why? Werenât we supposed to reconnect with the United Nations and reaffirm to the world that America can, and should, lead it to collective security and prosperity? Indeed, improvements to Americaâs image may or may not occur, but either way, they mean little. Condoleezza Rice has said America has no âpermanent enemies,â but it has no permanent friends either. Many saw the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as the symbols of a global American imperialism; in fact, they were signs of imperial overstretch. Every expenditure has weakened Americaâs armed forces, and each assertion of power has awakened resistance in the form of terrorist networks, insurgent groups and âasymmetricâ weapons like suicide bombers. Americaâs unipolar moment has inspired diplomatic and financial countermovements to block American bullying and construct an alternate world order. That new global order has arrived, and there is precious little Clinton or McCain or Obama could do to resist its growth.
<b>The Geopolitical Marketplace</b>
At best, Americaâs unipolar moment lasted through the 1990s, but that was also a decade adrift. The post-cold-war âpeace dividendâ was never converted into a global liberal order under American leadership. So now, rather than bestriding the globe, we are competing â and losing â in a geopolitical marketplace alongside the worldâs other superpowers: the European Union and China. This is geopolitics in the 21st century: the new Big Three. Not Russia, an increasingly depopulated expanse run by Gazprom.gov; not an incoherent Islam embroiled in internal wars; and not India, lagging decades behind China in both development and strategic appetite. The Big Three make the rules â their own rules â without any one of them dominating. And the others are left to choose their suitors in this post-American world.
The more we appreciate the differences among the American, European and Chinese worldviews, the more we will see the planetary stakes of the new global game. Previous eras of balance of power have been among European powers sharing a common culture. The cold war, too, was not truly an âEast-Westâ struggle; it remained essentially a contest over Europe. What we have today, for the first time in history, is a global, multicivilizational, multipolar battle.
In Europeâs capital, Brussels, technocrats, strategists and legislators increasingly see their role as being the global balancer between America and China. Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, a German member of the European Parliament, calls it âEuropean patriotism.â The Europeans play both sides, and if they do it well, they profit handsomely. Itâs a trend that will outlast both President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, the self-described âfriend of America,â and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, regardless of her visiting the Crawford ranch. It may comfort American conservatives to point out that Europe still lacks a common army; the only problem is that it doesnât really need one. Europeans use intelligence and the police to apprehend radical Islamists, social policy to try to integrate restive Muslim populations and economic strength to incorporate the former Soviet Union and gradually subdue Russia. Each year European investment in Turkey grows as well, binding it closer to the E.U. even if it never becomes a member. And each year a new pipeline route opens transporting oil and gas from Libya, Algeria or Azerbaijan to Europe. What other superpower grows by an average of one country per year, with others waiting in line and begging to join?
Robert Kagan famously said that America hails from Mars and Europe from Venus, but in reality, Europe is more like Mercury â carrying a big wallet. The E.U.âs market is the worldâs largest, European technologies more and more set the global standard and European countries give the most development assistance. And if America and China fight, the worldâs money will be safely invested in European banks. Many Americans scoffed at the introduction of the euro, claiming it was an overreach that would bring the collapse of the European project. Yet today, Persian Gulf oil exporters are diversifying their currency holdings into euros, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has proposed that OPEC no longer price its oil in âworthlessâ dollars. President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela went on to suggest euros. It doesnât help that Congress revealed its true protectionist colors by essentially blocking the Dubai ports deal in 2006. With London taking over (again) as the worldâs financial capital for stock listing, itâs no surprise that Chinaâs new state investment fund intends to locate its main Western offices there instead of New York. Meanwhile, Americaâs share of global exchange reserves has dropped to 65 percent. Gisele Bündchen demands to be paid in euros, while Jay-Z drowns in 500 euro notes in a recent video. American soft power seems on the wane even at home.
And Europeâs influence grows at Americaâs expense. While America fumbles at nation-building, Europe spends its money and political capital on locking peripheral countries into its orbit. Many poor regions of the world have realized that they want the European dream, not the American dream. Africa wants a real African Union like the E.U.; we offer no equivalent. Activists in the Middle East want parliamentary democracy like Europeâs, not American-style presidential strongman rule. Many of the foreign students we shunned after 9/11 are now in London and Berlin: twice as many Chinese study in Europe as in the U.S. We didnât educate them, so we have no claims on their brains or loyalties as we have in decades past. More broadly, America controls legacy institutions few seem to want â like the International Monetary Fund â while Europe excels at building new and sophisticated ones modeled on itself. The U.S. has a hard time getting its way even when it dominates summit meetings â consider the ill-fated Free Trade Area of the Americas â let alone when itâs not even invited, as with the new East Asian Community, the regionâs answer to Americaâs Apec.
The East Asian Community is but one example of how China is also too busy restoring its place as the worldâs âMiddle Kingdomâ to be distracted by the Middle Eastern disturbances that so preoccupy the United States. In Americaâs own hemisphere, from Canada to Cuba to Chávezâs Venezuela, China is cutting massive resource and investment deals. Across the globe, it is deploying tens of thousands of its own engineers, aid workers, dam-builders and covert military personnel. In Africa, China is not only securing energy supplies; it is also making major strategic investments in the financial sector. The whole world is abetting Chinaâs spectacular rise as evidenced by the ballooning share of trade in its gross domestic product â and China is exporting weapons at a rate reminiscent of the Soviet Union during the cold war, pinning America down while filling whatever power vacuums it can find. Every country in the world currently considered a rogue state by the U.S. now enjoys a diplomatic, economic or strategic lifeline from China, Iran being the most prominent example.
Without firing a shot, China is doing on its southern and western peripheries what Europe is achieving to its east and south. Aided by a 35 million-strong ethnic Chinese diaspora well placed around East Asiaâs rising economies, a Greater Chinese Co-Prosperity Sphere has emerged. Like Europeans, Asians are insulating themselves from Americaâs economic uncertainties. Under Japanese sponsorship, they plan to launch their own regional monetary fund, while China has slashed tariffs and increased loans to its Southeast Asian neighbors. Trade within the India-Japan-Australia triangle â of which China sits at the center â has surpassed trade across the Pacific.
