"In 1919 Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau together virtually controlled the world. Sitting in Paris, they determined what countries would exist and which would not, what new countries would be created, what their boundaries would be and who would rule them, and how the Middle East and other parts of the world would be divided up among the victorious powers. . . . A hundred years later . . . the age of Western dominance will be over."
AND WHAT, YOU MIGHT ASK, WOULD BE SO BAD ABOUT THAT?
Amid nuclear tension, a North Korean soldier peers past South Korean border guards.
(Kim Kyung-Hoon - Reuters)
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Back when happy students were building a papier-mache replica of the Statue of Liberty in Tiananmen Square, and Russian kids were waving American flags in Moscow, and the president of the United States and the chancellor of Germany were fast friends, American dominance felt like a rewarding and gratifying pursuit. Now, we read bestsellers like Blowback and The Sorrows of Empire, both by Asia expert Chalmers Johnson -- books in which the purported costs of our dominance are counted in a litany of miserable tolls. We're hated, Johnson informs us. We're resented. We're increasingly opposed by other nations. And a fair number of the world's people would like to kill as many of us as they possibly can. "In the long run," Johnson writes, "the people of the United States are neither militaristic enough nor rich enough to engage in the perpetual police actions, wars, and bailouts their government's hegemonic policies will require."
I once had the good fortune to visit Rome and found myself sitting on a perfect late-summer evening at a cafe on the vast Piazza Navona. Thousands of Romans, ineffably beautiful and thoroughly relaxed, were gliding happily back and forth across the plaza, hailing their many friends. The whole city, it seemed, had just returned from a month's vacation in the hills or by the sea. Shouted greetings and untroubled laughter were accompanied by the soothing music of water splashing in a huge fountain wrought by the master carver Bernini. My tummy was pleasantly full of prosciutto and figs and warm bread dipped in olive oil, and I found myself thinking that the best places to live in the whole world might be the capitals of former empires -- Athens, Amsterdam, London, Madrid, Vienna and right there in Rome -- where people enjoy all the cultural riches of having once dominated the world but are blissfully free of the burdens of leadership.
There's just one problem with that, said Niall Ferguson. "There isn't always a contender to take over" the job of leading the world; or sometimes there is a contender, but one who happens to be a genocidal maniac. "If the U.S. draws back from the imperial hubris of 2003 -- which I guess it already is doing; after all, it's hard to imagine America taking any new significant military actions for a while -- then the short-term and medium-term scenario is that large parts of the world will be left in a state of misrule under dictators, or in a state of no rule at all. That is rather a troubling prospect."
Ferguson is one of the hottest young stars in the foreign policy world, a thinker so big right now that he has hardly any fixed address. Just a few years ago, he was an unknown Oxford scholar working on a history of global fiscal policy (insert enormous yawn here). But it turned out that money really does make the world go around, or at least that it helps enormously to understand money if you want to understand history. Plus, Ferguson writes with flash and verve. His first book was a hit in brainy circles, and he followed it up with book after provocative book.
Now, at 40, he's a globe-trotting, multinational theorist of empire. It can take days of e-mail exchanges and transatlantic telephone tag just to track him down; when we finally did talk, he was taking a brief break from a conference in Lisbon. At least I think he was still in Lisbon.
While I was trying to find him, I read Ferguson's recent cover article in Foreign Policy magazine, a harrowing vision of a world without a dominant country -- a condition he called "apolarity" or "a global vacuum of power." We've seen such periods before, he observed: the so-called Dark Ages, for example, after the collapse of the Roman Empire, and, more recently, the demoralized 1920s, which gave rise to Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini in Europe and a resurgent Ku Klux Klan in the United States. We now see that the '20s also sowed the seeds of today's violent Islamicism, thanks to the dispirited intellectuals of the former Ottoman Empire, who began dreaming of a new order founded on strict Islamic law.
So: "Be careful what you wish for," Ferguson warned those who might like to see America pull back from world leadership. "Apolarity could turn out to mean an anarchic new Dark Age: an era of waning empires and religious fanaticism; of endemic plunder and pillage in the world's forgotten regions; of economic stagnation and civilization's retreat into a few fortified enclaves."
It's one thing to say, as most big thinkers do, that no nation has ever remained on top forever, and thus the United States, too, will someday see its period of dominance come to an end. The tricky part, as Ferguson's worries about a new dark age remind us, is figuring out a relatively peaceful path from hyperpower to former power.
There are plenty of theories about potential rivals to American power 20 or 50 or 100 years from now. At current levels of growth, China will blow past the United States as the world's biggest economy sometime in the next half-century, according to economists at Goldman Sachs. China's influence over East Asia is growing even faster than that. China's military is no match for ours today, but it has nuclear-tipped missiles and a big army, and the wealthier China becomes the more it can spend on guns, bombs, airplanes and warships, if it so chooses. Many theorists can paint a vivid picture of a not-so-distant world in which Asia is the center of the action, with China dominating the continent. One piece of that picture appeared in a recent article in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's magazine Technology Review, which declared that the "world's hottest computer lab" is the one Microsoft has established in Beijing.
