The Post-American World

Since the year 2000, there has been an endless parade of political crises around the world, yet the global economy has, for the most part, improved. In the wake of the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, Israel’s stock market surpassed what it was before the war. The Iraq War was politically devastating for the Middle East, but Iraq’s neighbors all became more prosperous in its wake, not less. Part of the explanation is that despite the onslaught of bad headlines, organized violence is much less a part of today’s world than in the past. 

Contemporary mass media might create the impression that the world is worse off than it is because there is immediate and widespread knowledge of awful events when they occur. Terrorist violence is specifically designed to gain media coverage and shock a wide audience, but the actual number of victims remains fairly low. The threat of terrorism is a real one, as 9/11 and many deadly attacks since have attested, but government action is typically enough to contain the threat to a manageable degree. Al Qaeda had hoped that the Iraq War would be a battleground on which to defeat the West, but instead, it turned Sunni Muslims against Shi’a Muslims, alienating many local people whom they tried to attract to their cause along with respected Islamic scholars. The overwhelming majority of people in the Arab and Muslim world are looking to enter the modern age, not return to an imagined fundamentalist past.

Terrorism, among other threats, has a more limited effect because “across the world, economics is trumping politics” (19). The growth of the global economy has been so immense that it dwarves the political challenges that occur simultaneously. Even when the more developed parts of the world go through recessions or slowdowns, it does not necessarily halt growth in developing markets, especially those with massive populations like China and India. In the 1970s, developing countries sought a middle road between US-style capitalism and Soviet central planning, but the decline and ultimate collapse of Soviet power tilted the balance decisively toward open markets and free capital flows. Central banks undertook greater measures to control inflation, which made recessions much less frequent. 

Open economies that controlled inflation tended to do very well, and revolutionary new technology in communications and transportation concurrently developed, making it even easier for disparate parts of the world to connect with one another. Zakaria points out that “[s]ince the 1980s these three forces—politics, economics, and technology—have pushed in the same direction to produce a more open, connected, exacting international environment. But they have also given countries everywhere fresh opportunities to start moving up the ladder of growth and prosperity” (28). The global economy now doubles in size every 10 years, while prices decrease and wealth goes up tremendously.

Many of the issues that cause the most concern are the unintended results of these generally positive trends. Oil prices rose in the late 2000s because emerging economies had vastly greater demand, and commodity prices in general rose. This trend would stop briefly during the Great Recession but would resume afterward. This helps explain why the main adversaries to the US-led international order are all oil-rich (such as Iran, Venezuela, and Russia) and are thus valuable enough to get away with some troublemaking. The biggest downside of prosperity is the taxing of natural resources with a population that is both growing and enjoying a higher standard of living. This is a major contributor to climate change, and it is only likely to get worse as countries like India and China burn more coal and petroleum.

One of the paradoxical effects of a more globalized world is the ascendance of nationalism. Countries that have risen rapidly from poverty tend to feel immense pride in their accomplishments, and they are also likely to be playing a bigger role on the world stage where the Western powers have traditionally been dominant. Gone is the world where “the United States and a few Western allies directed the whole show while the Third World either played along or stayed outside the box and remained irrelevant as a result” (39). While institutions like the United Nations still reflect the old Western order, cooperation with both emerging nations and non-governmental organizations is necessary for tackling contemporary problems like climate change.

In the wake of the Great Recession, it became evident that the wealth of developed nations like the US was heavily dependent on debt, which proved disastrous when capital reserves ran dry. The market crash “has had the effect of delegitimizing America’s economic power” (47), so developing countries will be more likely to choose their own path without taking advice from Washington or US corporations. The United States stood alone as a global superpower at the end of the Cold War, and it will remain the most powerful country for some time, but the rise of other nations necessarily entails a decline in US relative power. Russia is pushing back on US-led efforts to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) into former Soviet republics, India conducts a friendly relationship with Iran over US protests, and other nations are no longer interested in Washington’s calls for economic austerity after it bailed out its own banks in 2008.

The US will be able to secure its vital interests if it “can show that it is willing to allow other countries to become stakeholders in the new order” (56). The US-led order has helped to foster a system in which so many have prospered, but Americans have largely been slow to recognize that because of American success, other nations will be more and more able to defy American preferences. Instead, the US has curled into a “defensive crouch” (60), refusing to accept the globalized world it did so much to bring into existence.