At the same time, a set of Asian security and diplomatic institutions is being built from the inside out, resulting in Americaâs grip on the Pacific Rim being loosened one finger at a time. From Thailand to Indonesia to Korea, no country â friend of Americaâs or not â wants political tension to upset economic growth. To the Western eye, it is a bizarre phenomenon: small Asian nation-states should be balancing against the rising China, but increasingly they rally toward it out of Asian cultural pride and an understanding of the historical-cultural reality of Chinese dominance. And in the former Soviet Central Asian countries â the so-called Stans â China is the new heavyweight player, its manifest destiny pushing its Han pioneers westward while pulling defunct microstates like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, as well as oil-rich Kazakhstan, into its orbit. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization gathers these Central Asian strongmen together with China and Russia and may eventually become the âNATO of the East.â
The Big Three are the ultimate âFrenemies.â Twenty-first-century geopolitics will resemble nothing more than Orwellâs 1984, but instead of three world powers (Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia), we have three hemispheric pan-regions, longitudinal zones dominated by America, Europe and China. As the early 20th-century European scholars of geopolitics realized, because a vertically organized region contains all climatic zones year-round, each pan-region can be self-sufficient and build a power base from which to intrude in othersâ terrain. But in a globalized and shrinking world, no geography is sacrosanct. So in various ways, both overtly and under the radar, China and Europe will meddle in Americaâs backyard, America and China will compete for African resources in Europeâs southern periphery and America and Europe will seek to profit from the rapid economic growth of countries within Chinaâs growing sphere of influence. Globalization is the weapon of choice. The main battlefield is what I call âthe second world.â
<b>The Swing States</b>
There are plenty of statistics that will still tell the story of Americaâs global dominance: our military spending, our share of the global economy and the like. But there are statistics, and there are trends. To really understand how quickly American power is in decline around the world, Iâve spent the past two years traveling in some 40 countries in the five most strategic regions of the planet â the countries of the second world. They are not in the first-world core of the global economy, nor in its third-world periphery. Lying alongside and between the Big Three, second-world countries are the swing states that will determine which of the superpowers has the upper hand for the next generation of geopolitics. From Venezuela to Vietnam and Morocco to Malaysia, the new reality of global affairs is that there is not one way to win allies and influence countries but three: Americaâs coalition (as in âcoalition of the willingâ), Europeâs consensus and Chinaâs consultative styles. The geopolitical marketplace will decide which will lead the 21st century.
The key second-world countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, South America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia are more than just âemerging markets.â If you include China, they hold a majority of the worldâs foreign-exchange reserves and savings, and their spending power is making them the global economyâs most important new consumer markets and thus engines of global growth â not replacing the United States but not dependent on it either. I.P.O.âs from the so-called BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) alone accounted for 39 percent of the volume raised globally in 2007, just one indicator of second-world countriesâ rising importance in corporate finance â even after you subtract China. When Tata of India is vying to buy Jaguar, you know the landscape of power has changed. Second-world countries are also fast becoming hubs for oil and timber, manufacturing and services, airlines and infrastructure â all this in a geopolitical marketplace that puts their loyalty up for grabs to any of the Big Three, and increasingly to all of them at the same time. Second-world states wonât be subdued: in the age of network power, they wonât settle for being mere export markets. Rather, they are the places where the Big Three must invest heavily and to which they must relocate productive assets to maintain influence.
While traveling through the second world, I learned to see countries not as unified wholes but rather as having multiple, often disconnected, parts, some of which were on a path to rise into the first world while other, often larger, parts might remain in the third. I wondered whether globalization would accelerate these nationsâ becoming ever more fragmented, or if governments would step up to establish central control. Each second-world country appeared to have a fissured personality under pressures from both internal forces and neighbors. I realized that to make sense of the second world, it was necessary to assess each country from the inside out.
Second-world countries are distinguished from the third world by their potential: the likelihood that they will capitalize on a valuable commodity, a charismatic leader or a generous patron. Each and every second-world country matters in its own right, for its economic, strategic or diplomatic weight, and its decision to tilt toward the United States, the E.U. or China has a strong influence on what others in its region decide to do. Will an American nuclear deal with India push Pakistan even deeper into military dependence on China? Will the next set of Arab monarchs lean East or West? The second world will shape the worldâs balance of power as much as the superpowers themselves will.
In exploring just a small sample of the second world, we should start perhaps with the hardest case: Russia. Apparently stabilized and resurgent under the Kremlin-Gazprom oligarchy, why is Russia not a superpower but rather the ultimate second-world swing state? For all its muscle flexing, Russia is also disappearing. Its population decline is a staggering half million citizens per year or more, meaning it will be not much larger than Turkey by 2025 or so â spread across a land so vast that it no longer even makes sense as a country. Travel across Russia today, and youâll find, as during Soviet times, city after city of crumbling, heatless apartment blocks and neglected elderly citizens whose value to the state diminishes with distance from Moscow. The forced Siberian migrations of the Soviet era are being voluntarily reversed as children move west to more tolerable and modern climes. Filling the vacuum they have left behind are hundreds of thousands of Chinese, literally gobbling up, plundering, outright buying and more or less annexing Russiaâs Far East for its timber and other natural resources. Already during the cold war it was joked that there were âno disturbances on the Sino-Finnish border,â a prophecy that seems ever closer to fulfillment.
Russia lost its western satellites almost two decades ago, and Europe, while appearing to be bullied by Russiaâs oil-dependent diplomacy, is staging a long-term buyout of Russia, whose economy remains roughly the size of Franceâs. The more Europe gets its gas from North Africa and oil from Azerbaijan, the less it will rely on Russia, all the while holding the lever of being by far Russiaâs largest investor. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development provides the kinds of loans that help build an alternative, less corrupt private sector from below, while London and Berlin welcome Russiaâs billionaires, allowing the likes of Boris Berezovsky to openly campaign against Putin. The E.U. and U.S. also finance and train a pugnacious second-world block of Baltic and Balkan nations, whose activists agitate from Belarus to Uzbekistan. Privately, some E.U. officials say that annexing Russia is perfectly doable; itâs just a matter of time. In the coming decades, far from restoring its Soviet-era might, Russia will have to decide whether it wishes to exist peacefully as an asset to Europe or the alternative â becoming a petro-vassal of China.