If Bill Gates is betting on China, perhaps we all should.
But even if things go smoothly for the Chinese, their nation is years away from rivaling the United States. And things are not likely to go smoothly. The coming years for China are precisely the phase in which other developing countries have experienced financial panics, civic unrest, economic meltdown and stagnation of trade.
Maybe Europe? Charles A. Kupchan of Georgetown University said the United States and Europe were bound to clash after their common enemy -- communism -- was conquered. Arguments over Iraq and the global warming treaty simply sped up a process already underway. The development of the European Union is moving much faster than anyone expected, Kupchan said, and the United States might soon find itself competing with a confederation of European countries. There may be a tipping point when the combined EU economy becomes larger than the U.S. economy, when the euro rivals the dollar as the global currency, and when America no longer sets the rules for global banking and finance.
Not everyone buys the idea of a bulked-up Europe, however, because Europe has problems of its own. European military power is mostly hollow, and some of Europe's leading economies are wheezing. The demographic picture is bleak: Native populations, especially in Western Europe, are aging and shrinking, which means fewer workers and more pensioners -- not exactly the muscular image of a rising superpower.
If it's true that no other power is ready -- or even close to being ready -- to step into the yoke of history, America's choice is to either hang in there or give up. Much of the world is not going to like either choice.
"Our real enemy may simply be . . . chaos in the world," said Walter Russell Mead, the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow in U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. Mead is another of the hot hands in the foreign policy business, harder to reach than a mid-list movie star. When I spoke to him by telephone, Iraq was boiling over and the United Nations was dithering about the genocide in Sudan. Yet Mead pronounced himself "optimistic" about the way history is unfolding -- as long as events aren't allowed to drift into madness.
"Where I worry," he said, "is that the social and economic changes underway are going to create chaos." Some countries, like the change-loving United States, will be able to hack it in a world of change. Others will not. The widening gap between the two is a zone of enormous danger, Mead believes.
"In many ways, I see Islamic terrorism as reflecting the changes of modernity in societies that may not be ready for them, or are divided by them," he said. "As the pace of change accelerates, and more and more people are affected, I worry we will see increasing resentment aimed at the country often seen as the source of these changes -- the United States."
Which brings us back to: Yikes.
I HALF-EXPECTED TO FIND FRANCIS FUKUYAMA SMOKING A PIPE AND PEERING AT A GLOBE WITH HIS BROW FURROWED. Or standing over a huge table covered with maps and encoded dispatches, his hands clasped behind him. Fukuyama is among the most widely acclaimed foreign policy theorists in the world. Even people who disagree with him routinely describe him as "brilliant."
But no, Fukuyama works in an ordinary professor's lodgings at 1619 Big Think Blvd. His is one of several small offices grouped around a bullpen at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. (Eggheads simply call it SAIS -- pronounced "sice.") His standard-issue desk is heaped with the usual mounds of paper, and his nondescript bookshelves overflow with volumes that pool on the tables and spill to the floor. There is an appealing humility about the place; you have to scour the jumble with your eyes to spot The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama's book-length extension of his influential essay.
Contrary to the assumptions of people who only read the title, Fukuyama never claimed that historic events were going to stop happening after the fall of the Berlin Wall. His thesis was limited to a philosophical claim. He reminded readers that for almost 200 years, dating back to the German philosopher G.F. Hegel, many big thinkers -- notably Karl Marx -- viewed "history" as a sometimes violent struggle to determine the best way to structure society. History was believed to be headed toward a solution. Fukuyama argued that the end of the Cold War was "the end of history" because it left no plausible alternative to free markets and liberal democracy. End of argument, end of history.
Within that narrow definition, he may still be correct. The global clash of ideologies may well be over. Bin Laden isn't trying to create the future so much as he is trying to escape from it to the past, and a very distant, parochial past at that: medieval Arabia, and step on it. Still, Fukuyama acknowledged that this rarified use of the word "history" is less enlightening than it once seemed, because any notion of history that doesn't include the destruction of the World Trade Center is of dubious value.
The world has moved on, and so has Fukuyama's thinking. His recent cogitation has produced a seemingly simple but subtle realization that might explain a lot about why America's role in the world has become so difficult. America's enormous power, he noted, actually violates an axiom of the political philosophy we have been promoting for the past two centuries.
How so? As every civics class graduate knows, liberal democracy and free markets depend on "checks and balances" to rein in excess, to correct mistakes and to unleash creativity by bringing more ideas to the table. But now the unmatched military, economic and cultural power of the United States flouts the principle of checks and balances on a global scale. We don't expect monopolies to work well in economic markets. We don't expect dictatorships to survive free elections. Perhaps, he suggested, we should not be surprised to find that hyperpower has not ushered in a pastoral future.
