The Post-American World: Release 2.0 (3 page)

Since 9/11, Western commentators have been calling on moderate Muslim leaders to condemn jihadist ideology, issue fatwas against suicide bombing, and denounce Al Qaeda. Since about 2006, they’ve begun to do so in significant numbers. In 2007, one of bin Laden’s most prominent Saudi mentors, the preacher and scholar Salman al-Odah, wrote an open letter criticizing him for “fostering a culture of suicide bombings that has caused bloodshed and suffering, and brought ruin to entire Muslim communities and families.” That same year Abdulaziz al ash-Sheikh, the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, issued a fatwa prohibiting Saudis from engaging in jihad abroad and accused both bin Laden and Arab regimes of “transforming our youth into walking bombs to accomplish their own political and military aims.” One of Al Qaeda’s own top theorists, Abdul-Aziz el-Sherif, renounced its extremism, including the killing of civilians and the choosing of targets on the basis of religion and nationality. Sherif—a longtime associate of Zawahiri who crafted what became known as Al Qaeda’s guide to jihad—has called on militants to desist from terrorism, and authored a rebuttal of his former cohorts.

Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the oldest and most prestigious school of Islamic learning, now routinely condemns jihadism. The Darul Uloom Deoband movement in India, home to the original radicalism that influenced Al Qaeda, has inveighed against suicide bombing since 2008. None of these groups or people have become pro-American or liberal, but they have become anti-jihadist. Much more must happen to modernize the Muslim world, but the modernizers are no longer so scared. They have finally realized that, for all the rhetoric of the madrassas and mosques, few people want to live under the writ of Al Qaeda. Those who have, whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, have become its most dedicated opponents. In contrast to Soviet socialism or even fascism in the 1930s, no society looks with admiration and envy on the fundamentalist Islamic model. On an ideological level, it presents no competition to the Western-originated model of modernity that countries across the world are embracing.

A cottage industry of scaremongering has flourished in the West—especially in the United States—since 9/11. Experts extrapolate every trend they don’t like, forgoing any serious study of the data. Many conservative commentators have written about the impending Islamization of Europe (Eurabia, they call it, to make you even more uncomfortable). Except that the best estimates, from U.S. intelligence agencies, indicate that Muslims constitute around 3 percent of Europe’s population now and will rise to between 5 and 8 percent by 2025, after which they will probably plateau. The watchdogs note the musings of every crackpot Imam, search the archives for each reference to the end of days, and record and distribute the late-night TV musings of every nutcase who glorifies martyrdom. They erupt in fury when a Somali taxi driver somewhere refuses to load a case of liquor into his car, seeing it as the beginning of sharia in the West. But these episodes do not reflect the basic direction of the Muslim world. That world is also modernizing, though more slowly than the rest, and there are those who try to become leaders in rebellion against it. The reactionaries in the world of Islam are more numerous and extreme than those in other cultures—that world does have its dysfunctions. But they remain a tiny minority of the world’s billion-plus Muslims. And neglecting the complicated context in which some of these pseudoreligious statements are made—such as an internal Iranian power struggle among clerics and nonclerics—leads to hair-raising but absurd predictions, like Bernard Lewis’s confident claim that Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad planned to mark an auspicious date on the Islamic calendar (August 22, 2006)
by ending the world
. (Yes, he actually wrote that.)

The ideological watchdogs have spent so much time with the documents of jihad that they have lost sight of actual Muslim societies. Were they to step back, they would see a frustration with the fundamentalists, a desire for modernity (with some dignity and cultural pride for sure), and a search for practical solutions—not a mass quest for immortality through death. When Muslims travel, they flock by the millions to see the razzle-dazzle of Dubai, not the seminaries of Iran. The minority that wants jihad is real, but it operates within societies where such activities are increasingly unpopular and irrelevant.

In the West, the effects of terrorism have diminished with each additional attack. After September 11, global financial markets collapsed and did not return to September 10 levels for two months. After the Madrid bombings in 2004, the Spanish market took a month to recover. After the London bombings in July 2005, British stocks were back to prebombing levels in twenty-four hours. The broader economic picture is similar. After 9/11, the United States lost hundreds of billions of dollars in economic activity. The next large attack, the Bali nightclub bombing in 2002, had a similarly dramatic effect on the Indonesian economy, with tourism vanishing and trade and investment drying up for months. A year later, after another Indonesian bombing, this time at the Marriott hotel in Jakarta, the market dropped only briefly, and the Indonesian economy suffered little damage. Bombings in Morocco and Turkey in 2003 had similarly small effects. The 2004 bombings in Spain and 2005 bombings in Britain did nothing to undermine growth.

Of course, things would be different if a major terrorist organization were to acquire significant weapons of mass destruction. A nuclear attack could result in mass panic and a broader breakdown. But such weapons are harder to get than many think, and a more sustained effort from Washington could make it nearly impossible to acquire them in any quantity. Biological terror may seem most worrying because of the ease of acquiring biological agents, but dispersing them effectively is difficult and may lack the dramatic results terrorists crave. And none of this is to suggest that anti-terror activities are unnecessary, but rather that careful, calibrated, intelligent policies are likely to be quite successful.

In some unspoken way, people have recognized that the best counterterrorism policy is resilience. Terrorism is unusual in that it is a military tactic defined by the response of the onlooker. If we are not terrorized, then it doesn’t work. And, from New York and London to Mumbai and Jakarta, people are learning this fact through experience and getting on with life even amid the uncertainty. The most likely scenario—a series of backpack or truck bombings in the United States—would be a shock, but in a couple of weeks its effects would fade and the long-term consequences would likely be minimal. In vast, vigorous, and complex societies—the American economy is now $14 trillion—problems in a few places do not easily spill over. Modern civilization may be stronger than we suspect.