Turkey, too, is a totemic second-world prize advancing through crucial moments of geopolitical truth. During the cold war, NATO was the principal vehicle for relations with Turkey, the Westâs listening post on the southwestern Soviet border. But with Turkeyâs bending over backward to avoid outright E.U. rejection, its refusal in 2003 to let the U.S. use Turkish territory as a staging point for invading Iraq marked a turning point â away from the U.S. âAmerica always says it lobbies the E.U. on our behalf,â a Turkish strategic analyst in Ankara told me, âbut all that does is make the E.U. more stringent. We donât need that kind of help anymore.â
To be sure, Turkish pride contains elements of an aggressive neo-Ottomanism that is in tension with some E.U. standards, but this could ultimately serve as Europeâs weapon to project stability into Syria, Iraq and Iran â all of which Europe effectively borders through Turkey itself. Roads are the pathways to power, as I learned driving across Turkey in a beat-up Volkswagen a couple of summers ago. Turkeyâs master engineers have been boring tunnels, erecting bridges and flattening roads across the countryâs massive eastern realm, allowing it to assert itself over the Arab and Persian worlds both militarily and economically as Turkish merchants look as much East as West. Already joint Euro-Turkish projects have led to the opening of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, with a matching rail line and highway planned to buttress European influence all the way to Turkeyâs fraternal friend Azerbaijan on the oil-rich Caspian Sea.
It takes only one glance at Istanbulâs shimmering skyline to realize that even if Turkey never becomes an actual E.U. member, it is becoming ever more Europeanized. Turkey receives more than $20 billion in foreign investment and more than 20 million tourists every year, the vast majority of both from E.U. countries. Ninety percent of the Turkish diaspora lives in Western Europe and sends home another $1 billion per year in remittances and investments. This remitted capital is spreading growth and development eastward in the form of new construction ventures, kilim factories and schools. With the accession of Romania and Bulgaria to the E.U. a year ago, Turkey now physically borders the E.U. (beyond its narrow frontier with Greece), symbolizing how Turkey is becoming a part of the European superpower.
Western diplomats have a long historical familiarity, however dramatic and tumultuous, with Russia and Turkey. But what about the Stans: landlocked but resource-rich countries run by autocrats? Ever since these nations were flung into independence by the Soviet collapse, China has steadily replaced Russia as their new patron. Trade, oil pipelines and military exercises with China under the auspices of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization make it the new organizing pole for the region, with the U.S. scrambling to maintain modest military bases in the region. (Currently it is forced to rely far too much on Afghanistan after being booted, at Chinaâs and Russiaâs behest, from the Karshi Khanabad base in Uzbekistan in 2005.) The challenge of getting ahead in the strategically located and energy-rich Stans is the challenge of a bidding contest in which values seem not to matter. While China buys more Kazakh oil and America bids for defense contracts, Europe offers sustained investment and holds off from giving President Nursultan Nazarbayev the high-status recognition he craves. Kazakhstan considers itself a âstrategic partnerâ of just about everyone, but tell that to the Big Three, who bribe government officials to cancel the othersâ contracts and spy on one another through contract workers â all in the name of preventing the others from gaining mastery over the fabled heartland of Eurasian power.
Just one example of the lengths to which foreigners will go to stay on good terms with Nazarbayev is the current negotiation between a consortium of Western energy giants, including ENI and Exxon, and Kazakhstanâs state-run oil company over the development of the Caspianâs massive Kashagan oil field. At present, the consortium is coughing up at least $4 billion as well as a large hand-over of shares to compensate for delayed exploration and production â and Kazakhstan isnât satisfied yet. The lesson from Kazakhstan, and its equally strategic but far less predictable neighbor Uzbekistan, is how fickle the second world can be, its alignments changing on a whim and causing headaches and ripple effects in all directions. To be distracted elsewhere or to lack sufficient personnel on the ground can make the difference between winning and losing a major round of the new great game.
The Big Three dynamic is not just some distant contest by which America ensures its ability to dictate affairs on the other side of the globe. Globalization has brought the geopolitical marketplace straight to Americaâs backyard, rapidly eroding the two-centuries-old Monroe Doctrine in the process. In truth, America called the shots in Latin America only when its southern neighbors lacked any vision of their own. Now they have at least two non-American challengers: China and Chávez. It was Simón BolÃvar who fought ferociously for South Americaâs independence from Spanish rule, and today it is the newly renamed Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela that has inspired an entire continent to bootstrap its way into the global balance of power on its own terms. Hugo Chávez, the countryâs clownish colonel, may last for decades to come or may die by the gun, but either way, he has called Americaâs bluff and won, changing the rules of North-South relations in the Western hemisphere. He has emboldened and bankrolled leftist leaders across the continent, helped Argentina and others pay back and boot out the I.M.F. and sponsored a continentwide bartering scheme of oil, cattle, wheat and civil servants, reminding even those who despise him that they can stand up to the great Northern power. Chávez stands not only on the ladder of high oil prices. He relies on tacit support from Europe and hardheaded intrusion from China, the former still the countryâs largest investor and the latter feverishly repairing Venezuelaâs dilapidated oil rigs while building its own refineries.
But Chávezâs challenge to the United States is, in inspiration, ideological, whereas the second-world shift is really structural. Even with Chávez still in power, it is Brazil that is reappearing as South Americaâs natural leader. Alongside India and South Africa, Brazil has led the charge in global trade negotiations, sticking it to the U.S. on its steel tariffs and to Europe on its agricultural subsidies. Geographically, Brazil is nearly as close to Europe as to America and is as keen to build cars and airplanes for Europe as it is to export soy to the U.S. Furthermore, Brazil, although a loyal American ally in the cold war, wasted little time before declaring a âstrategic allianceâ with China. Their economies are remarkably complementary, with Brazil shipping iron ore, timber, zinc, beef, milk and soybeans to China and China investing in Brazilâs hydroelectric dams, steel mills and shoe factories. Both China and Brazilâs ambitions may soon alter the very geography of their relations, with Brazil leading an effort to construct a Trans-Oceanic Highway from the Amazon through Peru to the Pacific Coast, facilitating access for Chinese shipping tankers. Latin America has mostly been a geopolitical afterthought over the centuries, but in the 21st century, all resources will be competed for, and none are too far away.
