"History?" President Bush answered with a shrug when Bob Woodward asked him how the future will view the Iraq war. "We don't know. We'll all be dead." I've become curious, though, about where the strange and unnerving events of recent years might be heading, and whether we can steer our course or must simply ride irresistible currents. I wanted a hint as to how this movie might end.
So while most Washington journalists were tracking each up and down of the presidential campaign, I tried to look past this single election, and even Bush's second term, toward the larger pattern of things. I began reading books with titles like The Future of Freedom and The Clash of Civilizations, magazines with names like Foreign Affairs and the National Interest and Technology Review. I began e-mailing provocative young scholars and sage older ones. I started paying visits to the offices of learned women and men who are paid to ponder where America is and where it is headed. I discovered that they tend to be concentrated along a stretch of Massachusetts Avenue NW, which I came to refer to as "Big Think Boulevard."
Amid nuclear tension, a North Korean soldier peers past South Korean border guards.
(Kim Kyung-Hoon - Reuters)
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This is an intimidating world for a layperson to enter. The hushed hallways and book-lined offices of Big Think Boulevard are home to a priesthood that knows precisely the difference between "hegemony" and "empire," not to mention the difference between entente and detente.
I found that some of these thinkers fear we are living through the end of the Western alliance, while others believe America's power is already seeping away to China. I met thinkers who fret most about nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists and others who prefer to worry about the speed at which our debtor nation is skidding toward fiscal crisis. You know things are scary when you find a wistful note of nostalgia for the relative stability of the Cold War creeping into the voices of level-headed people.
True, the brains of Big Think Boulevard have always shown a tendency to be worrywarts, except for when they are overly optimistic. Through the years, a visitor could have heard deep and earnest discussions along that street of the domino theory (by which the communists would conquer the world), the triumph of the German economy (which also did not happen) and the rise of superpower Japan (ditto). But just because predicting the future is difficult doesn't mean thinking about the future is pointless.
I found widespread agreement on at least two propositions:
First, that some very different sort of world is roaring up at us.
Second, that the history of our times will be the story of how we prepared for this different world -- which, so far, is mostly a story of how we have failed to prepare.
Yikes.
A FORMER GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL, THINK-TANK STAR AND NEWSPAPER COLUMNIST, Jessica Tuchman Mathews is now the president of a venerable outfit called the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The endowment occupies a handsome eight-story building in a prime spot on Big Think Boulevard -- a quietly elegant structure of glass and stone and wood, silent testimony to the power of Andrew Carnegie's millions multiplied by nearly a century of wise investment and compound interest. Human frailty being what it is, Carnegie's original goal of eliminating war has been scaled back over the years, and now the endowment is plenty busy just trying to keep wars from going nuclear.
I was hoping that Mathews might be able to summarize why being a hyperpower has turned out to be so unpleasant. Why, just a few years after the dawn of a new American epoch, it sort of feels like a fast-fading twilight.
"The past couple of years have shown us that the way we felt at the end of the Cold War -- the dominance we felt in terms of military power, economic power, so-called 'soft' cultural power -- was too facile," she began. America's power is "not at all as clear as it seemed just four years ago. Although we're spending approximately one-half of all the world's total military expenditures, and our power on that plane is supreme, it is not that usable against the enemies we now face."
She said this on a late-summer morning when Osama was still in his cave (or wherever he might be) and the low-tech insurgency in Iraq was metastasizing. So it was hard to argue with her assertion that certain foes are not cowed by the most awesome conventional military the world has ever seen. The United States has a fleet of nuclear submarines, every one of which packs enough megatons to decimate a nation. We have 12 aircraft carriers, every one of which totes more power than the entire air force of virtually any other country. We have stockpiles of laser-guided bombs and missiles that we can land on the proverbial dime. Yet we are flummoxed by beheadings -- a technology from the days of Salome and John the Baptist.
