The Post-American World: Release 2.0 (5 page)

Because of this, certain countries—those endowed with natural resources, especially petroleum and natural gas—get free rides. They are surfing the waves of global growth, getting rich without having to play by most of the rules that govern the global economy. This phenomenon is the strange but inevitable outgrowth of the success of everyone else. These countries are the nonmarket parasites on a market world.

Consider the principal political challenges to the United States and to Western ideas of international order. In the Middle East they come from Iran, in Latin America from Venezuela, and in Eurasia from Russia. All have newfound strength built on oil. Sudan’s ability to defy the world over Darfur would be difficult to imagine absent its oil reserves. Petroleum brings in eye-popping amounts of cash. Iran’s take from oil in 2006 amounted to $50 billion—enough to dispense patronage to interest groups, bribe the army, and stay in power while still having piles left over to foment trouble abroad. This situation is unlikely to change. Resource-rich countries will thrive as long as the others are growing. It’s the yin and yang of today’s globalization.

Not all resource-rich countries are rogues, and the climate of good economic management has led some to use their riches more wisely than before. Canada is becoming a major power, and yet acting extremely responsibly. The Persian Gulf, where so much of the oil revenue flows, is investing more of its profits in infrastructure and industry, rather than in Swiss bank accounts and Monte Carlo casinos (though there is certainly much of that as well). Dubai has become a business-friendly entrepôt, a Middle Eastern Singapore. Other Gulf states are now trying to emulate its success. Saudi Arabia, which for decades has mismanaged its vast fortune, plans to invest $70 billion in new petrochemical projects, aiming to become a leading petrochemical producer by 2015. The Gulf states made $1 trillion in capital investments between 2002 and 2007, and McKinsey and Company estimates that they could invest another $2 trillion over the subsequent decade. This is a state-directed form of capitalism, which is likely to result in narrow development and unlikely to produce self-sustaining growth (although there are strong state-directed elements in European and East Asian capitalism as well). But it is much closer to the global capitalist norm than the economic systems in these countries—from Russia to Saudi Arabia—a generation ago.

Over the long term, the most acute problem of plenty is the impact of global growth on natural resources and the environment. It is not an exaggeration to say that the world is running out of clean air, potable water, agricultural produce, and many vital commodities. Some of these problems can be fixed—by improving efficiency and developing new sources of supply—but progress has been far too slow. Agricultural productivity, for example, is rising. But feeding a global population of eight billion, which we will get to by 2025, will require crop yields to reach four tons per hectare from only three tons today. Similarly, our ability to manage and conserve water is not growing nearly as fast as our consumption of it. World population tripled in the twentieth century, but water consumption increased sixfold. Americans use more than four hundred liters of water a day to drink, cook, and clean themselves. People in poorer countries today are lucky to get forty, but as they get richer, their rising demands will cause greater stress.
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Violent clashes over water have already broken out in Africa and the Middle East. Historically, populations have moved to find water; if water sources dry up in the future, tens of millions of people will be forced to start moving.

Over the last decade, many predictions about the effects of climate change have proven to be underestimates because global growth exceeded all projections. The most recent assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was released in mid-2007. By the year’s end, scientists had shown that the polar ice caps are melting twice as fast as the report expected.
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There is greater demand for electricity, more cars, and more planes than anyone imagined fifteen years ago. And it keeps growing. The McKinsey Global Institute projects that, from 2003 to 2020, the number of vehicles in China will rise from 26 million to 120 million. And then there’s India, Russia, the Middle East—the rest.

Demand for electricity is projected to rise over 4 percent a year for decades. And that electricity will come mostly from the dirtiest fuel available—coal. Coal is cheap and plentiful, so the world relies on it to produce most of its electricity. To understand the impact on global warming, consider this fact. Between 2006 and 2012, China and India will build eight hundred new coal-fired power plants—with combined CO2 emissions five times the total savings of the Kyoto accords.

The Rise of Nationalism

In a globalized world, almost all problems spill over borders. Whether it’s terrorism, nuclear proliferation, disease, environmental degradation, economic crisis, or water scarcity, no issue can be addressed without significant coordination and cooperation among many countries. But while economics, information, and even culture might have become globalized, formal political power remains firmly tethered to the nation-state, even as the nation-state has become less able to solve most of these problems unilaterally. And increasingly, nation-states are becoming less willing to come together to solve common problems. As the number of players—governmental and nongovernmental—increases and each one’s power and confidence grows, the prospects for agreement and common action diminish. This is the central challenge of the rise of the rest—to stop the forces of global growth from turning into the forces of global disorder and disintegration.

The rise of pride and confidence among other nations, particularly the largest and most successful ones, is readily apparent. For me, it was vividly illustrated a few years ago in an Internet café in Shanghai, where I was chatting with a young Chinese executive. He was describing the extraordinary growth that was taking place in his country and a future in which China would be modern and prosperous. He was thoroughly Westernized in dress and demeanor, spoke excellent English, and could comfortably discuss the latest business trends or gossip about American pop culture. He seemed the consummate product of globalization, the person who bridges cultures and makes the world a smaller, more cosmopolitan place. But when we began talking about Taiwan, Japan, and the United States, his responses were filled with bile. He explained in furious tones that were Taiwan to dare to declare independence, China should instantly invade it. He said that Japan was an aggressor nation that could never be trusted. He was sure that the United States deliberately bombed the Chinese embassy during the Kosovo war in 1999, to terrify the Chinese people with its military might. And so on. I felt as if I were in Berlin in 1910, speaking to a young German professional, who in those days would have also been both thoroughly modern and thoroughly nationalist.