The Middle East â spanning from Morocco to Iran â lies between the hubs of influence of the Big Three and has the largest number of second-world swing states. No doubt the thaw with Libya, brokered by America and Britain after Muammar el-Qaddafi declared he would abandon his countryâs nuclear pursuits in 2003, was partly motivated by growing demand for energy from a close Mediterranean neighbor. But Qaddafi is not selling out. He and his advisers have astutely parceled out production sharing agreements to a balanced assortment of American, European, Chinese and other Asian oil giants. Mindful of the history of Western oil companiesâ exploitation of Arabia, he â like Chávez in Venezuela and Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan â has also cleverly ratcheted up the pressure on foreigners to share more revenue with the regime by tweaking contracts, rounding numbers liberally and threatening expropriation. What I find in virtually every Arab country is not such nationalism, however, but rather a new Arabism aimed at spreading oil wealth within the Arab world rather than depositing it in the United States as in past oil booms. And as Egypt, Syria and other Arab states receive greater investment from the Persian Gulf and start spending more on their own, they, too, become increasingly important second-world players who can thwart the U.S.
Saudi Arabia, for quite some years to come still the planetâs leading oil producer, is a second-world prize on par with Russia and equally up for grabs. For the past several decades, Americaâs share of the foreign direct investment into the kingdom decisively shaped the countryâs foreign policy, but today the monarchy is far wiser, luring Europe and Asia to bring their investment shares toward a third each. Saudi Arabia has engaged Europe in an evolving Persian Gulf free-trade area, while it has invested close to $1 billion in Chinese oil refineries. Make no mistake: America was never all powerful only because of its military dominance; strategic leverage must have an economic basis. A major common denominator among key second-world countries is the need for each of the Big Three to put its money where its mouth is.
For all its historical antagonism with Saudi Arabia, Iran is playing the same swing-state game. Its diplomacy has not only managed to create discord among the U.S. and E.U. on sanctions; it has also courted China, nurturing a relationship that goes back to the Silk Road. Today Iran represents the final square in Chinaâs hopscotch maneuvering to reach the Persian Gulf overland without relying on the narrow Straits of Malacca. Already China has signed a multibillion-dollar contract for natural gas from Iranâs immense North Pars field, another one for construction of oil terminals on the Caspian Sea and yet another to extend the Tehran metro â and it has boosted shipment of ballistic-missile technology and air-defense radars to Iran. Several years of negotiation culminated in December with Sinopec sealing a deal to develop the Yadavaran oil field, with more investments from China (and others) sure to follow. The longer International Atomic Energy Agency negotiations drag on, the more likely it becomes that Iran will indeed be able to stay afloat without Western investment because of backing from China and from its second-world friends â without giving any ground to the West.
Interestingly, it is precisely Muslim oil-producing states â Libya, Saudi Arabia, Iran, (mostly Muslim) Kazakhstan, Malaysia â that seem the best at spreading their alignments across some combination of the Big Three simultaneously: getting what they want while fending off encroachment from others. America may seek Muslim allies for its image and the âwar on terror,â but these same countries seem also to be part of what Samuel Huntington called the âConfucian-Islamic connection.â What is more, China is pulling off the most difficult of superpower feats: simultaneously maintaining positive ties with the worldâs crucial pairs of regional rivals: Venezuela and Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Iran, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, India and Pakistan. At this stage, Western diplomats have only mustered the wherewithal to quietly denounce Chinese aid policies and value-neutral alliances, but they are far from being able to do much of anything about them.
This applies most profoundly in Chinaâs own backyard, Southeast Asia. Some of the most dynamic countries in the region Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam are playing the superpower suitor game with admirable savvy. Chinese migrants have long pulled the strings in the regionâs economies even while governments sealed defense agreements with the U.S. Today, Malaysia and Thailand still perform joint military exercises with America but also buy weapons from, and have defense treaties with, China, including the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation by which Asian nations have pledged nonaggression against one another. (Indonesia, a crucial American ally during the cold war, has also been forming defense ties with China.) As one senior Malaysian diplomat put it to me, without a hint of jest, âCreating a community is easy among the yellow and the brown but not the white.â Tellingly, it is Vietnam, because of its violent histories with the U.S. and China, which is most eager to accept American defense contracts (and a new Intel microchip plant) to maintain its strategic balance. Vietnam, like most of the second world, doesnât want to fall into any one superpowerâs sphere of influence.
<b>The Anti-Imperial Belt</b>
The new multicolor map of influence â a Venn diagram of overlapping American, Chinese and European influence â is a very fuzzy read. No more âTheyâre with usâ or âHeâs our S.O.B.â Mubarak, Musharraf, Malaysiaâs Mahathir and a host of other second-world leaders have set a new standard for manipulative prowess: all tell the U.S. they are its friend while busily courting all sides.
What is more, many second-world countries are confident enough to form anti-imperial belts of their own, building trade, technology and diplomatic axes across the (second) world from Brazil to Libya to Iran to Russia. Indeed, Russia has stealthily moved into position to construct Iranâs Bushehr nuclear reactor, putting it firmly in the Chinese camp on the Iran issue, while also offering nuclear reactors to Libya and arms to Venezuela and Indonesia. Second-world countries also increasingly use sovereign-wealth funds (often financed by oil) worth trillions of dollars to throw their weight around, even bullying first-world corporations and markets. The United Arab Emirates (particularly as represented by their capital, Abu Dhabi), Saudi Arabia and Russia are rapidly climbing the ranks of foreign-exchange holders and are hardly holding back in trying to buy up large shares of Western banks (which have suddenly become bargains) and oil companies. Singaporeâs sovereign-wealth fund has taken a similar path. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia plans an international investment fund that will dwarf Abu Dhabiâs. From Switzerland to Citigroup, a reaction is forming to limit the shares such nontransparent sovereign-wealth funds can control, showing just how quickly the second world is rising in the global power game.
To understand the second world, you have to start to think like a second-world country. What I have seen in these and dozens of other countries is that globalization is not synonymous with Americanization; in fact, nothing has brought about the erosion of American primacy faster than globalization. While European nations redistribute wealth to secure or maintain first-world living standards, on the battlefield of globalization second-world countriesâ state-backed firms either outhustle or snap up American companies, leaving their workers to fend for themselves. The second worldâs first priority is not to become America but to succeed by any means necessary.
<b>The Non-American World</b>
Karl Marx and Max Weber both chastised Far Eastern cultures for being despotic, agrarian and feudal, lacking the ingredients for organizational success. Oswald Spengler saw it differently, arguing that mankind both lives and thinks in unique cultural systems, with Western ideals neither transferable nor relevant. Today the Asian landscape still features ancient civilizations but also by far the most people and, by certain measures, the most money of any region in the world. With or without America, Asia is shaping the worldâs destiny â and exposing the flaws of the grand narrative of Western civilization in the process.