As it happens, this is a common problem for global powers: Conventional strength doesn't always succeed. The Romans had a similar experience with the Huns. Or a more recent example: In 1898, the British army won an overwhelming victory at Omdurman to regain control of Sudan and establish itself as the supreme fighting force on Earth. Within a year, the same army under the same general went off to fight the Boers in South Africa. At first, all went well: The British quickly seized the Boer capitals. Mission accomplished. But the opposing forces simply melted into the population, then launched a devastating guerrilla war that exposed the vulnerabilities of the superpower army.
Which sounds familiar.
Mathews continued: "On the economic side, we are very, very vulnerable." Strange: Wasn't it just a few years ago that the American economy was crushing its competitors like Godzilla mashing Toyotas? She cited two reasons to feel nervous. First, while the U.S. economy is easily the largest in the world, we're not even paying the bills of our own government -- not by a long shot. The federal deficit is more than $400 billion this year. And worse is sure to come when the baby boomers start retiring later this decade and Social Security and Medicare become massive drains. For the first time in our history, approximately half of our deficit spending is being financed by foreign nations. It can't bode well for a major power when its potential competitors hold the mortgage on its future.
The second economic weak spot Mathews sees is the explosive growth of the global labor market. With populous countries like China and India and Singapore and Malaysia rushing into the manufacturing age, "we're looking at a global labor surplus for an extended period, which is something new," Mathews said.
Let that sink in for a moment. An oversupply of a commodity means a declining price. A surplus of labor should mean lower wages, which means less saving and less spending, which means a sluggish economy, if not worse. Even the upside of cheap foreign labor -- the low prices we pay for clothes and gizmos -- often comes with a downside: a staggering trade deficit. At best, the coming years will be a nerve-racking race to convert those global workers into buyers of American exports, not just competitors for American jobs.
Brightening briefly, Mathews added: "We're still best in the world at adapting to rapidly changing circumstances. No other nation takes disruption in stride the way we do."
So the good news is, we're good at handling bad news.
Finally, as satisfying as it may be to many Americans, even U.N.-bashing may be beyond our power in the future. "I think it's clear there are not many really important issues we can tackle alone," Mathews said. Take the example currently occupying her attention -- the proliferation of nuclear technology in places such as North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, places that are hostile, unstable or both.
"A huge amount of work needs to be done on proliferation by a lot of countries working together," she said. "We can't accomplish what needs to be done by ourselves. And yet, what's the level of our political influence on other countries right now? When we were going into Iraq and the U.N. was resisting, I must have had 300 people say to me: 'Jessica, don't be silly. When push comes to shove, we'll get the votes.' But then it happened, and we couldn't get Mexico, for heaven's sake. Talk about a country that depends on us. Chile, which had a free-trade agreement on the line with us -- we couldn't get their vote.
"This is a long-winded way of saying that we are not nearly as dominant as we all thought we were just a few years ago."
I was surprised by how much agreement I found on this general idea among big thinkers, ranging from neoconservatives to multilateral peaceniks, from Republicans to Democrats to unaffiliated foreign intellectuals. They disagreed over nuances, but nearly all of them concurred that the rosy assumptions of the recent past must be completely reexamined. If the touchstone title of the 1990s was "The End of History," the title that speaks to the dawn of this decade might be Robert D. Kaplan's "The Coming Anarchy."
So where are we headed? Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard offered an early take on that question in his influential 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations:
"In sum, overall the West will remain the most powerful civilization well into the early decades of the twenty-first century. . . . [But] the West's control of [key] resources peaked in the 1920s and has been declining irregularly but significantly. In the 2020s, a hundred years after that peak, the West will probably control about 24 percent of the world's territory (down from a peak of 49 percent), 10 percent of the total world population (down from 48 percent) . . . about 30 percent of the world's economic product (down from a peak of probably 70 percent), perhaps 25 percent of manufacturing output (down from a peak of 84 percent), and less than 10 percent of global military manpower (down from 45 percent).