The challenges from rogue states are also real, but we should consider them in context. The GDP of Iran is 1/43 that of the United States, its military spending 1/72 that of the Pentagon.
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If this is 1938, as many conservatives argue, then Iran is Romania, not Germany. North Korea is even more bankrupt and dysfunctional. Its chief threat—the one that keeps the Chinese government awake at night—is that it will implode, flooding the region with refugees. That’s power? These countries can cause trouble in their neighborhood and must be checked and contained, but we need to keep in mind the larger world of which they are a relatively small part. Look at Latin America. Venezuela is a troublemaker, but what has that meant on the ground? The broad trend in the region—exemplified by the policies of the major countries like Brazil, Mexico, and Chile—has been toward open markets, trade, democratic governance, and an outward orientation. And that trend, not Hugo Chávez’s insane rants, represents the direction of history.

The Great Expansion

Today’s relative calm has a deep structural basis. Across the world, economics is trumping politics. What Wall Street analysts call “political risk” is almost nonexistent. Wars, coups, and terrorism have lost much of their ability to derail markets more than temporarily. Again, this may not last (it has not historically), but it has been the world we have lived in for at least a decade.

This is not the first time that political tumult became disconnected from economics. Two earlier periods seem much like our long, post–Cold War expansion: the turn-of-the-century boom of the 1890s and 1900s, and the postwar boom of the 1950s and early 1960s. In both, politics was turbulent and yet growth was robust. These two periods had one feature in common: large countries were entering the world economy, increasing its size and changing its shape. The expansion of the pie was so big that it overwhelmed day-to-day dislocations.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fears of war between European great powers were frequent, often triggered by crises in the Balkans, North Africa, and other hot spots. But the world economy boomed despite flash points and arms races. This was the era of the first great movements of capital, from Europe to the New World. As Germany and the United States industrialized quickly, they became two of the three largest economies in the world.

The 1950s and early 1960s are sometimes remembered as placid, but they were in fact tension-filled times—defined by the early years of the Cold War, fears of conflict with the Soviet Union and China, and a real war in Korea. There were periodic crises—the Taiwan Strait, the Congo, the Suez Canal, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam—that often mushroomed into war. And yet the industrial economies sailed along strongly. This was the second great age of capital movement, with money from the United States pouring into Europe and East Asia. As a consequence, Western Europe rebuilt itself from the ashes of World War II, and Japan, the first non-Western nation to successfully industrialize, grew over 9 percent a year for twenty-three years.

In both periods, these “positive supply shocks”—an economist’s term for a long-run spike in production—caused long, sustained booms, with falling prices, low interest rates, and rising productivity in the emerging markets of the day (Germany, the United States, Japan). At the turn of the twentieth century, despite robust growth in demand, wheat prices declined by 20 to 35 percent in Europe, thanks to American granaries.
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(Similarly, the price of manufactured goods has fallen today because of lower costs in Asia, even as demand for them soars.) In both periods, the new players grew through exports, but imports expanded as well. Between 1860 and 1914, America’s imports increased fivefold, while its exports increased sevenfold.
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We are living through the third such expansion of the global economy, and by far the largest. Over the last two decades, about two billion people have entered the world of markets and trade—a world that was, until recently, the province of a small club of Western countries.
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The expansion was spurred by the movement of Western capital to Asia and across the globe. As a result, between 1990 and 2010, the global economy grew from $22.1 trillion to $62 trillion, and global trade increased 267 percent. The so-called emerging markets have accounted for over half of this global growth, and they now account for over 47 percent of the world economy measured at purchasing power parity (or over 33 percent at market exchange rates). Increasingly, the growth of newcomers is being powered by their own markets, not simply by exports to the West—which means that this is not an ephemeral phenomenon. Nor is it one that is easily derailed. The financial panics, recessions, and debt crises that have left much of the industrialized world dazed for the last three years were unable to halt, or even significantly slow, the ongoing expansion elsewhere.

Some people dismiss such trends by pointing to the rise of Japan in the 1980s, when Westerners were scared that the Japanese would come to dominate the world economy. That turned out to be a phantom fear: Japan in fact went into a long slump, one that continues to this day. But the analogy is misleading. In 1985, Japan was already a wealthy nation. Many experts believed it was on track to unseat the United States as the largest economy, but because Japan’s markets, industries, institutions, and politics were still not fully modernized, the country could not make that final leap. China, by contrast, is still a poor country. It has a per capita GDP of $4,300. It will certainly face many problems as and when it becomes a first-world country. But, for the foreseeable future, it will surely manage to double the size of its economy just by continuing to make toys and shirts and cell phones. India, starting at an even lower base income, will also be able to grow for several decades before hitting the kinds of challenges that derailed Japan. Even if China and India never get past middle-income status, they are likely to be the second- and third-largest economies in the world for much of the twenty-first century.

It is an accident of history that, for the last several centuries, the richest countries in the world have all happened to have small populations. The United States was the biggest of the bunch by far, which is why it has been the dominant player. But such dominance was possible only in a world in which the truly large countries were mired in poverty, unable or unwilling to adopt policies that made them grow. Now the giants are on the move, and, naturally, given their size, they will have a large footprint on the map. Even if the average person in these countries still seems poor by Western standards, their total wealth will be massive. Or to put it in mathematical terms: any number, however small, becomes a large number when multiplied by 2.5 billion (the approximate population of China plus India). It is these two factors—a low starting point and a large population—that guarantee the magnitude and long-term nature of the global power shift.