The rise of China in the East and of the European Union within the West has fundamentally altered a globe that recently appeared to have only an American gravity â pro or anti. As Europeâs and Chinaâs spirits rise with every move into new domains of influence, Americaâs spirit is weakened. The E.U. may uphold the principles of the United Nations that America once dominated, but how much longer will it do so as its own social standards rise far above this lowest common denominator? And why should China or other Asian countries become âresponsible stakeholders,â in former Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellickâs words, in an American-led international order when they had no seat at the table when the rules were drafted? Even as America stumbles back toward multilateralism, others are walking away from the American game and playing by their own rules.
The self-deluding universalism of the American imperium â that the world inherently needs a single leader and that American liberal ideology must be accepted as the basis of global order â has paradoxically resulted in America quickly becoming an ever-lonelier superpower. Just as there is a geopolitical marketplace, there is a marketplace of models of success for the second world to emulate, not least the Chinese model of economic growth without political liberalization (itself an affront to Western modernization theory). As the historian Arnold Toynbee observed half a century ago, Western imperialism united the globe, but it did not assure that the West would dominate forever â materially or morally. Despite the âmirage of immortalityâ that afflicts global empires, the only reliable rule of history is its cycles of imperial rise and decline, and as Toynbee also pithily noted, the only direction to go from the apogee of power is down.
The web of globalization now has three spiders. What makes America unique in this seemingly value-free contest is not its liberal democratic ideals â which Europe may now represent better than America does â but rather its geography. America is isolated, while Europe and China occupy two ends of the great Eurasian landmass that is the perennial center of gravity of geopolitics. When America dominated NATO and led a rigid Pacific alliance system with Japan, South Korea, Australia and Thailand, it successfully managed the Herculean task of running the world from one side of it. Now its very presence in Eurasia is tenuous; it has been shunned by the E.U. and Turkey, is unwelcome in much of the Middle East and has lost much of East Asiaâs confidence. âAccidental empireâ or not, America must quickly accept and adjust to this reality. Maintaining Americaâs empire can only get costlier in both blood and treasure. It isnât worth it, and history promises the effort will fail. It already has.
Would the world not be more stable if America could be reaccepted as its organizing principle and leader? Itâs very much too late to be asking, because the answer is unfolding before our eyes. Neither China nor the E.U. will replace the U.S. as the worldâs sole leader; rather all three will constantly struggle to gain influence on their own and balance one another. Europe will promote its supranational integration model as a path to resolving Mideast disputes and organizing Africa, while China will push a Beijing consensus based on respect for sovereignty and mutual economic benefit. America must make itself irresistible to stay in the game.
I believe that a complex, multicultural landscape filled with transnational challenges from terrorism to global warming is completely unmanageable by a single authority, whether the United States or the United Nations. Globalization resists centralization of almost any kind. Instead, what we see gradually happening in climate-change negotiations (as in Bali in December) â and need to see more of in the areas of preventing nuclear proliferation and rebuilding failed states â is a far greater sense of a division of labor among the Big Three, a concrete burden-sharing among them by which they are judged not by their rhetoric but the responsibilities they fulfill. The arbitrarily composed Security Council is not the place to hash out such a division of labor. Neither are any of the other multilateral bodies bogged down with weighted voting and cacophonously irrelevant voices. The big issues are for the Big Three to sort out among themselves.
<b>Less Can Be More</b>
So letâs play strategy czar. You are a 21st-century Kissinger. Your task is to guide the next American president (and the one after that) from the demise of American hegemony into a world of much more diffuse governance. What do you advise, concretely, to mitigate the effects of the past decadeâs policies â those that inspired defiance rather than cooperation â and to set in motion a virtuous circle of policies that lead to global equilibrium rather than a balance of power against the U.S.?
First, channel your inner J.F.K. You are president, not emperor. You are commander in chief and also diplomat in chief. Your grand strategy is a global strategy, yet you must never use the phrase âAmerican national interest.â (It is assumed.) Instead talk about âglobal interestsâ and how closely aligned American policies are with those interests. No more âusâ versus âthem,â only âwe.â That means no more talk of advancing âAmerican valuesâ either. What is worth having is universal first and American second. This applies to âdemocracyâ as well, where timing its implementation is as important as the principle itself. Right now, from the Middle East to Southeast Asia, the hero of the second world â including its democracies â is Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore.
We have learned the hard way that what others want for themselves trumps what we want for them â always. Neither America nor the world needs more competing ideologies, and moralizing exhortations are only useful if they point toward goals that are actually attainable. This new attitude must be more than an act: to obey this modest, hands-off principle is what would actually make America the exceptional empire it purports to be. It would also be something every other empire in history has failed to do.
Second, Pentagonize the State Department. Adm. William J. Fallon, head of Central Command (Centcom), not Robert Gates, is the man really in charge of the U.S. militaryâs primary operations. Diplomacy, too, requires the equivalent of geographic commands â with top-notch assistant secretaries of state to manage relations in each key region without worrying about getting on the daily agenda of the secretary of state for menial approvals. Then weâll be ready to coordinate within distant areas. In some regions, our ambassadors to neighboring countries meet only once or twice a year; they need to be having weekly secure video-conferences. Regional institutions are thriving in the second world â think Mercosur (the South American common market), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), the Gulf Cooperation Council in the Persian Gulf. We need high-level ambassadors at those organizations too. Taken together, this allows us to move beyond, for example, the current Millennium Challenge Account â which amounts to one-track aid packages to individual countries already going in the right direction â toward encouraging the kind of regional cooperation that can work in curbing both terrorism and poverty. Only if you think regionally can a success story have a demonstration effect. This approach will be crucial to the future of the Pentagonâs new African command. (Until last year, African relations were managed largely by European command, or Eucom, in Germany.) Suspicions of America are running high in Africa, and a country-by-country strategy would make those suspicions worse. Finally, to achieve strategic civilian-military harmonization, we have to first get the maps straight. The State Department puts the Stans in the South and Central Asia bureau, while the Pentagon puts them within the Middle-East-focused Centcom. The Chinese divide up the world the Pentagonâs way; so, too, should our own State Department.
