Coming Soon: The 21st Century

By shedding this misapprehension, the United States could restore its influence. We could rediscover the imperative of acting in concert with others to build global institutions that strengthen our security and foster our values.

Nowhere is the need for a new understanding more obvious than in economic matters. Capitalism will not disappear, but the current crash has destroyed a series of damaging myths.

Those brilliant financiers were not so brilliant after all and certainly did not deserve the outsized rewards our system showered upon them for three decades. They did not understand that the financial instruments they created contained time bombs that would eventually rip apart the very system from which they so profited.

The market cannot operate without significant regulation, and dreaded government turns out to be the only institution with the capacity to repair things when market actors are routed from the field and sit, petrified, at the sidelines.

Barack Obama will have as free a hand as history ever allows to chart a new course and to define a new era. He may or may not succeed, but the country was right to seize the opportunity he offered to put the previous century and its assumptions behind us.

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