As economic fortunes rise, so does nationalism. This is understandable. Imagine that you lived in a country that had been poor and unstable for centuries. And then, finally, things turn and your nation is on the rise. You would be proud and anxious to be seen. This desire for recognition and respect is surging throughout the world. It may seem paradoxical that globalization and economic modernization are breeding political nationalism, but that is so only if we view nationalism as a backward ideology, certain to be erased by the onward march of progress.

Nationalism has always perplexed Americans. When the United States involves itself abroad, it always believes that it is genuinely trying to help other countries better themselves. From the Philippines and Haiti to Vietnam and Iraq, the natives’ reaction to U.S. efforts has taken Americans by surprise. Americans take justified pride in their own country—we call it patriotism—and yet are genuinely startled when other people are proud and possessive of theirs.

In the waning days of Britain’s rule in India, its last viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, turned to the great Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi and said in exasperation, “If we just leave, there will be chaos.” Gandhi replied, “Yes, but it will be our chaos.” That sense of being governed by one’s “own,” without interference, is a powerful feeling in emerging countries, especially those that were once colonies or quasi-colonies of the West.

Zbigniew Brzezinski recently called attention to what he terms a “global political awakening.” He pointed to rising mass passions, fueled by various forces—economic success, national pride, higher levels of education, greater information and transparency, and memories of the past. Brzezinski noted the disruptive aspects of this new force. “The population of much of the developing world is politically stirring and in many places seething with unrest,” he wrote. “It is acutely conscious of social injustice to an unprecedented degree . . . [and this] is creating a community of shared perceptions and envy that can be galvanized and channeled by demagogic political or religious passions. These energies transcend sovereign borders and pose a challenge both to existing states as well as to the existing global hierarchy, on top of which America still perches.”
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In many countries outside the Western world, there is pent-up frustration with having had to accept an entirely Western or American narrative of world history—one in which they either are miscast or remain bit players. Russians have long chafed at the standard narrative about World War II, in which Britain and the United States heroically defeat the forces of fascist Germany and Japan. Given mainstream U.S. historical accounts, from Stephen Ambrose to Ken Burns, Americans could be forgiven for believing that Russia played a minor part in the decisive battles against Hitler and Tojo. In fact, the eastern front was the central arena of World War II. It involved more land combat than all other theaters of the war put together and resulted in thirty million deaths. It was where three-quarters of all German forces fought and where Germany incurred 70 percent of its casualties. The European front was in many ways a sideshow, but in the West it is treated as the main event. As the writer Benjamin Schwarz has pointed out, Stephen Ambrose “lavishes [attention] on the U.S.-British invasion of Sicily, which drove 60,000 Germans from the island, but completely ignores Kursk—the largest battle in history, in which at least 1.5 million Soviets and Germans fought, and which occurred at exactly the same time. . . . [M]uch as it may make us squirm, we must admit that the struggle against Nazi Germany . . . was primarily, as the great military historian John Erickson called it, ‘Stalin’s war.’”
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Or consider the perspective on the same war from another spot on the map. An Indian friend explained to me, “For Britain and America, World War II is a heroic struggle in which freedom triumphs over evil. For us, it was a battle to which Britain committed India and its armed forces without bothering to consult us. London told us to die for an idea of freedom that it was at that very moment brutally denying to us.”

Such divergent national perspectives have always existed, but today, thanks to greater education, information, and confidence, they are widely disseminated on new news networks, cable channels, and Internet sites of the emerging world. Many of the “rest” are dissecting the narratives, arguments, and assumptions of the West and countering them with a different view of the world. “When you tell us that we support a dictatorship in Sudan to have access to its oil,” a young Chinese official told me in 2006, “what I want to say is, ‘And how is that different from your support for a medieval monarchy in Saudi Arabia?’ We see the hypocrisy, we just don’t say anything, yet.”

After the Cold War ended, there was a general hope and expectation that China and Russia would move inexorably into the post–World War II Western political and economic system. When George H. W. Bush spoke of “a new world order,” he meant simply that the old Western one would be extended worldwide. Perhaps this view stemmed from the postwar experience with Japan and Germany, both of which rose to the heights of economic power and yet were accommodating, cooperative, and largely silent members of the existing order. But perhaps those were special circumstances. The two countries had unique histories, having waged aggressive wars and become pariahs as a consequence, and they faced a new threat from Soviet communism and relied on American military power for their protection. The next round of rising powers might not be so eager to “fit in.”

We still think of a world in which a rising power must choose between two stark options: integrate into the Western order, or reject it, becoming a rogue nation and facing the penalties of excommunication. In fact, rising powers appear to be following a third way: entering the Western order but doing so on their own terms—thus reshaping the system itself. As the political scientists Naazneen Barma, Ely Ratner, and Steven Weber point out, in a world where everyone feels empowered, countries can choose to bypass this Western “center” entirely and forge their own ties with one another.
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In a post-American world, there may be no center to integrate into. U.S. Secretary of State James Baker suggested in 1991 that the world was moving toward a hub-and-spoke system, with every country going through the United States to get to its destination. The twenty-first-century world might be better described as one of point-to-point routes, with new flight patterns being mapped every day. (This is true even in a physical sense: in just ten years, the number of Russian visitors to China increased more than fourfold, from 489,000 in 1995 to 2.2 million in 2005.) The focus has shifted. Countries are increasingly interested in themselves—the story of their rise—and pay less attention to the West and the United States. As a result, the urgent discussions on the presidential campaign trail throughout 2007 and 2008 about the need to lessen anti-Americanism were somewhat off-point. The world is moving from anger to indifference, from anti-Americanism to post-Americanism.