Third, deploy the marchmen. Europe is boosting its common diplomatic corps, while China is deploying retired civil servants, prison laborers and Chinese teachers â all are what the historian Arnold Toynbee called marchmen, the foot-soldiers of empire spreading values and winning loyalty. There are currently more musicians in U.S. military marching bands than there are Foreign Service officers, a fact not helped by Congressâs decision to effectively freeze growth in diplomatic postings. In this context, Condoleezza Riceâs âtransformational diplomacyâ is a myth: we donât have enough diplomats for core assignments, let alone solo hardship missions. We need a Peace Corps 10 times its present size, plus student exchanges, English-teaching programs and hands-on job training overseas â with corporate sponsorship.
Thatâs right. In true American fashion, we must build a diplomatic-industrial complex. Europe and China all but personify business-government collusion, so let State raise money from Wall Street as it puts together regional aid and investment packages. American foreign policy must be substantially more than what the U.S. government directs. After all, the E.U. is already the worldâs largest aid donor, and China is rising in the aid arena as well. Plus, each has a larger population than the U.S., meaning deeper benches of recruits, and are not political targets in the present political atmosphere the way Americans abroad are. The secret weapon must be the American citizenry itself. American foundations and charities, not least the Gates and Ford Foundations, dwarf European counterparts in their humanitarian giving; if such private groups independently send more and more American volunteers armed with cash, good will and local knowledge to perform âdiplomacy of the deed,â then the public diplomacy will take care of itself.
Fourth, make the global economy work for us. By resurrecting European economies, the Marshall Plan was a down payment on even greater returns in terms of purchasing American goods. For now, however, as the dollar falls, our manufacturing base declines and Americans lose control of assets to wealthier foreign funds, our scientific education, broadband access, health-care, safety and a host of other standards are all slipping down the global rankings. Given our deficits and political gridlock, the only solution is to channel global, particularly Asian, liquidity into our own public infrastructure, creating jobs and technology platforms that can keep American innovation ahead of the pack. Globalization apologizes to no one; we must stay on top of it or become its victim.
Fifth, convene a G-3 of the Big Three. But donât set the agenda; suggest it. These are the key issues among which to make compromises and trade-offs: climate change, energy security, weapons proliferation and rogue states. Offer more Western clean technology to China in exchange for fewer weapons and lifelines for the Sudanese tyrants and the Burmese junta. And make a joint effort with the Europeans to offer massive, irresistible packages to the people of Iran, Uzbekistan and Venezuela â incentives for eventual regime change rather than fruitless sanctions. A Western change of tone could make China sweat. Superpowers have to learn to behave, too.
Taken together, all these moves could renew American competitiveness in the geopolitical marketplace â and maybe even prove our exceptionalism. We need pragmatic incremental steps like the above to deliver tangible gains to people beyond our shores, repair our reputation, maintain harmony among the Big Three, keep the second world stable and neutral and protect our common planet. Letâs hope whoever is sworn in as the next American president understands this.
<i>Parag Khanna is a senior research fellow in the American Strategy Program of the New America Foundation. This essay is adapted from his book, âThe Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order,â to be published by Random House in March.</i><!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
USA And The Future Of The World - dhu - 01-31-2008
The End of the 'American Century' Is Here
By Conn Hallinan, Foreign Policy in Focus.
USA And The Future Of The World - acharya - 01-31-2008
Here's what Richistan looks like:
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Lower Richistan. About 7.5 million households worth between $1 million to $10 million. However, "many Richistanis say that Lower Richistanis don't even belong in their country. They refer to the Lowers as 'affluent,' the ultimate Richistani insult," Frank writes.
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Middle Richistan. More than two million Americans have a net worth between $10 million and $100 million. This may also include many in Thomas Stanley's "The Millionaire Mind" published in 2000. Their average net worth was $9.2 million, but inflation may protect them from that snarky "affluent" insult.
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Upper Richistan. Frank says there are "thousands" with $100 million to $1 billion. Sadly, the Uppers recently increased with the firings of several greedy CEOs from Citi, Bear, Merrill and Countrywide.
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Billionaireville. Forbes listed only 13 in 1985. By 2007, more than 400. Since 1995 their wealth has more than doubled to over a trillion. Another source says there are more than 1,000 American billionaires, many under the radar.
Although Richistan's population is less than 10 million today, they control more than 90% of America's wealth.
USA And The Future Of The World - acharya - 01-31-2008
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/how-...D&dist=morenews
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/amer...dist=TNMostRead
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/fed-...st=TNMostMailed
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/why-...dist=TNMostRead
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/gold...dist=TNMostRead
USA And The Future Of The World - dhu - 02-01-2008
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->A Japanese challenge to the âend of historyâ
Book Case / Madhuri Santanam Sondhi
Francis Fukuyama made history of sorts by announcing a Hegelian "end of history" shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Although the liberal democratic free-market dispensation failed to evolve worldwide, the goal he prematurely pronounced as realised, lingered on. But so did pluralism, however defined. Shimon Peres on his first visit to India, opened his IIC speech with a dramatic announcement: India and Israel are threatened by the same enemy. After a half minuteâs suspense he named the enemy â cable television!
Fujiwara Masahiko, a distinguished mathematician at Ochanomizu University who has taught at Harvard and Cambridge (UK), in The Dignity of a Nation (Shinchosa Japan 2007) expresses the threat from globalisation somewhat differently: Japanâs obsession with the pursuit of wealth ("economic realism") which informs her domestic, foreign and strategic policy, has degraded her emotional and cultural life and introduced a culture of self-obsession. His attack on the shibboleths of modernism are far more sweeping and radical: he contests the whole concept of the free market democratic utopia.
Each of Fujiwaraâs apparently outrageous statements has a rider. If the so-called "triumph of capitalism" is an illusion, it is so because it has seriously destabilised society. No doubt logic and reason have been the sine qua non of progress in science, mathematics and technology, but "logic alone will drive the world to ruin." Equality and freedom are fictions invented by the West to counteract oppressive monarchism: they have no inherent meaning unless contrasted with slavery. To believe that individuals can pursue pleasure freely, because an "invisible hand" would ensure harmony is a "fatuous" notion. Democracy is a "conceptual wonder," but based on the erroneous assumption that people are capable of making mature judgments. Democracy, moreover, leads to war, not peace, as the populace can always be roused to heights of jingoism or manipulated by a skilful demagogue.
That his book sold over two million copies in Japan indicates a pervasive unease and concern about Japanâs dignity and international stature which her meteoric economic advance and socio-political westernisation have not assuaged. Fujiwara holds that the western definition of progress has led the West itself into a civilisational impasse through over-dependence on and misapplication of enlightenment values like logic, reason, freedom, equality, democracy, and the supposed ultimacy of the economic principle. In imitation, Japan is going even further by cutting at the roots of her own creativity and originality by neglecting Japanese language and literature in the mind-numbing exercise of trying to prioritise the English language.
Many in the subcontinent might regard this at best as old hat, at worst, unrealistic. We have seen the century-old prescriptions of Gandhi, Tagore, the Arya and Brahmo Samajis et al with their varying attempts at adjusting classical or folk tradition with judicious inputs of modernity wilt before the onset of industrialisation, democratisation, urbanisation and now for the younger Indian, mass culture. Count Okakura Kakuzo shared a similar dialogue with Tagore over Meiji Japanâs headlong embrace of the West, generally ascribed to Japanâs desire to recover her lost stature and get even with if not defeat those who had humiliated her.
Fujiwaraâs salvo comes a good century later when modernisation cum westernisation is even more entrenched in the imaginations if not lives of Asian peoples. The basic paradigm is rarely challenged in its essentials, and in that sense although history has not ended, the history of ideas has for the time being, run into a morass. He speaks for a country that modernised earlier (almost three quarters of a century before) and more efficiently than any other in Asia, and despite losing the war, raced on to become world "Number Two." For decades she served as a model of how to combine tradition and modernity, and how to organise a humane and efficient workplace, but now as Asia "rises," she appears to be beset by self-doubt.
Basanta Kumar Mallik and Fujiwara share the starting-point that logic and reason are incapable of delivering any fundamental faith or value, and only come into play after some belief or hypothesis has been a-rationally adopted as true. Such primeval choices are conditioned by culture, environmental circumstances et al. Mallik concurs that worldviews, religious or secular, social, political or cultural, i.e., including democracy, have non-rational (but not irrational) foundations. They only become irrational when taken to be universally true. Fujiwara quotes Godelâs incompleteness theorem to make a similar point. These non-rational non-universal assumptions must needs be unmasked and then reassembled with inputs from other paradigms. This entails combining the undeniable usefulness of western technological and scientific prowess with the emotional and psychic, specifically samurai culture of Japanâs elites.
Fujiwaraâs "shock and awe" tactics aim to expose the ambivalent foundations of the modernist enterprise which systemically generates certain social and political problems: one must search outside modernity for remedies. It is a truism that the humanities have failed to keep pace with the awesome progress in science and technology. The threat of war and destruction is ever with us, its scale magnified with each new dazzling technological innovation.
Fujiwara does not defend his countryâs record in the last World War, nor its roots in Commander Perryâs bullying expedition. He focuses on Japanâs decision to deliberately forsake her samurai culture, abandoning "patriotism" (love of received culture and values) for jingoistic "nationalism." The bushido emphasis on charity, justice, courage and compassionate empathy for the weak and disadvantaged would never sanction the invasion and ill-treatment of a weaker country.
It is difficult to challenge the common-sense of the age until certain anomalies cry out for attention: Fujiwara obviously feels such a moment has arrived to contest modernity in Japan, if not for the world. He advocates an educational focus on Japanese literature and cultivation of Japanese aestheticism which nourishes emotional and psychic development. "Unprofitable" tea ceremonies, flower arrangement or appreciation of cherry blossom have lost their centrality in Japanese life: modernity either museologises culture as the past, or marginalises, or commercially exploits it as ethnicity.
All Asian countries in differing degrees feel threatened by the phenomenon of modernisation or globalisation; Fujiwaraâs prescription of a combination of past and the present, East and West is not new: but the question remains as to whether it is possible to isolate science, technology and industrial organisation from the social ethos from which they have emerged and inject them into a different socio-cultural environment.
The questions he raises are real and affect individuals and societies alike. Aurobindo and Basanta Kumar Mallik had envisioned the near future either as a syncretic or complementary universalisation of the worldâs basic values through an evolutionary process which would lead to a new enlightenment. As optimists we might just interpret the current impasse as a stage in that evolution.
Madhuri Santanam Sondhi can be contacted at mssondhi@hotmail.com<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
USA And The Future Of The World - acharya - 02-02-2008
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USA And The Future Of The World - dhu - 02-03-2008
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->TALE OF TWO NATIONS: Why the US responds differently to the rise of China and of India
The Telegraph (India) ^ | 12/16/07 | SUNANDA K. DATTA-RAY
Singaporeâs Lee Kuan Yew wonders why âIndiaâs peaceful rise hasnât led to unease over the countryâs futureâ whereas âChinaâs peaceful rise (has) raised apprehensionsâ. His comparison of the global (meaning American) response to the two nations in a recent article in Forbes magazine should warn smart-alecky Indians to stop their silly gushing about âChindiaâ and consider a coherent and consistent response to the challenge as Manmohan Singh prepares to visit China.
Lee answers his own question by outlining the Confucian compulsions that drive China to forge ahead on the economic, social and military fronts so that it eventually becomes âa peer competitor, if not an adversaryâ of the United States of America. A China that aspires to best the US is bound to see India as a puny neighbour, as was evident from Liu Shao-chiâs claim that âChina was a great power and had to punish India onceâ. So had Vietnam in 1979 because it, too, was becoming uppity. India may again have to be âpunishedâ â though the instruments of chastisement may be different â if a booming economy and Western applause encourage what the Chinese consider too much assertiveness.
Of course, Indiaâs high annual growth is narrowing the gap. There are also many flaws in the Chinese miracle that admirers seldom acknowledge. But Chinaâs strident territorial claims, aggressive competition for gas, charm offensive in south-east Asia and determination to exclude India from east Asian diplomacy (Malaysia being its catâs-paw) confirm the âsingleness of purpose in policy and its executionâ that prompt American, European and Japanese misgivings.
Leeâs surprise at the US actively promoting Indiaâs growth while actively trying to curb Chinaâs ignores the exigencies of swings in great power politics. Indians cannot forget the bleak years when the US would not sell the Kray computer India sought or components for a light combat aircraft. In contrast, politically acquiescent China received sophisticated dual use technology that laid the foundations of modernization as well as a flood of American investment for its economic revolution. It surprises Indians even more to learn that India is militarily more powerful than China. âIndiaâs navy has an aircraft-carrier force; its air force has the latest Sukhoi and MiG aircraft; its army is among the best trained and equipped in Asia. India can project power across its borders farther and better than China can,â Lee says, âyet there is no fear that India has aggressive intentions.â
Isnât there? Pakistanâs âmajor non-NATO allyâ status, carrying substantial military and economic privileges, meant the Americans were renewing their traditional insurance lest their new investment in India went awry. Nor does the nuclear treaty grant everything India wants. If American wariness of India hasnât quite gone, India is even more cautious, and with better reason too, about China. The spectre of 1962 haunts us still. India knows it cannot match Chinaâs nuclear arsenal, range of ballistic missiles, the numerical strength of the Peopleâs Liberation Army, âstring of pearlsâ (reconnaissance posts) in the Indian Ocean and the strategic triangle of Gwadar in Pakistan, Hambantota in Sri Lanka and Sitwe (Akyab) in Myanmar.
Lee has an instinctive understanding of his ancestral land. He also has a special interest in the Sino-Indian equation because, as he says, Singapore and south-east Asia, sandwiched between the two behemoths, need China and India. His optimistic expectation is that in growing and prospering together, they will pull up the rest of Asia. The reasons he gives for the widespread assumption that the West prefers India to China deserve consideration.
First, India âis a democracy in which numerous political forces are constantly at work, making for an internal system of checks and balancesâ. Coalition governments and communist recalcitrance mean that âIndiaâs development will, from time to time, run into domestic obstructionâ. In short, we dither when the need is for decisive action. Second, being âsurrounded by states in turmoil, India obviously has preoccupations enough to keep its focus fixed on its border regionsâ. In other words, unlike China, India has too much on its plate to threaten anyone.
That can be the accident of geopolitics; it can also owe something to political design. As Lee says, âPakistan is in crisis; a bad outcome there will increase the terrorist threat to India.â Pervez Musharraf in civilian attire wonât have the same command over the army, and any other elected president would have even less. But it is also true that Pakistanâs nuisance value, especially the missile and nuclear strength that go a long way in redressing the regionâs natural geopolitical balance, is largely the product of calculated and sustained American and Chinese patronage.
Third, India does not pose a challenge to Western global dominance â âand wonât until it gets its social infrastructure up to First World standards and further liberalizes its economyâ. But the Chinese are so determined to catch up with the US, Europe and Japan that in 20 to 30 years the world will have to accommodate a more technologically advanced and economically sophisticated China, irrespective of whether it is still a dictatorship or has made some concession to multi-party politics.
Fourth, Indiaâs elite âspeak, write and publish in Englishâ and âhold a wide range of diverse viewsâ. Both make for easy communication with the Anglo-American elite but linguistic familiarity is not the only reason for the latterâs sense of comfort. Leeâs mention in this context of Amartya Senâs The Argumentative Indian suggests a character trait Westerners find appealing. It is not clear whether he thinks this is because argumentativeness indicates disunity or because it implies flexibility.
Chinaâs token gesture of rephrasing its âpeaceful riseâ to âpeaceful developmentâ has not helped. Lee feels that âgreater openness and transparency in Chinese societyâ would make a difference. Now, even those few Chinese who speak or write in English use speech, like Talleyrand, to conceal their innermost thoughts. Chinaâs huge success makes it doubly unpopular with a West that already suffers from the âphobia of the yellow perilâ reinforced by memories of the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square and government censorship. Even if a multi-party China lagged behind India economically, it would, Lee thinks, still invite Western hostility. What he leaves out but has elaborated before is the cultural difference between âintenseâ Chinese and âsoftâ or âspiritualâ Indians that also explains why the West regards the former â and not the latter â as a menace.
Social psychologists might say that a sense of persecution is essential for a nation to mobilize its moral and material resources to tackle the world. But truth to tell, Chinaâs isolation ended with Henry Kissingerâs 1971 mission. Apart from the technological and financial help already mentioned, Americaâs Cold War patronage also provided the diplomatic respectability China did not enjoy when India was its only non-communist champion on the international stage. The Sino-US rapprochement forced Southeast Asian countries like Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines swiftly to change tack and establish diplomatic relations with China. Indonesia, the biggest regional power, was the last. Chinese-dominated Singapore with massive economic relations with China, and Chinaâs most eloquent interlocutor on the world stage, tactfully deferred the formality of diplomatic ties until then.
Having enabled China to reach this height, the Americans might feel their protégé has (to lapse into a vulgarism) become too big for its boots. That does not concern India. What does is Chinaâs view of itself and its place in Asia and the world. That does not mean China is out to put down India. But any equation Lee suggests must reconcile Indiaâs dignity and growing stature with what Jawaharlal Nehru called Chinaâs âMiddle Kingdom complexâ. I suspect that knowing this, Southeast Asians feel obliged to propitiate China in the same way as the ancient Greeks called the Furies, the good-natured ladies in the hope of flattering them into being benign. But there is no reason for India to follow suit. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
USA And The Future Of The World - dhu - 02-04-2008
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Tom Hanks' Charlie Wilson Movie: An Imperialist Comedy
By Chalmers Johnson
....
An Imperialist Comedy
Which brings us back to the movie and its reception here. (It has been banned in Afghanistan.) One of the severe side effects of imperialism in its advanced stages seems to be that it rots the brains of the imperialists. They start believing that they are the bearers of civilization, the bringers of light to "primitives" and "savages" (largely so identified because of their resistance to being "liberated" by us), the carriers of science and modernity to backward peoples, beacons and guides for citizens of the "underdeveloped world."
Such attitudes are normally accompanied by a racist ideology that proclaims the intrinsic superiority and right to rule of "white" Caucasians. Innumerable European colonialists saw the hand of God in Darwin's discovery of evolution, so long as it was understood that He had programmed the outcome of evolution in favor of late Victorian Englishmen. (For an excellent short book on this subject, check out Sven Lindquist's "Exterminate All the Brutes.")
..
The tendency of imperialism to rot the brains of imperialists is particularly on display in the recent spate of articles and reviews in mainstream American newspapers about the film. For reasons not entirely clear, an overwhelming majority of reviewers concluded that Charlie Wilson's War is a "feel-good comedy" (Lou Lumenick in the New York Post), a "high-living, hard-partying jihad" (A.O. Scott in the New York<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
USA And The Future Of The World - dhu - 02-04-2008
"Exterminate All the Brutes": One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide
by Sven Lindqvist